>But the biggest thing is that I'm the only one in charge of maintenance. There's no one person I can call for every single problem. Keeping track of regular maintenance, performing that maintenance, and learning how to DIY things takes a lot of time. And even if I want to pay someone to do it for me, I still have to research contractors, coordinate estimates, and schedule the project. And I still need to learn enough about the project to determine whether they're doing it right!

The thing is, you can actually find these people. My landlord has one. Sage old handiman who knows everything about how the building works and fixed half of it himself already. Seemingly he can do every trade. He's under the building doing plumbing or electric one day. Landscaping the next. Installing appliances. Paint and drywall. Roofing. Most of the time it's him by himself, but he will occasionally bring out his crew of similar sage old handimen who know seemingly everything there is to know.

You don't need a contractor. They will give you the runaround. You need to find a handiman like this. Not easy I'm sure, but they are out there.

I don't think home ownership is an "every single weekend" thing unless you bought a fixer-upper.

Honestly, it sounds like you enjoy it.

If you are doing it with that frequency I think you just are "into" your house.

> House maintenance and projects have taken up most of every single weekend of mine for the past few years.

Mine come and go but it's no where near every weekend since I've purchased in 2019. What sort of things occupy this much time?

Indeed. This is why I'm a preferential life-long renter, although I think the primary reason is that I can't stand living anywhere for more than 2-5 years. So much friction to move, unwinding this risky position very expensively, with loads of transaction fees stacked--I can't understand the appeal. Even owning a condo was enough for me to realise I don't want to own my own bare metal, and that I look at housing as a cloud service of sorts, where much of what I pay for is just for all operational questions to be someone else's problem and to relieve myself of the burden of owning and liquidating what I would otherwise have to CAPEX.

For me, it's hard to put a price on the reclamation of _time_ spent otherwise thinking about those issues, to say nothing of the money. I just don't have time to think about even 1/60th of what's involved in getting vendor quotes for roof reshingling or painting or whatever, and even if I do have the time, I'd rather pull my fingernails out than spend it that way.

I sure do miss that mortgage interest deduction, though. I had no desire to accrue equity in the property--and indeed, if I had more equity, I would have lost even more money than I did in the 2008 crash--but I loved my super high-interest loan. It meant that my most of my housing payment was tax-deductible, and that's fantastic. My only regret, besides buying itself, is that I didn't take out an interest-only mortgage.

However, this isn't a Great Recession sob story. The condo would be way too much work and cognitive bandwidth theft even in the best of times, and that's like a tenth of the structural, landscaping, etc. issues one has to think about with an SFH. No thanks, man. I have other stuff to do.

"Home ownership is definitely a lifestyle choice first and foremost more than a financial one."

Respectfully, that assertion isn't really supported by your anecdote.

Agree completely about the time thing. Indeed, every time I’ve fallen into the trap of somehow believing I’ve moved “past” the time sink it inevitably has bitten me down the road when something breaks or I learn about some maintenance task I should have been doing but didn’t even know existed.

More than anything, I’ve come to admire those who learn how to do this stuff consistently because it is hard.

> There's no one person I can call for every single problem.

There absolutely can be if you want to pay for the service. Look up home concierge / residential management services, like Para Home Services.

I've rented a studio all the way to a 5 bedroom house. The difference in maintenance/upkeep for me has mostly been the yard. There's also the fact that cities typically have more demands on landlords.. meaning renters foot the bill/time on more maintenance items more in some areas. I think that's often overlooked when weighing the costs.

I sadly don't get much benefit out of renting beyond freedom of movement and higher cash on hand in my current place. Sometimes I've lost my freedom to stay though.

I have a, perhaps irrational, fear of getting stuck with a house.

100%. We bought a house because we wanted to be able to adjust our home to our family and lifestyle and we both like futzing around with homeowner stuff like repairing things and having a big garden to grow stuff right outside our door. I don't envy the people who get into homeownership and learn that they actually hate being their own general contractor (or don't have the money to pay someone else to be their general contractor because they hate being one).

Once you get a good handyman, just need a good electrician and plumber

Condo is suppose to be that nice hybrid but they became enshittified long ago and have routinely proven to be bad deals for the average buyer in too many circumstances.

The US doesn’t understand how to make the housing market functional. I’d love to have a condo where a great many things are handled by the association but the math never maths, as they say, and a great deal of the issues is because condo associations aren’t well regulated and they often don’t account things correctly.

I owned two single family houses both built in 2002. I am not handy at all and only will do remodeling when im going to sell a house. I was fortunate with both houses needing very little maintenance over the 7 years i lived in them. If i did need a maintanence guy my realtor has a good number of great reliable contractors in her back pocket. Realtors who have been selling houses in your area for MANY years usually have a great rolodex of solid, reliable contractors at their disposal vs. going online and rolling the dice.

