This is nonsense.

The person counts the 12 month escrow prepayment during closing as "cost to get a loan" It's not. It's the cost of 12 months of taxes and insurance on your property.

Also notable is the "1 year insurance premium" either they're double counting the escrow, or this 1 year insurance premium is mortgage insurance where the bank makes you take out insurance to protect them. This can be prepaid, split paid, paid monthly, or you could put down 20%.

The lender makes you purchase title insurance for them, but this person also purchased title insurance for themselves. This is mostly just pure profit for the title company. The cost for the insurance is for the company to do the research, if they found an issue, they wouldn't insure the bank. Buying it for yourself is mostly just lighting money on fire.

A lot of those closing costs are shoppable, you can find better lenders. Before closing, you're given a truth in lending disclosure with all this carefully spelled out. If you don't do even basic due diligence, I question if you have the financial literacy to own a home.

I'll also note, they didn't mention in their closing costs paying for a home inspection (beyond termites). This is likely why they had to pay for real repairs on the house.

One of their "repairs" is new water pipes. There's no reason listed for this, but this is often pushed by door to door salesmen telling you need to do it to protect your property/health and is mostly, like all door to door sales, a scam.

That note about counting the cost of heating and cooling is similarly nonsense. They claim "apartments are almost always smaller than houses" which isn't true, and count electricity rate increases as cost of ownership, rentals have to pay that too. They also assert, with clearly no evidence that heating and cooling is half their electric bill. There's easy ways to figure this out, an emporia can do it easily.

The whole premise is flawed. They note that in the beginning only 20% of their payment goes to principle and A) you can control that (bigger downpayment so no PMI, less interest), bigger more frequent payments or a shorter loan, and B) exactly 0% of your rent payment goes to your principle.

This might better be an examination of "can I afford a mortgage with the same rent payment as I make today" and the answer, not surprisingly, is no, if your rent payments are a the top end of what you can afford.

They also neglect the Mortage Interest Tax Deduction and State and Local Tax Deductions, whcih reduce the cost of both by your marginal tax rate, and is a big benefit towards owning.

More importantly, this neglects that buying a home is locking in the price for the long term for the majority of your housing cost. Buying usually is similar all in the first year, but after 5 years your mortage payment is the same while rent has probably gone up significantly.

As a non American, I have to admit a lot of things sounds very weird to me, especially on the "mortgage loan fees" part.

In particular, the title part sounds horrible (and expensive). As far as I know, over here it's all handled by the state, no insurance required. I don't know if it's because of different laws regarding future claims (the registry is the truth, too late to change it?) or just better records?

Same with tax/insurance escrow, you just pay directly as it comes, but since we have essentially no property taxes, it's probably not required?

On the other hand, here mortgages only have a closing fee (and quite often even none at all, with all the small fees being invisible and rolled into the margin), so that transparency is welcome.

I agree, this is a pretty terrible article that basically boils down to (to quote the article...)

> I bought this house new, and didn't live there very long

End of story.