Iommic Pope wrote:Cool man.
Yeah home ownership, what the fuck were we thinking?
But, I'm glad I'm not renting anymore because, down here at least, it's like living with a knife to your throat and your assailant has been huffing glue.
As long as everyone is happy.
Yeah dude, it will be interesting to see what I think about renting again while we are looking for another house or building something. We already had one rental agency let us look at a house that was already booked and then charge us an application fee...so I'm not hopeful about it being the best experience
But I found out that I can apparently leave a voicemail that sounds menacing enough that they won't even call back and just email me to say my fee had been refunded
odontophobia wrote:I spend less on my monthly mortgage than I ever have in rent.
We definitely got a very nice deal on our house. It needed some serious updating. We've done most of that work ourselves.
Most people in America live immodestly. I don't need a huge house even though I could get a bank to approve me for a much higher loan. A lot of people look at what their parents or friends parents or whatever did with their money and their homes and think they need 5 bed/3 bath. I definitely didn't need that much. Found a house on the edge of the city. 5 min drive to downtown but also walkable.
But that's just what worked for me. Not gonna work for everybody.
Yep, ownership is definitely cheaper than renting. Until major repairs happen, and even then it's probably a wash in the long run. I wish I could do update work, but I always fuck it up, get ultra pissed off, then have to hire it out anyway.
We fell into the live at the top of your means Murican Dream situation for sure. We were 25 and bought a monster of a house because the market was at its lowest point, and because the bank said we could. Looking back it was a predatory loan - they actually said they would approve us for something stupid like 350k even though the mortgage would've been our entire paychecks. Fuckers. The upside is that we aren't dipshits so we didn't lose the house or anything, and now we get to cash in on that sweet, sweet equity now that the market is stronger again.
What it taught us though is that a big house in the burbs isn't all its cracked up to be, especially when you don't have the income to match the rest of the lifestyle that supposed to come along with it. So downsizing is a happy thing for us - I'm actually hoping for something a bit older that someone has updated. Something with some goddamn character. We're definitely suburban folks though - I grew up out in the sticks so I don't like living that close to folks, and my wife is from the Cincinnati suburbs, so she's afraid of just about everything that isn't the burbs.
Corey Y wrote:We just sold our house, escrow closed yesterday. Our mortgage was way cheaper than rent here, the new owner's mortgage is twice what ours was, but it's gotten too expensive to live here now that we're having kids. Plus the schools suck and crime is nuts. In about a month we're moving out of state and buying a house outright with some savings left over.
Hell yeah dude - congrats on the sale! Sounds like you did great in terms of equity and shit. Where will you move?
odontophobia wrote:the shred shed
Corey Y wrote:Thanks, it was kind of a nerve wracking process and went really fast. We went into escrow 2 weeks after listing the house. It's almost as expensive here as the bay area and this area is a shit hole. We're in driving distance of Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur and all that, but our city is a wasteland culturally (no live music venues, no live music allowed in bars, no book stores, no record stores). Vice wrote an article called it the Youth Murder Capital of California. We had 8 murders on our block at work the 2 months before we moved to a new location.
We're heading to Ohio, looking around the northeast part of the state. We looked at houses online in about 10 different states, looking at all the ratings, statistics, etc. and seeing what we could find in our budget where we could get the most house in the best school district. We're going to rent and just start house hunting immediately (we've got a short list of like 20 houses that are listed right now). My wife and I decided if we didn't like the area we could just take weekend trips to other areas and if we find one good house, we'll just have our stuff in storage moved there.
Ohio is kind of a shithole in the same way that everywhere is kind of a shithole. The upside is that I've literally never seen such low cost of living in a place. In/around Cincinnati, you can work at fucking McDonalds and still have a 3 bedroom house with a full finished basement for jamming. And everyone is super nice because it's all white people who are terrified of everything
BUT if my mom didn't live close by, and I had the opportunity to buy some shit outright, you'd be seeing my ass somewhere in Ohio in a heartbeat.