What maintenance is there to do exactly ?

you prbly bought an old aging home

> If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

That is not the right way to see it.

If you have the cash to buy upfront, then yes, real estate is not that good an investment, unless you have a loaded portfolio already and want to diversify a bit, get some high inflation hedge, etc.

The real value of buying a home is leverage. That is, most people cannot go to a bank and borrow $500k. The bank will just not make a blank loan like that without any idea of what you're going to do with it.

Buying a home though is well understood and borrowing is made relatively easy.

For most people, buying a home is the only way they have to actually get significant leverage from borrowing.

Yes, this is broadly correct. The free market will (roughly) arbitrage out any differences between owning and renting. The hidden factor is that whatever money you have in house equity represents opportunity cost that it isn't in investments. If you have 400k in a house and the stock market returns 6% over inflation, then the opportunity cost is 2k per month in interest, which is comparable to what you'd pay in rent.

There are tax advantages that favor owning (in the US), for a primary resident and not an arbitrageur - mortgage interest and capital gains when you sell are not taxed, while capital gains in a non-retirement account are.

You can gain by appreciation and leverage, of course - but you can just as easily not, you don't know if your city is going to be the next high-flying Austin or Boulder, or run-down Detroit. My own house has been flat in estimated value for four years in an area that I thought would continue to rise.

Neighbors of owned-properties:

  - care about the long-term effects of their actions
  - care about the plan of their surroundings
  - plan to stick around

Notably this is equally applicable to any occupant-owned property (e.g. condos > apartments).

The control benefit isn't just psychological; it can have real financial consequences. If you own your home, you can't be told by a landlord that their pet policy has changed and you will have to move out. You also can't have your landlord sell the place where you're living out from underneath you and inform you that the buyer doesn't want to rent the place out any more and you will have to move out. Both of those things have happened to me, and at pretty short notice (about a month to find a new place and move both times), and they were significant costs that I did not expect to have to pay.

This.

Our household income is 300k, and I took a big risk purchasing a home in Socal where mortgage is 50% of our take home income. In a space of 1 year or so, we went from saving two out of four paychecks each month, to sinking two into mortgage each month.

For me, we have one kid and we plan to stay put for at least 10 years. It's a good school district. The quality of life is excellent considering the weather, outdoors, cultural diversity, things to do, and proximity to international airport. We have friends and family here.

But to me what mattered most is that I am 40, our income is going to plateau. Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy. On the other hand, I can refinance now and bring my mortgage down to what I was paying for rent previously, and in 10-15 years be mortgage free at a place with all the benefits I mentioned above.

One term for this is "price-to-rent ratio" which is as simple as it sounds.

The ratio has a wide range from city to city.

Full financial analysis gets complicated quickly because you have to consider mortgage rates, inflation, opportunity cost of the invested money, and how long you're keeping the house. It's possible to pick the more financially optimal decision using today's numbers and then have your perfect plan clobbered by a collapsing housing market, extreme swings in interest rates, or being forced to move early.

> You don't have to worry about rent increases

I'd also argue there are financial advantages (on top of the psychological ones) to the price stability as you don't have to hedge against your housing cost shooting up as much.

> But don't do it for financial reasons.

I think I disagree on this front, but that’s probably because I ended up buying a home due to a mix of FOMO, bad landlords and rent not being too far from mortgage.

Plus from a psychological perspective it’s hard to say don’t do it for financial reasons when anyone who bought a home in the last 10 years (forget 20+) has seen insane appreciation. I’m jealous of everyone who got practically free money (2-3% mortgages) on an asset that has increased at least 50%. Life probably doesn’t get better than that and makes me wish for such nice things.

At least my “rent” is “set” for the next 29 years (I just bought last year) so hopefully at some point my mortgage would be something to be envious of.

Totally agree with all of this. When I was younger I'd heard that owning a home was financially a no-brainer so many times I took it as fact. Boy was I in for a surprise when the reality of actually owning a home kicked in. It's not just the less obvious overall costs that add up, it's also the variance. At any point you can be hit with a sudden expenditure of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a major repair.

Owning does give you a lot more control over your life in certain ways, which some will find a lot of value in. If you're someone who likes doing home improvements then buying a house makes a lot of sense.

Whether or not you plan to stay in the area for a while is probably the biggest factor. Buying a house makes it a lot harder to move in the future, but it also means you can't be forced to move. I had a horrible rental experience where I suddenly found out I had to move on short notice. It happened right after starting a stressful new job. Combining those two stressors made for some rough months.

