Doing something for pure status signalling is considered crass.
Expensive hobbies are not. I think they should be, but they're not.
Expensive hobbies are not. I think they should be, but they're not.
I'll take an awesome cook (my spouse in this case) and a modest kitchen, over a modest cook and an awesome kitchen any day.
Makes sense economically. Mass market manufacturers can amortize their R&D and quality control over many more units than luxury brands. The point of the luxury brand is explicitly countersignaling, showing that you can afford to spend more money on an inferior product.
What convenience features? Is the Honda or Toyota really meaningfully more reliable during the first couple of years of ownership?
And I care more about how reliable it is at > 10 years of ownership, not < 3 years (when nearly everything is reliable). My Honda Fit is coming up on 14 years old and runs like new.
It sounds like the comment you replied to was not about efficiency, but about rich people's preferences and whether they're justified.
Stone backsplashes require frequent maintenance and special chemicals. If you don't stay on top of it, they are basically impossible to keep looking clean.
A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.
I've seen kitchens with thin coated bright shiny copper/brass handles on everything which immediately tarnish and can never be maintained in new looking shape.
A lot of modern gas ranges are fairly hard to clean with lots of parts you have to remove, while a solid middle class electric glass countertop one is zero effort.
I once rented a place where the guy had wooden edges on the kitchen counters which of course aged poorly, plus a porcelain kitchen sink which immediately broke any glass wear that dropped even a couple inches while cleaning.. and was impossible to keep clean looking.
What's insane about this? I grew up in a pretty basic old house with a wooden floor in the kitchen, I don't recall it being an issue in any practical sense.
Or Spending 5-10x on a $10k appliance where a $1-2k one would do. These people tend to get the whole set, so it's a good $30-40k worth of kitchen appliances that could easily be replicated for $5k total otherwise. Does a better fridge/freezer really help you cook better? Do even most experienced cooks get noticeable benefit of a $10k range or oven?
I cook a lot, I personally would like a higher quality stove - I’ve killed one before because I (an)use the broiler a lot (it wasn’t terribly old), but I probably would do an NXR or something. maybe in the $2k. Or a used Wolf/viking from one of the people you mention
I’d rather buy a nice oven than a bunch of shit appliances though. People love their air fryers, over the stove microwave, countertop oven, instant pot, etc…
On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.
For many this means replacing some dated appliances, repainting, and strategic spending on a few items that may be out of style or more aged, like bathroom vanity or replacing a linoleum top.
Extravagant, expensive, specific renovations may actually detract because the general markets taste are not your taste and so you've either reduced the number of likely buyers, or half the universe of buyers are going to actually deduct value of your renovation because they may want to undo whatever you've done.
Spending $2k replacing a worn appliance or buying a $200 air fryer are two orders of magnitude off from the expenditure levels I am referring to.
This is the motivation I have to invest further in what already feels like a generally "move-in ready" home; my "move-in ready" is not others' "move-in ready", so my goal is to find all the objections and invest in making them less objectionable :)
If I were to spend $300k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $100k.
The only real increase in home value comes from additions which add bedrooms. If I were to spend money converting an attic, a basement, or adding an add-on, I'd probably come out even at the sale.
And renovations are quickly depreciating assets. I'm much better off doing that right before a sale. A new dishwasher will be an old dishwasher before too long.
I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.
If the work takes more than a week (so not just appliances, painting, etc) is there generally a positive expected return?
They must surely make sense, given that there are people who "flip" houses (buy a house, do a quick paint/bathrooms/kitchen renovation on it and sell it for a nice markup).
The average homeowner is unlikely to have any of those relationships or knowledge, so there are a lot more things that could go wrong that delay the project or cause costs to balloon. Maybe a lot of people mistakenly believe that renovating the kitchen for $20k will add $40k value to the house, but in practice, the project will cost $34k, take five weeks, and ultimately only raises the final sale price to $35k.
However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance. A new car has a much different safety profile than a 10 or 20 year old car. Watching crash videos on YouTube is very illuminating as to how far we've come even versus a car from 2000.
Modern advanced cars will warn you about rear & front cross traffic, actively keep you from driving off the road if you fall asleep, emergency brake for obstacles, keep you from changing lanes into a car in your blind spot, and many other things that were pretty unheard of 10-20 years ago. My car even flashes lights and beeps at me if I am opening the door and it detects oncoming cars or bikes.
