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Comment by The_Amp_Walrus | Hacker News Reader

You can also make the same argument for owning a car as well. After registration, mandatory insurance, petrol and maintenance, it's not clear that owning a car is a financially sound decision for me, personally.

I've run the numbers before and the cost of owning is pretty close to just catching an Uber every time I would otherwise drive, given I live an hour's walk from my city's center.

The only big benefit I get out of it is that I can drop everything and go on a camping / skiing trip several times a year. I certainly wouldn't buy a car now if I didn't own one, and if I could easily rent a car for outdoor trips, then I wouldn't have a reason to own one at all.

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The problem with reducing everything to whether it's a 'financially sound' decision is that the ultimate endpoint of that is that you live in 5sqm in SF/NYC/London/wherever, or a van in the Google car park, and stash it all away until you're 40 or whatever, because that's the Paperclip Maximizer optimal-strategy.

Ultimately it doesn't matter _that much_. You're going to get old, you're going to lose your health eventually, and then you're gonna die.

I used to think that way, the effects were long-term great (I have a good amount of savings now), but I recognise that there really was no need to be quite so extreme about it.

"Ultimately it doesn't matter _that much_. You're going to get old, you're going to lose your health eventually, and then you're gonna die."

Sure, but probably not at 40, so you've kind of refuted yourself. Speaking as someone who flipped from renter to homeowner at 42.

Saving up for 20 years in an index fund and then buying as much house as you can pay for in cash seems like a reasonable plan to me, if you make the sort of money people on HN claim to.

If that's what you want, that's excellent!

But perhaps it doesn't make 'financial sense' to buy the house after those 20 years, right, because you'd be better off just holding the money in index funds (or at least you'd be better off treating the home as an investment and not actually developing an emotional attachment because then you'll never sell it).

What I'm saying is - you have to spend money eventually. Very few people are in a situation in which they can just stash away 10M, spend 1M of it, and have the majority of their funds exist as investment money, and thus act in this sort of 'financially optimal' way.

Unless they want to live an austere life - which again, is fine! But it's not literally the only way to live.

I'm talking about saving, say, $150K over 20 years. Not $10M.

I’m having a hard time with that math. I recently bought a two yr old Mini Clubman and with my payments, insurance, and estimated maintenance and gas for my 22 miles per day total commute it runs me about $18/day. In five years (or less if I choose to pay it off early) it’ll be way less than that. And then there is the convenience and fun factor which isn’t even in the math I provided. Basically I’m not sure two Ubers a day at 11 miles each in rush hour in a top 20 US metro area are gonna be less than that.

Had I bought a used Toyota (done that a few times now) it’d be even less. (I’ve always bought used - let some other sucker pay the initial depreciation) I drive my cars until they are about dead or look to be too expensive to maintain.

> The only big benefit I get out of it is that I can drop everything and go on a camping / skiing trip several times a year.

This is my only excuse for owning a vehicle, too. I can be spontaneous and do a thing that requires multiple people with coordination that Uber/Lyft can't provide.

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