I know a lot of other folks with similar stories of having to scramble out of a property on short notice. Maybe the rent gets jacked up to an unaffordable level, or maybe the landlord who said they were renewing the lease suddenly changes their mind.

This isn't really true in many HCOL areas, a mortgage payment + amortization can be cheaper than renting an equivalent property. On top of that the amortization of your loan doesn't incur capital gains tax.

Even if your property doesn't appreciate more than inflation you can still profit massively from owning just through the loan amortization. Only being forced to sell during a market crash could realistically cause a big downside, but the upside is substantial compared to the risk.

It is also the safest leverage investment most people can do and the cheapest way to diversify away from stock market.

In fact paying off your mortgage is usually better risk/profit calculation than buying bonds as mortgage interest is usually higher than bond interests[1]. If you hold any significant amount on bonds you are better off using that money for a downpayment.

Everyone here is doing the cold hard math on 100% stocks when every financial advisor says you should diversify to reduce risks. Of course if you go 100% stocks and assume average returns will keep going forever (and not, you know, go full 90s Japan) the math will say stocks. But if you add any sort of risk lowering diversification a mortgage is usually the best one you can get.

[1]: I live in Sweden where almost everyone has floating interest rates for mortgages, I know US people can lock in their interest at low or high rates for decades which can skew the calculations

I don't think that's good advice. I, and most people I know who have invested in home ownership over the past 30-40 years, have done way better than we could ever have in the stock market or 401k. It's way more tangible for people than trusting some index fund with their savings, especially if they can maintain the home, improve it, and do repairs mostly themselves. And bonus... when you sell, you don't have to wait until you're 60 years old to spend it!

This!

As someone who moved 6 times in 8 years (admittedly, some of those were for work), and every time, I relied on moving things myself/with friends, I was just tired any more!

For the last move, I hired movers since I was already married by then and our stuff tripled (yes, mine was a very small portion).

The fact that I don't have to move for a while now gives me a lot of peace!

Yeah this. But some additional flavor to emphasize the 'don't do it for financial reasons' aspect.

In the late 90's I, like a number of my married friends, 'owned' a house in the Bay Area. Dot coms were going crazy, the economy was insane, and people who got big equity payouts were buying places with their stock. At the height of all that, my Sun stock holdings were enough to pay off the remainder of my mortgage but I got the "opportunity cost" talk from my financial advisor about how tech stocks were returning 15 to 20% and more, so what I should really do, is refinance, and put my equity into tech stock! I didn't do that but at least two people I knew did. And when the crash came, the friends that had refinanced ended up selling their houses an moving out of the area, and I was left with the dread associated of being an "older" engineer when tech jobs were on the way out. But I still had a mortgage and kids to support. Had I paid the house off I would be in a position to take a job with much lower pay than my last job and still stay in my house (with just the tax,insurance,utilities and maintenance costs). The psychological cost of 'uncertainty' is especially burdensome on me (which, I suppose, is why I make a good operations person).

I told my wife that if I ever had a chance to pay off the mortgage again (prior to paying it off the old fashioned way of making payments for 30 years :-)) I would. In California, you are required by law to be able to make a payment larger than you requested payment and any excess goes toward the principal. So we started making bigger payments, and between that and some bonuses and stock recovery we managed to pay it off. I still got complaints from my financial advisor that she could get us a better return than that, but I didn't care. I wanted more certainty than that.

Now that story works because I knew that I wanted to stay in the Bay Area, there were jobs that I would be interested in (even if they didn't pay what I would prefer) and that was important to me. A relative who was more management in retail (started at Sears) found owning was a problem because it made relocation harder. As a result, even though they owned now and then, they lost money during the mortgage crisis (needed to move with their house underwater) and didn't get the advantage of just staying in one place.

My wife's parents simply rented out their place and moved to a new place and bought a new house there. They ended up collecting a few properties which were their retirement plan, being sold off over time to pay for expenses when they could no longer work. That was more 'investment like' in my mind. But it was also a lot of accounting work with property managers etc.

Buying a home works really well if you are married and you both have salaries (and initially no kids). The US tax system is set up to 'reward' that behavior with a better rate for married filing jointly and a mortgage deduction for owning a house. It cuts out a lot of uncertainty. But it also means moving is a bigger deal. In today's market, if you bought a house with an < 6% mortgage and are looking at buying with on >9% then they feel a bit locked in.

> If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

You'd actually end up in a much better place historically, homes were never a particularly good investment in the US, but there are very few people who can pull it off and actually invest the difference and not just spend it.

Yeah, no. Fuck renting. It may be ok for 5 maybe 10 years, while you're figuring yourself out, but after that it's just wasted money.

