Affording a mortgage is the easy part.
Then you have to somehow get your mortgage-contingent offer accepted by the seller when you’re up against cash offers, $50k over asking, with no inspection, no appraisal, unlimited possession, and a free hit of adrenochrome.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Mortgage payments are cheaper than rent
doctordevice@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
My wife and I were able to buy a ridiculously priced starter home only because we had the privilege of her parents being able to help with the down payment. We had to move farther away from work than where we were renting just to be able to even consider homes.
Our mortgage is twice what our rent was, and we only gained about ~100 sq ft of interior space. Plus a whole host of problems because the previous owners were jackasses who DIYed everything and did it all wrong.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You get 0% back when you move out of an apartment. It is much more expensive to rent than own considering this, even if you sell at a loss.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 1 month ago
You incur interest and fees with a home that you pay in addition to your principle. It can be seven years or more before you begin actually storing any value in that purchase because it’s eaten by the cost of borrowing.
It depends on your time horizon and relative costs of overhead and rent.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
That fucking sucks, but don’t apply your anecdotes as general truths. I have the opposite experience.
Wife and I built a new home with family help on the downpayment. Doubled sq ft, 1.5x previous rent, house increased value significantly between contract and move in. Farther from work but closer to highway so commute times unaffected. Saved up enough to pay back the downpayment help over the course of a year.
I’m a massive outlier, and most people have experiences closer to yours, but it’s not an across the board thing. So fucking much of the housing market depends on location.
batmaniam@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So you got a zero percent loan requiring no collateral for a piece of land? I’m happy for you, but you do realize how few people that’s available to right?
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
if it’s so terrible, why even do it?
batmaniam@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The answer is qualifying for a mortgage is not as simple as you might think. Even if you do, good luck squaring that with prices that will almost certainly leave you “holding the bag” because none of it is sustainable ore makes sense. Wrap that into the best choice when you might get laid off at any second is not always a mortgage…
That last point seems like it’s a great point for what rentals but I’ll save you some time: for the vast majority of jobs thats strictly because of people enforcing office mandates unnecessarily because something like 1/3rd of assets in the USA are in commercial realestate.
My point being: the deck is stacked. There is not an actual housing shortage, there’s just a housing shortage for human beings. An entire generation has gotten boxed out of the most classic way to build wealth.
doctordevice@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to get back on Lemmy until now. Bit of a now-or-never situation. The housing market is absolutely bonkers where I live (maybe where you live too, from your username). We had both made big leaps in salary recently that put the monthly payment in the barely-doable range, and her parents had some fixed funds available to help with the down payment.
Both the gift money and our salaries were going to be outpaced by the housing market if we waited, and interest rates were already on the post-COVID rise. I don’t think it was a terrible financial decision in the long run, because at least now we’re building equity and the house value will rise with the market. But until we sell (which we won’t be able to afford to for a long time), those assets aren’t liquid, so our month-to-month finances are a lot tighter than when we were renting. Which makes the repair work from the dipshit former owners hurt a lot more since it’s gonna take a long time to recover from big financial hits.
TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. This isn’t true everywhere or for every home, but yeah, I pay less on my mortgage than some friends did for a two-bedroom apartment in more or less the same area.
It’s seriously unfair.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Oh, it’s more disgusting than that. You can re-finance which brings your monthly payment lower than what you could possibly afford when buying the same house anew. Yeah, the 30-year horizon for paying off gets reset, but there are ways to work around that.
Back when I was renting the landlord offered a 3-year instead of a 1-year lease. I immediately asked “does that mean I get a discount on rent or lock-in a rate?” When they told me “no”, I asked “why would I do that?” Renters really have no such luxuries.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Wouldn’t a three-year lease lock in the rent for those three years?
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s not even counting that a significant fraction of each mortgage payment is going towards the principal, increasing your equity, so you’re basically paying yourself back each month.