Comment on Landlords are parasites
huquad@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I’ve seen a recent finance bro fad saying renting and investing is better than owning. My brother in Christ my rent was much higher than my mortgage for a shittier spot and I didn’t get equity.
During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.
Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.
The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don’t have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.
I just did the math for renting/investing vs buying, including rent/house value yearly increase, income taxes on capital gains, mortgage rate, down payment amount, and initial house price. The results indicate a strong dependence on rent price and taxes/insurance for buying. I found that renting/investing can be a better financial option depending on the inputs. As another commenter pointed out, the main reasons are taxes/insurance and the greater time return rate for market vs home value. This was surprising to me, so I’m glad I ran the numbers. That tells me the real difference is your life choice of wanting a place of your own vs renting and moving around.
I should’ve known better than to trust my intuition on this. I previously ran the numbers on investing vs double mortgage payments and found investing to be far superior.
Taxes and maintenance wouldn’t be included in the mortgage. A new roof is expensive, so are HVACs, floors, etc. These things will need to be replaced. A rule of thumb is to budget 1% to 4% of the total house value per year. For a 400k house that could be up to $16k extra per year, or $1333 more per month than your mortgage. Those costs for maintenance and taxes don’t go towards paying down your principal so they aren’t directly gaining equity. With the rent and invest option, the investing is the counter to equity. When you sell your house you usually pay a realtor commission. There are a lot of factors to include when seeing if rent & invest is better than mortgage & buy.
That being said, I prefer to buy. I don’t plan on moving anytime soon.
As always, you have to run the numbers. Ownership also comes with hidden costs. Property taxes and maintenance aren’t cheap.
Those costs are included in the rent.
Precisely. When comparing against home ownership, people often only consider the mortgage.
Yeah, I think renting has less hidden costs, but it might increase in an unpredictable way, or you might need to move out sooner.
It depends, it can definitely be more worthwhile to rent.
Sirence@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
It really depends on the circumstances. For me personally renting and investing is indeed better - but my rent is 500 Eur per month for 100m² cold and I can’t finance a similar sized house for that here. Everyone needs to do their own math for their situation.