If you buy property it will be yours, forever. You will pass it down, you will be forever part of the community, and your children, and so on.

Both my parents come from big farmer families, and lots of poverty. When my grandparents managed to end serfdom in the late 50's and their rented farm became their it was a huge deal: that became the family home. Like our own castle of sorts.

But i guess it's a different culture, my country has the higher percentage of home owners in europe for a reason, whereas most of northern europe housing marked is dominated by speculation and renting agencies, among the worst sort of leeches that have ever lived.

Well, not historically because for a lot of the last few decades, house prices have gone up dramatically more than average investments. But it does seem like that is coming to and end and of course you can't make decisions based on the future.

Even so, there's still a benefit to owning which is that you aren't paying the agency fees, elevated maintenance fees, and landlord profit, which are all non-zero.

Yes the benefit is psychological but I think there's more to it as well.

Firstly within investing, I am assuming that a person has safety net amount of money before properly investing. This is something that I have heard some people don't exactly do.

As such, what happens is that, they might lose a job and have to pay rent and might have to sell the stocks or any index fund/investments that they had within the market (which depends on if the market is doing good or bad too) and overall snatches opportunity for money to actually grow for years.

I recommend having a safety net but I must admit that there is still some psychological stress overall due to multitude of factors, as such, if possible, buying a house feels like it might be overall decent choice and the differences might not be so much.

that being said, I do think that it depends upon the land prices and many other things overall too.

Also, this is tangential but I used to be a boglehead, still am but with recent cases of Nasdaq[0] & I think S&P bending towards SpaceX and AI IPO's by literally bending rules, it does feel like the investment markets might be more shaky given other factors

(Not a financial advice at all) but I recommend looking towards dimensional index funds which do just a very bit more than index funds if the addition of floaty investments like SpaceX and other IPO's make you fear similar to me.

But the thing is that the downstream effects of it will still be visible, for example, just imagining if SpaceX gets added to IPO and then quickly added to Nasdaq/S&P and then it falls substantially for any reason. The thing is that the market itself would be spooked and other funds would be impacted too.

I have belied in the market efficiency hypothesis but a lot of it feels like private equity trying to raise evaluations to then push it to index funds (by in this case, asking nasdaq to bend the rules to force passive investors to buy and hold the bags basically impacting retirement accounts too and perhaps even govt bailouts but basically it becomes privatization of gains and socialization of losses and becoming too big to fail.

I must say that it feels a bit of blatant corruption in some instances like the one for SpaceX and this removes my confidence within markets.

I do recommend overall diversification for world stocks and also housing if affordable.

I wish to still invest in markets but with a bit more caution rather than blind optimism. Also no, active investing doesn't quite work either reading john bogle books and other resources and passive investing is still superior to active investing overall but just with more caution. That's all.

[0]: https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/new-nasdaq-rules-open-...

There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

And while I agree that it’s nice to customize things to your preferences, this has a downside in that it’s easy to get carried away and overspend. Might as well get the nicer finishes when you are remodeling, right? After all you’re paying so much for labor anyway. And you can’t have just your kitchen nice, now you need to upgrade the flooring in the whole house. And soon your small $30k improvement is $150k

> I redid/improved...

We are extending the fence in our backyard.

However, getting rid of the parking means the project will likely detract from the value of the home. But since we don't have a car, let alone two, it makes sense for us to do the project anyway. Despite the warning of our realtor when we purchased the home.

I've noticed a lot of folks are afraid to personalize their homes because of concern about the value when they eventually sell.

This depends on what country you live in, but in the UK renting is (even after recent changes) quite precarious. The landlord can kick you out with a few months notice. They can require regular inspections. They can send workers around to "fix stuff" without you really agreeing to it. Even if you never renovate your bathroom, the security and privacy of owning your own place without landlords bothering you is worth every penny.

> I redid/improved

I said it this way to my GF this weekend: "If I own the home, I can choose to do irrational things like demolishing things that are perfectly fine".

She was like "Perhaps you should rent, LOL."

> Beyond the financials, the psychological impact of both being able to make greater-than-superficial changes, and having extremely predictable payments for years without worrying about substantial rent increases, is substantial.

As a renter in a place that protects renters from radical increases year over year, I'd argue the only compelling sense of stability would be trading the risk of being evicted for that of losing the house

> I redid/improved the bathroom to exactly what I wanted. I renovated the kitchen. I added panelling to the walls. I added a few outlets to rooms that needed more.

