A conundrum
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Then there's all the expenses you didn't know about before you bought the house. If you don't have at least some DIY skills, you get to pay people a lot of money to fix things for you.
...BTW, the county just did a reassessment on your property and your property taxes have now doubled. In exchange, you get nothing. Congratulations.
I tell my soon-to-leave-the-nest kids:
Rent is the most you will pay every month. The mortgage is the least you will pay every month.
I'm loving them being here as full grown adults and enjoy my time with them and with our particular house they are seeing that lesson play out in real time. Some big expenses and I am the DIY dude. I don't fuck with (big) electric or gas though, that shit can really backfire.
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I wouldn't say you get nothing from paying property taxes.
That's true but when they double over 10 years and four schools in the area shut down due to "lack of enrollment"? Streets sure aren't any better and my neighbor who works for the city has only had COL raises for the same past decade?
c'mon... something is going on.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Yeeeeah, I was too adult in 2008 to go "you know the real problem? We check too hard for solvency when giving out mortgages".
Not that I have a silver bullet for solving a housing crisis. There probably isn't one. You need a lot more public housing as a percentage of the total pool, that much I can tell. How you fix a job market where nobody holds the same position for more than a handful of years is beyond me. You probably need to make it much more expensive to own a house without living in it or renting it out. You definitely want to make it much more expensive for corporations to own housing.
Guessing that's harder to fit in a pithy, viral tweet, though.
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Yup. Oops, you need a new roof and a water heater, that will be $34,000.
Hey, I just did these things! Water heater i was ripped off, which cost me $2600, and the roof i actually thought was a good deal at 17k. Not fun but the roof made me happy. The water heater actually destroyed my basement by leaking out...
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To be the devil's advocate here. Rental payments vs mortgage payments is not an accurate comparison of the true financial burdens.
With many rentals some if not all utilities are included in the price of rent, whereas homeowners must pay the full cost of utilities. There is also the additional cost of home insurance and property taxes. Most rentals have the majority of their maintaince covered whereas the homeowner is responsible for lawn cutting, gutter cleanings etc. The cost of repairs and maintaince is not negligible. While renting if the heat quits or an appliance breaks, the landlord is supposed to cover the cost but owning means you must take that full cost.
In the posted example, having double the mortage payment in rent payment is probably adequate to cover the additonal costs but the comparison of renting vs owning is not black and white. Several financial managers have even studied that depending on your needs and income, you can actually be getting ahead financially by renting if you don't actually need the full benefits of owning and are able to maintain a store of wealth through other investments. This is especially true if you are in a rent controlled unit.
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The biggest thing we can do for the housing crisis is making density legal again and allocating more space in cities to housing instead of parking cars.
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good news, theyre counting rent and utilities payment as a way to build credit now! link
That seems to be for the US when OP is in the UK based on the £ use
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The biggest thing we can do for the housing crisis is making density legal again and allocating more space in cities to housing instead of parking cars.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah, that'd work a lot better for me if I was American and not painfully aware of similar issues happening in cities where cars fold like umbrellas and are almost entirely parked underground.
I mean, don't get me wrong, you guys have a whole continent you can use for this, so maybe you can brute force it. Definitely not "the biggest thing" where I'm from, though.
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I've never paid a mortgage, but £500 seems pretty low. Do mortgage payments tend to be that much cheaper than rent prices?
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That's true but when they double over 10 years and four schools in the area shut down due to "lack of enrollment"? Streets sure aren't any better and my neighbor who works for the city has only had COL raises for the same past decade?
c'mon... something is going on.
Whats going on is decades of mismanagement of property taxes and city zoning. People fight tooth and nail to keep their property taxes low, and eventually the city has to do a big increase because they failed to increase incrementally. The bigger issue is how poorly we zone and design most north american cities.
The average car dependant suburb costs more to maintain than it generates in tax revenue. A denser area like mixed use neighbourhoods and "missing middle" housing fares far better and generates enough that it often ends up subsidizing the rest of the city, the same is usually true for denser downtowns. That trend is dying off as those denser areas demolish tax revenue generating businesses and homes to pave parking lots that don't generate taxes to park cars from the suburbs that don't generate enough taxes.
