Stop trying to convince me to buy a house!

The BBQ Pit
61

You are not, in any way, required to buy a house. Do not buy a house unless you want to buy a house. Even when houses come down in price to rental parity, you are not obliged to make investment decisions based on simplistic (and sometimes false) statements such as, “Renting is just throwing your money away.” You are not legally required to make investments that, in other times and under different circumstances, seemed to work out well for others.

If, however, you want to live in a house that you own because you wouldn’t mind living there for the rest of your life, and if you can afford it (regardless of whether the price has dropped to rental parity) and you do not have to spend money to go out and woo a future spouse and you don’t mind spending every weekend doing maintenance, then it might be a good idea to buy a house.

Do you know how rents are determined? Landlords keep lowering the rent until they get renters. Whatever their carrying costs, they cannot charge appreciably more than any other comparable place, because the market determines rents and the market, in this case, is an honest market. Those landlords who put enough down such that they were cash flow positive the same month they closed escrow can be happy with the prevailing rent, but they cannot raise it arbitrarily, because the renters will move to the next place that costs less. Then there are all other landlords who are hemmorrhaging money because they made very bad decisions, and they’re just delaying the inevitable. Once again, they do not get to set rent to whatever they want – they must set it to whatever the market will bear.

Another consideration: when you buy a house, you’re basically getting married to a bank, a chunk of land, the house itself, and the neighborhood it’s in. Try to be aware of what else might be going on in the neighborhood, because that block, those neighborhoods, the strip mall down the street – you’re married to them, too. Buy a condo? Okay, you’re married to all of the other owners, and you’re married to the association’s financial situation. However, there are situations in which all of these are wonderful things. YMMV.

Home ownership is not for everyone, and that is not a veiled insult. And even if someone is giving you good financial advice, you are not required to follow that advice.

62

Renting, and we got a new free (to us) roof that ended up costing more than our rent for the whole year after the last hurricane blew through here.
It’s a big old 1890’s plantation house, split up into apartments by a home health care company back in the 80’s, but we’re the only occupants, and that’s just awesome. Downtown, as well.

63

There will never be a better time to buy a house than right now due to low prices and low interest rates and lots of inventory. You can save hundreds of thousands of dollars if you are able to get into the market now. But only you know if you can make that commitment.

64

Awww, bullshit. There will be many better times, like when folks really have the income to buy a house. An awful lot of people can’t even begin the process right now, there’s nobody lending the money to 'em!

65

I just got another reminder of one of the downsides of owning a house this week. A pipe under my kitchen sink was leaking. When I was renting, I would have called the apartment complex office, and they would have sent somebody up to fix it, at no cost to me. They could even have done this when Mr. Neville and I weren’t at home. As a homeowner, however, I had to pay a plumber to fix it (luckily, it wasn’t too expensive), and be there for when the plumber showed up. Fortunately, I’d already found a plumber that we like; at one point I had to research and compare plumbers.

Finances should not be the sole motivation for major life decisions. Financial considerations should be a part of the decision, but not all of it. Ignoring what makes you happy or unhappy in favor of what will get you more money is not a good way to have a life that you can be satisfied with. I’m not sure what the meaning or purpose of life is, but I’m pretty sure, if there is one, it isn’t the accumulation of money.

66

Hey, I feel for you; people like that are a real PAIN…but as you say, to each his own

…I am 68, retired, and NEVER OWNED PROPERTY in my life…I have been a renter since I turned 19,many years ago…my family tells me I’m crazy; yeah, right…'but all you have is a stack of rental receipts!!" they insist…BUT I also have peace of mind…anything goes wrong, I just pick up the phone…

…I have more important things to do with my time than to paint, repair, fixup, mow, shovel, garden, etc…life’s too short!!! I have only met one or two others who feel the same way and who’ve never owned property…Anyone else out there feel the same way?

I can find NO arguments in favor of owning a home!! NONE…
But I’d sure like to hear from others who agree with me!!!

67

Which is why it IS a good time to buy, for those of us lucky enough to be in a position to afford it. (I’m actually not 100% convinced that the market has bottomed out yet, but in theory…)

68

Owning a home and renting simply represent two different sorts of freedom. As a generality, if you own your own home, you are reasonably free to do with it as you will; if you rent, you are reasonably free to move as you will.

I’m a home owner myself, and I love it; I can have my own wrought iron gate installed, and no-one can tell me not to; it’s my property, not someone elses’. I can fix the garage up as a workshop, and that’s my business. I don’t have to go to a landlord for permission to add a funky chandelier. But if I was a rambling person, ownership would be a ball and chain.

Valuing one sort of freedom over another is something reasonable people can disagree on.

69

In most neighborhoods around here, the Homeowner’s Association (HOA) could tell you not to. Inside your house you can do pretty much whatever you want, but there are often lots of rules about the exterior: types of fences, paint colors, even types of porch lights. The property manager/homeowner for one place I rented got in trouble with the HOA because the replacement windows didn’t have grids.