I think this is an interesting differentiation that would either be very compelling for a hobbyist or carpenter, or someone who works on cars, but it's also crazy to me if I frame homeownership this way. I don't think a condo would really provide the surface area for such customization *if* I were a person to be interested in doing it, nor would a townhouse or duplex. It seems that at least in my city, the premium to be able to do something as common as paint the exterior of your home, is like $2.5m CAD, or $1m more than a newish townhome, or $1.5m more than modest condo, or $10000/m more (just on the mortgage) than renting a sufficiently sized place.

That's partly because the kind of place I can rent is dramatically smaller than the minimum size of a place that has a modifiable exterior, and it's one of the most expensive cities. I guess it's sort of a framing that makes clear how dystopian the class divide is; I don't have any interest in painting my house, but if I did, I'll never be able to, and if I could (at the current rates), I'd have to be incredibly unimaginative to allocate that much to the house that could hypothetically be painted.

I guess people who value the concept of a home in that way more than anything else would simply move someone where they can buy one, but I value so many other things more than hacking away on the walls that it's an absolute no-brainer to continue renting where I want to live despite the ambient sense that I have no sense of permanence secured by land

>says local homeowner, 2007

I absolutely don't see these as benefits... Living in the Netherlands, apartments owners typically have to pay "VVE" (service fee for the ongoing upkeep of the building where your apartment is), while house owners typically pay out of their pocket for any repairs they have to do.

This was my first time living in a house as opposed to an apartment. It's been three years of bitter regret, and I'm very eager to sell the damn thing and leave the nightmare behind. In the last three years, I had to re-paint the roof, replace the garden fence and a bunch of related stuff in the garden, replace the water boiler. I had to climb on the roof of the house to rake the leaves at least twice a year (not expensive, just scary). I had to repaint areas of the house because the previous owner did a crappy job painting them.

But, most importantly, it's a piece of junk. It's a typical front brick wall with the rest of the house made of wood covered in dry wall. Its foundation is going to skew and sink because... that's the general condition of everything in the Netherlands: the ground water is too close to the surface, so the foundation is too shallow. I can't hang anything heavy on the wall because the wall can't support it. Every wall is crooked and bent and so is the ceiling, so, for example, it's not possible to put a curtain railing on the ceiling...

Everything is made of perishable materials which will last five to ten years tops, and then everything needs to be torn down and redone. Looking at how my neighbors are spending their lives on the hamster wheel of infinite repairs... I want absolutely none of this. Some people enjoy sinking their time and finances into this black hole, but I'd rather just buy hard drugs for the same price all the way until I die. It's just an arduous and unrewarding toil.

“Extremely predictable payments” - I don’t own a home, so I don’t know about this - I have heard mostly horror stories about HOA. Can they hike maintenance fees arbitrarily? Also, what about insurance? Last I read, at least in FL, insurance cost is out of control, is that still true?

I agree with this, but there's also the psychological impact of being able to easily move when you get a new job or when your state government allows agriculture/industry to poison your water or whatever the case may be. You may also buy a property only to find out you have a certifiably insane neighbor and you can't easily move out because said neighbor has created a dispute that requires disclosure to prospective buyers and you are under water (as is the case for a friend of mine). While this is admittedly a niche case, there are millions of such things that can happen where you are suddenly under water (including a mortgage crisis) and flexibility becomes an advantage. I don't think there's a clear psychological winner between renting and buying.

> and having extremely predictable payments for years

I’d argue rental is more predictable. Housing has a huge amount of upkeep — $10k ac, $5k water heater, $20k roof…

I would argue against this. I'm not sure owning is that much better. At the very least it's just as bad as renting if you bought in the past few years... I bought my home in 2023 and since then my monthly HOA payments doubled, my insurance premiums (nearly) tripled and my property taxes have gone up about $1000. Homeownership went from 35% to 45% of my monthly income. If you bought in the past few years, owning has absolutely been nothing short of a liability.

Buying a house with or without a mortgage is definitely a hedge against inflation. I have a couple of siblings in their 60s who are renting and the rents are going up much faster than their social security. Now in both of their cases the rent is about $300/mo higher than their social security. Adding in food, utilities and other expenses they're blowing through their meager savings.

I prefer corporate rentals precisely because there is less idiosyncratic risk. They boringly have a strong incentive to keep you renting the same place as long as possible.

The cost of owning absolutely does increase over time. The mortgage payment is just one part of the fully burdened cost. Furthermore, there is a real risk of an unexpected $20k expense that you have to pay for. Owning is less predictable than renting because the liability and risk surface area is much larger.

I'm the UK at least, it's also common for the renter to pay council tax, which is analogous to property taxes in other countries.

I imagine this is also likely passed through in the cost of rent in other places.

That said, it's totally possible to have a legal and fiscal framework that makes renting affordable and safe.

