People Buying Houses with Their Friends | Hacker News Reader

People Buying Houses with Their Friends

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18 pointswoldemariam4 comments

There’s a weird advantage in US tax code for buying a house with your friend. An individual can write off the interest on up to $750k of mortgage. A married couple gets $750k total. Two unmarried people get $750k apiece, and they can use it on the same house. This could be worth like $20k/year depending on your situation.

A man I know bought a house that way something around forty years ago. Originally there were five or seven owners. By the time I met him, only three of the owners lived there: him, his wife (who may not have been one of the originals), and another.

After his wife died a couple of years ago, he began the process of selling it. This was complicated, and the fact that he had had the use of the house all those years led some of the other owners to say he should get a smaller proportion of the proceeds. I believe that this has all been resolved to his satisfaction, but I haven't seen him in a while.

Now that can be tricky - seen a family torn apart over who inherited a family home just because he was the eldest.

We have a family home which is paid off and we will probably move out to a smaller retirement place - we have two daughters - one is working and living with her partner in a rental flat and the other one is still studying.

It would be a shame if the home needs to be sold and the proceeds split in half - we have a large plot so splitting parts of the home and doing another dwelling is a possibility.

> A decade ago, this might have seemed like a far-fetched idea

It's as old as the hills.

Every young person thinks about it. Every old person is glad they didn't - https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1w73i0/con... (10 years ago)

It's a problem that needs solving, but it's tricky. It's just a smaller version of the commune problem.

You can put money right now into property for an investment, there are lots of managed funds.

Buying a home is different. It's putting money into something you love rather than booze and hookers. It's a forced investment in your future, it needs to be fun/fulfilling for what it replaces. It's psychology.

If you are going into it with friends you need to solve the psychology. Will you spend time/weekends working on it when your friends get part of that $? Will you love love it if it's shared or does it become an object that sucks up money? They want to sell their object after x years, you want to keep what you love and invested in.

The real solution is probably cities allowing developers to build what people want. Homes half/third the size.

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