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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

You're falling for the trap of just thinking of buying a house as an investment.

Buying a house can be an investment, but it's also buying a place to live. Even if the home's value merely keeps pace with inflation over 30 years, you've converted a largely fixed housing payment into ownership rather than paying ever-increasing rent indefinitely.

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Along the same lines, you are buying a place. A place that you own and can do whatever you like with. I spent twenty years renting and twenty years of feeling like you can’t hang a picture on the wall, paint a room, upgrade an appliance, or really do anything to improve your surroundings, tends to get tiring.

Why can't you hang a picture on the wall? Fixing holes in drywall is super trivial, a good life skill to learn.

Is there a law saying your landlord has to accept the repair?

In most jurisdictions, what you can take out of a deposit is legislated.

And it's really not that hard to make an unnoticeable drywall repair.

Not sure, but they likely won't know. Too many people ask permission for things. You'd have better luck doing what big corporations have done for decades. You just do the thing, cover it up, and hopefully never have to ask for forgiveness. And if you DO have to ask for forgiveness, well that's still easier than asking for permission!

Painting, too. Not sure how common or uncommon but my landlord explicitly allows painting, as long as it's not a dark color

Yes; but matching the paint color? and matching it to the wear of sun/fade of the surrounding area? That's not nearly as straightforward.

> Buying a house can be an investment, but it's also buying a place to live.

I'm a strong proponent of both owning and renting, and each has tradeoffs vs. the other. I've moved between renting and home ownership a couple times, and I appreciate the customizability of ownership along with the very real financial advantages.

On the other side, I've also enjoyed "freedom" of renting, where I didn't have to spend any additional time, energy, or money on maintenance tasks. In my HCOL part of the country, I could also afford the rent to live "downtown" when owning anything remotely similar was out of the question.

Your "also a place to live" line is fantastically underrated. When the housing market was flat or declining, I'd always get annoyed when people said something like "I've owned this house for 5 years, but now it's worth $20k less than when I bought it!". That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!

> That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!

This also ignores the costs in buying/selling, including agent fees, lawyers, etc. You should probably only buy if you plan on living in a single place for at least a decade.

Unless you are willing to enter into some kind of a special arrangement, closing costs are almost always negotiated and usually paid by the seller.

That isn't true. States levy taxes and buyers brokers are a thing in some states, and in some cases they're less fully paid by seller (less than the customary 2.5-3, leaving buyer to provide 1 or 1.5). Closing costs include mortgage costs, too.

I've only ever heard of that stuff paid by seller if seller was a sponsor, and the market was a down market. Think new build in 2020 or in a depressed housing market today.

That isn't a trap if we're talking about how other people perceive things. You might want a place to live, but the houses are all owned by people who want investments, so for the purpose of explaining the housing market, they're investments.

No constant anxiety that you’re going to be serially priced out of your own home or that the landlord is going to decide they’re giving the apartment to their nephew or something is worth quite a lot.

I’m not against renting but the rate at which prices are rising in many areas is unbelievable and the inherent instability it brings frankly sucks. It makes renewal time every year needlessly stressful.

If prices were more stable over long periods and one could more easily secure assurance that the owner isn’t going to rugpull them so one could only move every decade or so at most frequent that’d be easier to deal with.

There is virtually no security in renting outside of whatever landlord-tenant laws your municipality will offer you. The landlord can simply say that they're not going to renew your lease at the end of the year because the neighbors don't like your barking dog. And you have no recourse.

I agree with this. The same goes for subscription cars. Default on the monthly payments and they take it away.

If you purchased a rust bucket of a car, you own it and if it all goes south you still have a roof over your head.

Home ownership comes with costs, too. There's maintenance, taxes, etc.

It can also be a prison, as many people who locked in at low interest rates are learning. If they move, a lot of them will have to reset their mortgage rates and end up paying a lot more. This has trapped people into housing that is substandard for their living situations (growing families, moving for career opportunities, etc).

Renting can be perfectly fine for society, though the explicit tax benefits in the USA usually tilt in favour of home ownership. But a lot of very wealthy countries are majority renters, including Switzerland (where the home ownership rate is in the 30-40% range). This gives the Swiss a huge leg up on lifestyle flexibility and the majority of their wealth isn't tied up in a single asset.

I'm not trying to shit on owning a place, but ideally there should be nothing wrong with renting (assuming a competitive market where rental units can be built and aren't zoned out due to restrictions, etc).

you are falling into the trap of thinking of a house as a maintenance-free place to live

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