The government, particularly in Western countries with insane pressure on the rental market, needs to act as a homebuilder and landlord of the last resort. It keeps supply up, prices and risk down.

We've had a couple of generations locked into the housing market as an investment, and it's causing demand crunches which have artificially inflated prices and are choking and dividing our societies.

I'd happily spend my life in a rental if it was affordable and safe, and part of a considerably more fair society.

Most folks rent before they buy, and so they are aware of the hazards of renting.

Being forced to move in the middle of the school year because the owner want to sell the house kind of sucks, though 5 years of a month-to-month was a bad idea. More landlords are asswipes than not, being able to control your own destiny has advantages. After all, you are paying all of the costs plus a premium for the rental, and you don't even get the paint or floor covering you want, let alone nice things.

If I could design society, we’d all live in RVs or other trailer type things, own the structure and rent/buy land as appropriate. But I’m aware this is an unusual opinion.

It just seems nice to be able to customize the structure without being tied to a particular location.

> You don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to stay in your apartment, whether that be due to rent hikes or the landlord deciding that they want to give the apartment to their nephew or any number of other things.

Absolutely. I had three landlords in a row promise all manner of things. "We're never coming back, moving to the country" (followed by "my wife hates it, we're moving back"). "We're looking to do other investments, we'd happily sign a 5 year lease with you if we could" (WA law limits residential lease lengths. Just as well for them because they decided "the property market is so hot it'd be irresponsible of us not to sell").

Why not just sign a longer term lease? Most landlords would love that.

Owning a house is a hedge against risk. You are paying a premium to have certainty, like insurance.

If that premium is too high though, you can be worse off than accepting the risk of variable costs.

Rent only goes up.

If you rent from an apartment complex (corporate owned), how big is the risk of being kicked out if you pay your rent?

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

Just beware that it's usually much less than you put in though. We bought our house for £25k more than the next door neighbours even though they're cookie cutter houses sold within 4 months of each other. Our house was thoroughly modernised, new kitchen, all old windows replaced with double glazed windows, garage converted into home office and a bunch of other stuff. We definitely can't do all this work for £25k.

> Unless you think landlords are running a charity, some part of your mortgage is going to them as profit (over a large enough sample of renters anyways), and some percentage of your rent is covering 'bad tenants' (which you're not, right?).

You can make the same argument about a bank not being a charity and making a profit from selling you a mortgage (both are true but are not helpful indicators about rent vs buying). Similarly the interest you pay is insuring the bank against bad debtors, which you presumably will not be.

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

You can improve your living situation in a number of ways when renting. If you want a new kitchen or bathroom, rent somewhere new with those things. Renting also affords you the freedom to leave when things go from good to bad (crime, noise, building ammenities, etc.).

Absolutely true if you're renting a home, but I feel like people never address that most people are renting apartments. These have substantially lower operating costs.

Home buying/rental is a totally fair comparison, but I know several people whose main justification for buying a home, rather than continuing living in an apartment, was that they wanted to, "stop throwing their money away". Totally ignoring how home ownership is actually more costly than renting a suitable apartment.

Of course, I fully recognize their are a lot of advantages to home ownership. Some of which you already called out. However, I doubt those advantages are actually sufficient to justify a small, but significant, portion of home purchases.

I think, in many places, landlords aim to break even with rent covering house expenses and interest on borrowing. The profit comes from capital gains. This works especially "well" when you keep buying places because with rent covering the interest you need very little capital so you can keep buying creating a demand that raises house prices that gives you your profit.

This works great until people are priced out of the market dropping house prices a bit and then you've just got a lot of debt and houses worth less, you go bankrupt and someone _really_ wealthy pick up all your houses at a discount.

You can at least hope that the really wealthy guy didn't get that way selling a "get rich in the property market" book.

A big financial upside of renting is that it is much easier to quickly move states/countries if tax laws changes. That alone can save you a significant amount of money.

Owning a home is a big part for deciding where you are a tax resident. If you rent an apartment in Monaco for 184 days of the year and live the other 181 days in The Netherlands in a house that you own, then you can still end up being a tax resident in The Netherlands despite the 183 day rule.

In a perfectly efficient market that's what one would expect. It's pretty likely that the housing market has plenty of inefficiencies but it probably varies by region and people would need to compare rent and sale prices in their area.

Is the 5% rule for total rent per year?

If you can buy low and sell high it’s worth it. Especially if you’re positioned to buy when you can lock in low mortgage rates. Above 6% you might be better off putting your down payment into the stock market and renting.

It’s also more likely that you’ll feel good about spending money to improve the home if you think you can get the money back when you sell. (And then you get to live in a more pleasant place for years)

I think this really depends on your expectations. Let the driveway go to gravel. Only mow near near the house. Hardscape instead of 12 irrigation zones.

