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Comment by flyandscan88 | Hacker News Reader

I hope you get shown similar sympathy when your house value crashes

I don't view housing as an investment. I look at it as I need a place to live. If I make money on it after I'm done living there then that's great.

If that's the case, why not just rent?

You'll never finish paying rent, but you will finish paying your mortgage eventually. Also, your mortgage payment won't increase much while you own your house (just the part for property taxes), while rents will often go up (and sometimes down) with the market. So if you are in it for the long term, a house will provide stability after 10 or so years. And that isn't even considering the fact that it is your place to make for your needs vs. your landlord's.

You’ll never stop paying. Pick rent or property taxes. Obviously property taxes are less than rent in your typical case. But it’s not even an order of magnitude difference

No, it is around...a third where I live maybe? Or maybe a 4th of what rent would be like. But I can always sell/downsize and retire to somewhere with cheaper property taxes, which is something I couldn't do renting. Rents don't do that.

But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.

Some non-investment reasons: stability, locking in your cost of living for many years, the ability to remodel your home to make it look the way you want it to, and no risk of being forced to move because the home you live in gets sold and the buyer wants to live in it themselves.

In Japan, houses generally depreciate over time, yet the home ownership rate is still 60% because the other benefits of home ownership are so attractive.

If you know you want to live in a particular area for a long time, and you can afford it, home ownership is usually an attractive move.

Because after 30 years of paying rent... you own nothing. After 30 years of paying a mortgage... you own land and a building.

OP said that they don't view housing as an investment thus owning the "land" should absolutely not matter. They might as well rent if its cheaper.

AFAIK an investment is when you put money into something expecting it to increase in value.

Buying a house just so that at the end you own it is not an investment, that's just a purchase with a loan.

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