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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't life optimisation, it's putting cost optimisation over happiness.

Having a yard/garden with kids is wounderful, open the back door and shove them outside without shoes to play for accessible easy outdoor time.

Half the fun of Friends staying over in the guest room is when you can have a few drinks and everyone relaxes knowing no one is traveling. The next morning you can all have breakfast together.

Car shares are great for going to the shops on Tuesday, getting a car for Christmas when you want to see family is a different ballgame.

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My father summarizes this concept by saying that if you consider the actual usage time, a prostitute is way more cost-effective than a wife, and still it just isn't the same thing.

That depend on whether he interacts with his wife only for sex. There are obviously many other tasks a wife can do, which could require hiring the prostitute for basically all waking hours, and that's not even getting into the misalignment of interests with a freelancer versus having a partner. I think the proper comparison for rent-versus-buy should be a girlfriend versus a wife.

Ok, let's end this comment train about measuring the value of women by what they can do for their significant other right now.

A slightly more polite way of putting that would be that sex with your spouse is incidental, the reason for the relationship, is the relationship. A prostitute can't provide that.

I think it goes beyond the relationship, as a marriage is a commingling of finances and legal rights. A marriage is a common way to achieve pooling of resources and division of labor, with a long-term outlook for the benefit of all parties. Not the most romantic way of looking at it, but this must be taken into account as unaligned goals for the above are the most common reasons that marriages fail.

in 2019 (i.e. before covid), I threw a party at my centrally located, but also quite small, 1 br apartment. Had some friends in from out of town and put them up at a hipster boutique hotel 3 blocks from my apt. They hung out at my place for as long as they wanted, stumbled back to the hotel when they were done, and retreated to privacy of their own hotel room. We all walked to breakfast the next day.

The way the math works out is that I would be able to pay for three nights per month in that hotel for the difference between a 1br and a 2br in my building.

I don't think everyone reading this article needs to shoehorn their own situation into the analysis, but for me it makes a ton of sense. I kind of want a 2br, but I really wouldn't use the space that often and I have excellent alternatives.

As someone living in a 1br, I'm not sure how you aren't constantly pining for the 2br like me. It would change so much. Right now my living room houses my hobbies, my job, my tv, my dining room, my gym, and my couch where I can fit 1 friend awkwardly sleeping with their legs sticking out the end. A second bedroom would become the office, the gym, the guest room, the music room, and would free up my living room for, well, living.

I dream of that day, but I don't expect to see it for another 4-5 years at least given the nature of the beast in this field in this city.

This is also a perspective I could have much more easily bought into pre-COVID.

We have kids, and live in a rural area, and honestly, many summers, don't get a ton of use out of our property and home because we spend most our free time and income on travel. Generally, we're gone at least 2-weekends a month on car trips, fly away for a few weekends a year, and try to fit in 1-2 international trips as well.

Obviously, all that's changed in the last year.

With COVID, we've felt incredibly lucky to live in a rural area where our kids were able to spend basically all summer just "playing outside." No need to interact with other people on mass-transit. No shared elevators or public spaces.

When we did start socializing a bit, it was very nice to have a nice private, outdoor space to (more) safely entertain our guests in.

COVID is hopefully a very temporary, one-time event. But it has changed my perspective.

Still, while I agree that the article takes optimization to sort of silly lengths, I do see a solid point behind it.

I apply the same philosophy to boats, RVs, vacation-homes and the like. (Though, I admit that COVID has tested my resolve there a bit). Expensive investments that aren't really going to make sense unless you're using them far more than our family would. Plus, with any major purchase like that, you're "locked-in" to doing that one thing if you're trying to maximize the value of your investment.

Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else. Buy a boat, and you're going to feel like you're wasting money when you spend a week of vacation somewhere besides a lake.

TL;DR: Like most things in life, it's a balance.

>Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else.

I would probably agree with OPs sentiment in the context of vacation homes. They're not necessarily a great investment. They sort of lock you into a location. They're another thing you have to manage. And so forth. I'd much rather just get a hotel room, a B&B, etc.

I've even thought of buying a small place in the city. First of all, I'm really glad I didn't do that in the last year or two. But, really, while I wish I had done it 10 years ago knowing what I know now about property values, I also don't miss having another property to manage and I can always get a hotel if I want to spend a weekend in town every now and then.

This is, in turn, where AirBnB and companies like it add value to the world.

There are some really bleak effects on affordability in urban areas, but for someone who owns a vacation home they use two or three weeks out of the year, it's great: employ someone local to handle keys and cleaning, cover mortgage/taxes, maintenance, and maybe enough profit that you don't feel so bad going somewhere else once in a while.

In turn, someone like me can rent it! The best of my experiences with AirBnB have been this exact sort of rental, while the worst were situations where I discovered that the rental was illegal.

The only problem with AirBnB in high cost of living cities is that it gobbles up supply zoned for housing and uses it for ostensibly commercial purposes, which hurts the people living there who might have had the chance of signing a lease for that vacant apartment you don't use. Instead it goes to people looking to save $30 a night on a hotel.

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