A $500k renovation of a home is usually financed and adds less than the $500k of value to the resale price to the homes (lets say, $400k to be generous), while costing north of $750k by the time all the payments are made. So $100-350k of waste, conservatively.
I highly recommend the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TikJC0x65X0
Actuarially as well, the value of a human life is so high that a few $1000 in safety options on a car for marginal increases in safety will almost always be worth it.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit. Looking at the state level auto fatalities stats is pretty striking how much lower fatality rates are in the low limit / high traffic (and therefore low speed) northeast .. whether you measure per capita or per mile driven.
The most interesting but hard to measure metric would be per vehicle hour, I would suggest. Commutes are driven more by time than distance, and in congested areas people commute shorter distances at lower speed vs some of the super commutes people do at 75mph+. You can see this sort of reflected in the stats where the per capita fatality rates are 1/3 to 1/2 the level of the Deep South, however on a per-mile basis closer to 2/3. You can also see that the northeastern per-capita miles driven is 1/2 ..
Follow the incentives. You will NEVER see them show you the difference between like a 93 and 94 of a given model (tons of vehicles went from airbags optional to airbags standard over that year so that's basically what you'd be testing) because a single variable or low variable test doesn't get them the DARE-esque messaging and "look how far we've come" back patting that these sorts of old vs new comparisons are meant for. Watching a dummmy face plant into the steering wheel of a 93 OJ bronco and then do the same thing into the airbag of a 94 (to just pick one example) just doesn't scratch those itches the same way comparing vehicles that are half a dozen major engineering revisions and 20yr of model bloat apart from each other.
>Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit.
Eh, I think you're reading too much into it.
Speed limits don't reflect reality, anyone from the northeast will tell you that limited access highway speeds are predicated on traffic, weather and road conditions and 80mph middle lane speeds aren't uncommon pre and post commuting "hour" (in sarcasm quotes for obvious reasons).
Reducing potential for high speed traffic conflicts probably matters a lot more than you're giving it credit for. You almost never have cross roads just dumping traffic onto a state highway where traffic goes 70+ in the northeast. This is pretty standard once you get out of the beltway in the more rural states and account for a lot of avoidable crashes.
That’s empirically false. Toyota and Subaru both make 25k cars with vastly better active driver assistance features than Tesla, as shown by every independent test that’s ever been done.
Subaru specifically punches above their weight in terms of safety per dollar and given their close relationship with Toyota I could see them being similar.
If you open up the pricing tool on the cheapest Subaru wagon/SUV model, the Crosstek, and want all the active driver assist options, you quickly end up at the $30k top-tier "Limited" spec which is $31k after fees, and if you add any functional options/accessories (GPS nav, auto dim mirror, etc) is more like $35k.
Similarly their most famous model, the Outback may START at $28k, but if you want the trim with all the safety options, thats the $41k Touring. You can knock a few of the safety options off by going with the Limited for $36k (and add a few of the safety features on optionally to end up at $39k).
And I'm not even including markups, which dealers spent the last 2 years adding. Personally my mom spent 6 months hunting down a Subaru dealer who would sell her a car at sticker price after having her old one totaled in an accident. Then another 2 months waiting for it to arrive. This is probably over now, but again the $25k car is so rare as to almost be mythical.
But so does a kitchen rennovation.
> Having freezer space can save you thousands of dollars in food.
It can, if you use it that way. How many of the people buying these expensive kitches do?
On the contrary, if we had spent an additional 40k on our car, how much of a game changer would that have been and how long would it have lasted?
$40k for a kitchen is on the order of magnitude of getting all your appliances reasonably up to date, plumbing/fixtures, electrical and cabinetry/countertop refreshed, without anything being exotic or luxury. The bare bones one could probably refresh everything in the kitchen has to be easily $20k, so the incremental "above bare minimum spend" here is only $20k and therefore very reasonable.
That is a reasonable level of taking something outdated which is hard to market and making it up to date move-in ready and therefore quicker to sell.
To contrast for example in my experience, a Miele dishwasher for $800 washes dishes vastly better than a $400 GE. To the point it is significantly labor reducing. On the other hand, does a $10k subzero freezer/fridge keep my vegetables better than a $2k Samsung?
Most people underestimated how much of their homes value appreciating over the 5-20 years of ownership is purely the land value increases over the long term due to real estate inflation and the relative performance of their local markets. Ie - if all the condos in NYC went up 2x from 2004-2007, mine going up similarly isn't because I put fancy tiles in my toilet.