You’re right about the rest, though: most of the time, when I catch myself thinking about buying a place it’s so I can decorate it as I wish. In my current rental, I often daydream about updating the kitchen and master bathroom, removing the horrible wallpaper in the downstairs bath, replacing some of the curtains/blinds, etc. (I watch too much HGTV). Of course, I also daydream about winning the lottery. :smiley:

Speaking of decorating, another downside to renting – at least, to renting townhouses/single-family homes – is that you don’t want to buy furniture specifically for the place where you’re currently living, because you never know if it will fit in the next place. Like, right now I have two couches in the living room, but I’m 99% sure that I’ll have to sell one of them when I move. I would never buy a sectional. And there’s a niche in my entry foyer that’s just begging for a big plant or a sculpture or something, but I’m disinclined to spend more than $30-40 bucks on whatever would go there (I never use the front door, and I don’t have visitors often) and I haven’t found anything nice for that little. Etc., etc.

70

Glad you have a good situation for yourself, considering the circumstances of your city.

One of the places I lived in Washington DC was a row house two blocks from Dupont Circle. That’s not quite the downtown center of DC, but it’s a more living and livable neighborhood than the governmental core. There was plenty within walking distance, including a subway stop to get to other parts of the city. For the most part the Metro does not suck. Some people would prefer other neighborhoods, but as a basic arrangement for urban living it seemed pretty much ideal to me. I certainly felt far more comfortable there, far more tied in to the life of the city, than when I lived in a big apartment building.

FWIW, It’s often possible to set up a “single-family” house for two or three or four single people where each person has more private personal square footage than they would in an apartment (at comparable expense), and they have the shared space. (Granted, in traditional houses, the nature of the shared space precludes certain single-resident freedoms.) You might be interested to know that there is a minor architectural movement toward actually designing and building houses intended for sharing.

71

There have been many arguments in favour of owning home in this thread already - did you read them? Off the top of my head, I can think of many arguments in favour of owning a home, but that isn’t really what this thread is about - it’s about people doing what’s right for them, and busybody co-workers minding their own business. :slight_smile:

72

Sounds like you’ve combined all the problems associated with owning with all the problems associated with renting with all the problems associated with shared living space. Basically, you’re talking about a condo where you share a living room. My guess: these don’t take off. Maybe you’ll have a market with certain first-generation asian families.

73

(Bolding mine. I hate it when people say that.)
Do people literally “walk away”? Pack up their stuff and move out of the house?

74

I’ve always rented, and there are many things about owning a house that strongly deter me. My parents seem to have to drop a couple thousand dollars every third month for one repair or another.

But the fact that he’s rolling into retirement with no rent or mortgage and only having to pay property taxes as a regular expense is an argument in favor of owning a home.

75

I’m sitting in the same place right now. My parents keep telling me to buy a house. I live in New York. I couldn’t afford the taxes on the house, let alone the house. If I wanted to own a house, I’d have to quit my job, find a new job, and go move somewhere else. Possibly out of state.

I can’t find anything that isn’t falling apart for less than 150k, and the taxes are horrible. I could try a condo… but the maintenance fees would be equal to the mortgage, and the cost is still the same.

76

It’s not an argument in favor of retiring unless you test the counterfactual. What would have happened if he had rented and invested the difference? What would have happened to lifetime income if he’d been more free to move for higher-paying jobs?

My parents had to move on a regular basis for my dad’s job; for years we lived in a series of hotels (which, in all fairness, were probably paid for by his employer). Now they’re retired and still paying rent, but they also have a couple million in liquid assets. Unlimited mobility and the funds to benefit from it, which seems to me to be ideal circumstances.

77

Yes.

78

I seriously doubt that renting would have been millions of dollars cheaper, and there is not a chance in hell that he would have moved to a higher paying job. He was already making very decent money, and strongly prefers consistency to frequent change. (As do I.)

I think it’s fair to say that your parents’ situation is not remotely comparable to my parents’ or mine. The counterfactual in this case is them renting (or attempting to rent) a similar house in a similar location. In which case they would not have been facing regular expensive maintenance, but would also not have saved a couple million extra as a result of the difference.

Of course, they might have saved some as a result of the difference, but that doesn’t mean that living rent and mortgage-free is something to scoff at.

79

Not only do they walk away, but they also take with them several things that they don’t have a right to keep. If you ever walk through a foreclosure with agent, you’ll see all kinds of things stripped out of the place.

80

Yes, such patterns do have some of the problems of owning and renting and sharing in other models, but they also avoid or reduce other problems. There are people who would like to have more space and a yard, and not be alone at home all the time, but don’t have much money or a family. The shared-house model (either owned by a resident group or rented), can provide that. It depends what works for particular people.

The movement on the design side is a response to the way some people are actually already living, in houses that weren’t originally designed with such patterns in mind. So there’s an existing market that isn’t being precisely met. Maybe it’s not a big market, but that’s not the point.

The point really is that we should be designing and building structures that accommodate all the different types and styles of households that people do, or would, choose to live in. This is preferable to expecting and pressuring everybody to fit, sometimes uncomfortably, into just the two prevailing models that the thread is mostly discussing, i.e., an owned “single-family house” for a single nuclear family, and a rented apartment for a single person or couple.