If you expect the whole place to be manicured like a city lot, yeah, that's a huge amount of work.

We maintain the areas around our house. The rest is just oak woodlands. Looks like nature because it is nature.

Unless you live in an HOA, theres no real value/use in maintaining your full lot. Just let it grow, or have landscapers come in a few times a year and keep things trimmed. Forget irrigation.

Hate to admit it but it is self imposed what you are doing. You don't actually need a brand new driveway. You don't have to manage all 10 acres. You can keep up a little half acre of it same as you used to, and let the rest go to woods and whatever wants to grow. Maybe you can get goats and chickens to help manage the brush. Or lease land to someone keeping goats and chickens.

> Septic is another ticking clock. When that goes, you're in for 5 digits.

But for the length they last it is less than my city sewer bill. Though if my septic fails I'll connect to the city system was the quote I got to do that was about what a new septic costs.

> and many homes thus slowly degrade in value

Except in my experience the lack of upkeep doesn't actually affect the value all that much. In many places the vast majority of the price is the land and people seem less interested in valuing based on the condition of the structure. It may affect time to sell, but that seems about it. Sure some credits might be offered during escrow for some repairs, but again often the money is insufficient or the seller simply says no.

> It is suggested to set aside 1%-3% of your home's overall value for repairs every year.

Rob Carrick, a now (semi-)retired personanl finance writer in Canada, observed that owning a home tends to not be a forced saving plan but rather a forced spending plan:

* https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWG223bPjvf/

* https://thewealthybarber.com/video/owning-a-home-is-so-expen...

Full interview on The Wealthy Barber podcast:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8OwBbm5OXc

A friend of mine had an interesting point there. It was more on a personal note that either of us had a hard time spending money on nice things for ourselves. Like, do you need better headphones, do you need this, do you really need that? Better not buy anything nice or fun.

A fairly unintuitive resolution to this is to setup a "fun and nonsense" budget and force yourself to spend it every half year, or to make a conscious plan on how to spend it over the year. If you plan the budget right, it won't hurt you, but it will force you to make your life better.

Maintenance, especially of owned property, seems similar to me. You should be saving up for the real "oh shit" situations, and you should accumulate a budget to just do things continuously. 6 months of routine maintenance budget saved up, what do we spend it on actively, before it becomes a mess?

This has been us the past few years: * Fall 2024: we had to get star bolts[1] installed to reinforce our front wall - $24k * Spring 2025: our (finished) basement flooded, requiring a French drain to be installed and the basement restored - $18k * Ongoing repairs to our roof to address leaks - $8k

Just a seemingly never ending stream of major repairs, which is taking up money we could have used on actual improvements (HVAC upgrades/mini split installation, reinforcing insulation, kitchen upgrades, etc.) that might actually raise the value of the home. Instead, I'm just hoping the repairs will keep us from losing money on the house when we sell.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/tying-architecture-to...

The trick if own can pull it off is to mortgage in an area with cost of living a step or two down from where one had previously been renting. This was easiest during the proliferation of remote work but can still happen with some persistence.

This way one’s housing costs feel like a bargain and savings (including repair reserves) quickly rack up unless the individual in question has serious problems holding onto money.

I would really recommend getting a Home Warranty. I probably saved myself $7-$8K just in the last year fixing all kinds of electrical, plumbing and HVAC issues.

I just paid 120 000 USD for replacing the exterior drainage system. I knew it was expensive, but not that expensive.

Most home repairs give warning. My roof is old but it wasn't hard to inspect it and conclude it is good for another year. If I have to replace it soon insurance will cover it.

> Most people do not do this, and many homes thus slowly degrade in value

I agree with the first part, people absolutely do shoddy work or none at all but the value doesn't seem to go down. My mother bought a house had it inspected beforehand but massive issues with the foundation and the roof showed up the following spring when there was heavy rain. Sure, all that can be fought with attorneys and insurance (both cost time and money) but it doesn't feel very good psychologically or physically to be dealing with so much paperwork and house repairs.

Sorry to rant, I think your comment is spot on... owning a house is expensive.

> You may also suddenly have unpleasant neighbors. That is true with a house as well, but the distance between you and them is closer in an apartment.

Not all, but a lot of the debate between renting and owning include something like this, but you can rent a home, and you can buy an apartment.

> Interest rates sure have made it less of a good deal than it was ~5-10 years ago, but it's usually still worth it in the long run.

Not only that, but when interest rates come down it's usually pretty easy to refinance

The biggest advantage of buying a house is that it forces people to actually put money into a giant savings account which is not easily accessible. Otherwise people just spend the vast majority of the money they have. As an investment, houses are historically mediocre outside of some hot areas.