You can't afford a home because for decades suburbs were given a massive tax break while denser downtowns (guess where the poors have to rent and ultimately fund the property taxes) have to subsidize car dependant expensive to maintain subdivisions (which is usually for middle class or wealthier people, especially when built new). Add in some racial demographics and we've basically engineered every city to have secret tax cuts for anyone rich enough to get into the suburbs.
The best part is, many cities are keeping the cycle going because the only way they are paying for maintaince of an old subdivision is by using the devleopment taxes and fees from a new subdivision. This is not sustainable and ultimately equates to kicking the can down the road to let a future generation figure it out (which is literally as simple as building cities densely again, as they had been built for 100s of years).
This hasn't even touched yet on the urban sprawl, energy ineffeciency, and secondary effects of car dependancy that have all spawned from "the american dream" of suburbia. We seriously need to reconsider how we zone, build, and get around our urban spaces.
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My house was literally like 100 yards from being eligible for one.
my municipality fought the USDA redistricting in the 1980s and kept the hamlet where my house is in the program.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
An ancient conundrum; you think anyone’s mortgage payment is £500, in any country? Ha!
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I've never paid a mortgage, but £500 seems pretty low. Do mortgage payments tend to be that much cheaper than rent prices?
Definitely not as low as £500… but mortgages are generally cheaper, sometimes much cheaper than rent. Example: we own a 5-bedroom house with a mortgage of $1,900, my step-son just moved into a 2-bedroom apartment for $2,200 rent.
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Front or back yards?
First one, then the other.
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An ancient conundrum; you think anyone’s mortgage payment is £500, in any country? Ha!
My actual mortgage payment is probably just under $500. Taxes and insurance just put it at about $1000. I bought a nearly crack den quality fixer upper about 6 years ago in a moderately low COL area. In the truely low COL areas I imagine you might still be able to manage the same pricing today. It's probably doable, just not anywhere most people want to live or with a house that doesn't have a bunch of issues.
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First one, then the other.
That'll take forever but I'm prepared to play the lawn game.
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That seems to be for the US when OP is in the UK based on the £ use
true, whoops lol. sorry
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Suppose I was the bank...
Guy1) Hey bank I want to sell my house for $1,000,000.00. Here is the deed, I owe $999,999.00 bank2.Bank1) OK I'll take the house, here is $1.00 and $999,999.00 for bank2. Did you fuck up the house or burn it down to the point I can't sell it?
Guy1) yup to the ground I burnt it all.
Assessor) I'll charge Bank 1 $300 to go asses the price. Yeah currently this property can be sold for $300,546.00.
Bank 1) OK Guy1, you owe Bank2 $699,454.00 but here's your $1.00.
Guy1) your honor I need to file for chapter 11. I have no money
Guy2) Bank 1, I would like to buy this property.
Bank1) Sure that'll be $1,000,000.00.
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Hey, I just did these things! Water heater i was ripped off, which cost me $2600, and the roof i actually thought was a good deal at 17k. Not fun but the roof made me happy. The water heater actually destroyed my basement by leaking out...
And so now you've learned that you need to regularly flush the water heater and change out the anode rod every few years, right? I just bought my first house. Hot water wasn't working right. Heating element was dead. Why? There was so much scale that the lower element was covered in it. Replaced the element, flushed as much out as I could reasonably remove, and then flushed again six months later while replacing the anode rod. This keeps the corrosion at bay.
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An ancient conundrum; you think anyone’s mortgage payment is £500, in any country? Ha!
"in any country" took it too far, since there's places where you can basically buy a house outright for that amount. "Western/first world" wouldn't even cover it I don't think, with Italy and eastern Europe being a thing. Even in my very expensive western European country our mortgage isn't that much higher than that (we kinda lucked out), but of course once you account for all real expenses it is.
