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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Do you want to have pets?

Do you want to redecorate to your own taste?

Can you even find anywhere to rent? Not everywhere has a liquid rental market.

Moving only once every 10 years sounds great. Renting means maybe having to move on notice as short as one month. Back when I was renting I moved about every 3 years, although that was also house-sharing with other young professionals.

Rent is usually more expensive than mortgage payments, and house price appreciation is your only chance to make a leveraged investment that pays roughly 7% annually.

Edit: also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments. Frees up a whole lot of cashflow. Would you really want to go into retirement on a fixed income with a variable rent payment?

Note that a "20 year mortgage" just sets the amortisation rate of the payments; you can accelerate it, and usually will end up re-mortgaging every 3-5 years to get better rates.

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> also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments.

You have maintenance. And if something bad happens with the foundation, that's very expensive to fix. Unless you just plan to die and have the house demolished and the property sold (which is honestly preferable in some cases of inheritance).

I had to pay $25k to have supports installed in the crawlspace and other mitigation to avoid foundation work. I might have gotten ripped off, and the annoying thing is that I can't know for sure because I'm not informed about foundation work, structural engineering, or other principles.

Simply inheriting a house and trying to sell it turned me off from owning a home in the near future due to the arduous process of paperwork, red tape, maintenance, and a low-liquid market. I'll take a comfortable living van/RV over dealing with real estate again if it means I can reduce the risk of dealing with those things to zero.

(Full disclosure: Bay Area homeowner here)

I can stomach the idea of renting for the rest of my working life. My renting life was good, had more cash to spare, good landlords, etc.

What terrifies me is the idea that I'd have to keep paying rent when I retire.

True but when you retire, you're not bound to a job and you can live in a cheaper place.

Real estate probably won't be a part of the post-scarcity economy, otherwise I'd bet on just buying a home in 30 years while forgetting what a mortgage was for.

'post-scarcity economy'

Hahahaha. Ha.

There's going to be plenty of scarcity to go around for the rest of our lives. And unless you're already in the top 1%, or unless you believe full-on socialism will ever catch on in a country run by and for the benefit of capitalists and corporatists, you can personally expect to see a lot more of it once everything worth doing has been automated.

Don't forget the roof that needs replacing every 15 or 20 years. Appliances. Furnace. Plumbing. Septic tank. Water lines on your property. Tree removal. Re-decorating and re-modeling. Replacing windows.

I think people generally maintain the homes they own to a higher standard than the ones they rent out. It's not equal in home ownership vs renting. The place I rent has the cheapest appliances possible, paint mostly chipped off on the steps, the flooring is from the 80s, etc.

If you look down a street where I live (Boston area) you can likely guess which units are rentals and which are owned.

I thought that, too... until it was time for me to buy a house. Then I discovered most home owners are just as miserly as landlords. Hacky, quick DIY fixes? Check. Cheapest possible repair/replacement option chosen every time? Check. Obvious concern for only things that "increase resale value" over things substantially more important to the house's long term well-being? Check.

I can't tell you how many houses I looked at with peeling, worn roof shingles, but a bangin' dishwasher and stove.

If your roof needs replacing every 15 years then there is something seriously wrong with the structural integrity of your house.

Shingles roof is replaced every 15 years, if you have more expensive metal roof it's every 50 years

In the Uk you'd be looking at replacing a roof after about 100 years, costs about £6k ($8k), not exactly a major cost.

Composite shingles are more like 30 years.

My brother, only a few months after buying his first house, had a tree in the backyard get struck by lightning, break in two and crush his neighbors garage.

The neighbors insurance paid for that, but then he still had to pay almost $3000 right away to get the rest of the tree removed from his backyard, because it was still in bad shape. Was an unpleasant introduction to the wonderful world of home ownership.

It's not like you avoid these expenses by renting. They're just rolled into your rent. You get to avoid thinking about them, of course.

Although there is an economies-of-scale advantage to maintenance on multi-family dwellings.

Yeah, it's basically like insurance. You're not hit with a sudden $10k+ bill, you just have a rent that has ~$100 a month factored in for maintenance costs.

Also with renting, one should be careful to avoid arguments at equilibrium. E.g. not all landlords seek the same profit margin and rent increases don't track improvements perfectly. Comparison shopping and moving opportunistically, one can stay ahead of the curve. Other people already financed the improvement ts you're enjoying!

The property group takes on risk if something like a roof needs replacing unless they just keep a lot of cash sitting around for just such a thing. They may also have access to better loans but I have no idea for sure.

I don't want to keep a pile of cash around waiting for housing emergencies (personal emergencies are a different thing), and I certainly don't want to sell stocks to fix a roof if my roof fails during a recession.

What is it with US roofs? Are they really all terrible, you're the third person in about 10 posts to be scared about massive costs to replace a roof.

setting aside trees, fires etc it hadn't even occurred to me that a roof may need replacing, aside from maybe the occasional tile.

Many US dwellings use asphalt shingles, which wear out. Slate roofs may last for hundreds of years, but they are pricey and I'm not sure how they stand up to golf ball hail.

A 15 year roof replacement is BS. It's more like 30.

Not that I'm helping, but I think you were definitely ripped off. Those supports cost about 20 dollars each. I had a company do one part for 3k, and did the rest myself. 25k should have been a big red flag.

> after 20 years you have no more payments.

You have no more principal and interest payments. You still have property taxes (~$1000/mo for me) and most will pay insurance (~$300/mo) and you'll have on-going maintenance; I think it's wise to ballpark the last at 1% of the house market value.

I'm a two-time homeowner and it absolutely fits my family life situation very well, but it's a common fallacy that housing costs go to zero when the mortgage is paid off.

Ah yes; I'm in the UK where local taxes are levied on the occupant not the owner, so you have to pay them even if you rent.

Interesting. TIL this; thanks.

I like that approach as it makes clear the financial flows and put the tenant in the logical frame of mind of "am I getting what I'm paying for?" when considering new civic projects or other budget items.

It would be nice if it worked that way, but local tax rates tend to be a matter for national politics, resulting in all sorts of messed up incentives. National government imposed a freeze on council tax increases for a while. The council tax system also has not had a house revaluation for two decades and the upper "band" is quite low, so it's regressive at the high end.

> Do you want to have pets?

At least in the competitive housing markets of San Jose and Seattle this is not much of an issue as every apartment I've visited allows pets and most even have accommodations for them as perks. I suppose there are limits though so maybe if you wanted to have 4 dogs that might not be allowed

I rented in Seattle with a pit bull that we adopted and it was challenging to find a place that would allow us.

We couldn't find a decent place in New Jersey that would take our Labrador. Even the place we have now had to be talked into letting us have one of my cats. :|

Ah good point! I forgot that sometimes they don't allow some breeds of dogs as I have cats..

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