> your home is a leveraged investment

Which means the potential losses are leveraged too. Plenty of people have ended up in that position. It isn't all upside.

We've been in our home for about 5 years now, but we bought down the interest rate as far as we could so our break-even point is still a year or so out, not counting appreciation. Our realtor told us over and over again than if there was any doubt we'd be in the house for 5 years we would very likely lose money selling it.

There will always be people who break even after 15 years, just like there will be people who hit the lottery and sell for 5x while the ink on their mortgage application is still wet. But 5-ish years on a standard 20% down no points 30 year mortgage seems like a good rule of thumb outside of VHCOL areas.

Is Germany more like the US? In the Netherlands, before 2020, the cost of getting the loan was negligible. For a while earlier, it was zero - all transaction and notary costs could be included in the mortage. You could literally buy a house with €0 in your bank account, as long as you had the necessary income.

These days it's not so easy, prices have risen by 50%+, but you still pay less on a mortage than the equivalent rent, by a large margin. Renting (if you can buy) is pretty much throwing your money away.

I pay only 650/mo for rent though. My friends with homes around me pay about what I pay in rent in their home property taxes alone... Or especially once you add in some utilities, like my heat is included in my rent and I can have my place at like 75F all winter if I want.

Also yes they replaced the dish washer and refrigerator with new ones before they broke or died while I've been there.

Meanwhile italian subscriptions have on average 6 months notice in advance for quitting it...

> Homes almost always offer more space and utility for less than rent would

1. you can rent a single family house so the space and utility are the same

2. if interest rates recently increased very rapidly, the owner can afford to charge rent much lower than the current mortgage would be because they are locked into a lower interest rate.

Seriously. My experience with 15 years of home ownership is probably more like 3% per year. I don't think I've ever had even a single year where 1% was accurate.

Painting is one of the home improvment tasks that most people can do without hiring out, especially since it is typically a discretionary.

There are years where I don't have to spend that much and sometimes there a year here or there where I do a major project (roof, new patio, etc) that goes way over, but an average of 1% per year seems right to me.

Some people get lucky. I'm not lucky and I've probably spent more like 2.5% on average.

There's always a loud minority that love to boast that all they had to do was replace a washer back in '86 for 50c

You are also reminded of the same dichotomy when you (the renter) get a letter from your landlord asking you to leave the premises you’ve liked a lot for the past few years.

> Both my coworker and I had AC issues. For him, he called his landlord and that was it in terms of hassle. He then went after his landlord for a rent reduction due to the AC being an issue for a week.

This is the best case outcome. All too often, especially with mom and pop small landlords, the repairs are delayed or done incompetently, or there is no local ordinance offering recompense to the renter, or both.

I had a towel bar fall out of the wall. I realized that that small repair would take a trip to home depot, buying plaster, paint, a paint brush, and probably some other crap. There are of course a million types of paint and brushes to get there. I'd have to research what makes sense. Something cheap but decent, I guess. I have no garage so what I do with the rest of the paint? Drive to the hazardous waste disposal in my city, which has limited hours. So maybe 3-4 hours of my time including watching youtube videos if I don't screw things up, and $50 of stuff.

I then sent a maintenance request to my landlord and they came the next day and fixed it in 15 minutes.

Only on paper.

You can borrow from your property’s value by neglecting maintenance, and that is sometimes even harder to notice than dollars in a bank account.

This is one of the ways condo ownership can bite you.

All you need is to invest into the index funds tracking some sort of the total market and you are golden. Not sure if I would describe that as aggressive.

But I fully agree that mortgage forces people to actually save money, most people would just spend it all.

I made plenty of money (and still do) holding US treasuries and other safe investments. You don't need to gamble on stocks to have income from cash which offsets rent.

And then hope you're not one of the ~1/3 that end in a divorce at which point your house gets firesold to first low-balling flipper. House can be really bad anytime it's multiple people liquidating it -- I watched some other family members inherit a house and it sold for about half it's value because some family members weren't willing to wait more than a millisecond for the inheritance payout.

There are places in the US that are cheap still. Midwest you can still get 150-250k homes today, decent ones at that too. Large american style, 4 beds with 2 car garage sort of thing.

Maybe 1% of renters do that. The rest can't afford a house.

Changing cities? Sell or rent out your house. Not harder than moving apartments.

> No, the statement is completely true

Why don't we say this about other expenditures? Am I throwing my money away when I buy dinner and not a cow? Did I throw my money away by buying a carrot and not farmland? I don't think the statement is true or false, it's just meaningless.