Raw Krypto ..."The cost of home ownership is hardly limited to the house note when you take into account the extra things you can't necessarily plan on, repairs, maintenance etc. A new air conditioner alone can screw up any savings you might have been enjoying"

Man thats no joke .... a house is a pain in the wallet. Lord give me house on wheels and let me see the great open road .... i don't wanna grow old tending to my grass and cussing out kids that walk across that green


"get off my grass you brats!"

Glad Murphy the map came in handy for her ... once in a great while i post something useful

I made the mistake of buying a condo when I moved to Jersey in 2008. Now that I got married to decided to buy a bigger house, I ended up having to sell the condo at a huge loss...50k loss just from the sale price alone.

If you add in interest, property tax, attorney fees, other closing costs...even if I figured I was paying 2000 a month in rent, I ended losing about 65 thousand in last 6 years.

I am buying a bigger house now and I plan to be there at least 20 years. But ma mortgage process has become such a pain compared to six years ago.

That's what I love about SimHQ, here I am, sitting in my comfy chair, reading real experiences from real people about the house market in a land thousands of miles away (and also hating my keyboard for having a faulty "a").

Time to research this "condo" thing!

EDIT: oh, our "propiedad horizontal"...

Personally unless your planning on living somewhere only temporarily its almost a given that owning is always a better option. At least that way your paying own mortgage rather than the landlord. At least that way you can recoup something when you sell.

That's true, but you aren't going to recoup closing costs (gonna be 6-8k on a 125k house) and your down payment unless you stay long enough to build equity.

And depending on the market, that can take a while.

Temporary is getting longer and longer these days....

Home Owner Costs....
interest paid to bank....highest at the beginning on your term. Most of your payment first 5 years or so will go very little to principal
property tax...especially super high in new jersey so 6 to 10k a year
home owner insurance. 800 to 1200 a year
home association fees or condo fees...could be over 200 a month
one time closing cost...10 to 15 k
maintenence and repairs...you can't just call your landlord to fix stuff for you
That's assuming that your property value is not decreasing. It sure is not climbing much lately

Balance that versus a monthly rent...minimal rental insurance....Even if your rent goes up 5 percent a year I would say that it would still be better to rent if you are going to be there for less than 7 years

Try this calculator....it will tell you why it's better to rent these days

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calculator.html

Well when your renting you'll never recoup one dime of the payments. So home repairs, closing costs, interest and all that other stuff aside personally I still think its better to buy if your looking for long term housing. We bought in 2008 fairly low, the market continued to drop but at the moment our home is finally starting to gain value. There is a lot of things to keep track of for sure but for our family buying was a good deal (.....so far).

Hey, many of those banks got publicly chastised in front of Congress on CSPAN about being in the wrong.

If you think that didn't cause them SERIOUS harm and make them totally reform their practices, no matter how much money they are making, well, then, you'd be right...



The Jedi Master

My area has peculiar characteristics that does not lend itself over comparing costs over renting over an extended period of time. It's always expensive, there are no really up or down markets. Even in a down economy, even during the housing crisis, it was still one of the most expensive real estate markets competing with Manhattan. But even if people could afford to buy an average priced home, there are none to buy, like a game of Monopoly with all the plastic houses sold and there are only rents on the green and blue properties.

The city of San Francisco is about 7 x 7 miles situated on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water. It's a small city in terms of area, simply, there is nowhere to expand its boundaries, no way to make the city bigger, all that can be done is to demolish current structures. This leads to the second problem-

SF is the second most densely populated city, and the housing situation doesn't support this reality- the houses are inefficient, they are lots of Victorians and town homes that are not designed to be filled with lots of tenants. They are nice to look at, but there's not a lot of places to put large highrises. Recently this has changed a little as more highrises and multi tenant condos have been set up, but this has barely put a dent in the vacancy rate. They are also pretty ugly and spoil what SF is known for- great views of rolling hills and the ocean. In some quarters it has an old world European look, which is wrong for modern glass and cement highrises.

Finally, the city has always been a magnet for transplants since the Gold Rush- but because of its importance to Silicon Valley, recently huge amounts of people have been moving to the area, the area is gentrifying even more, as more and more money starts spilling in, the gap between haves and have nots gets wider, more pressure is being put on people to move further and further away as even the suburbs are experiencing a crunch and are reaching home prices as expensive as SF.

Real estate developers would rather sell the houses out from underneath the occupants so they can turn the property into offices for start ups and upscale apartments. The consequence is a top heavy income sector, like all the young entrepreneurs and engineers from all over the world are moving to SF, but what's being displaced are all the service industry workers- waiters, bartenders, help staff are moving out, the ones left are hanging on to their rent controlled apartments hoping not to have their apartments sold to developers.