[thomasedwards]

This is borderline romantic at this point. What bank do you think would ever possibly agree to this? Most people can’t even prove to their banks that they can afford a mortgage that’s less than the rent they’re currently paying.

[sokoloff]

There’s a lot more expenses as a homeowner than the mortgage (even the PITI (principal, interest, taxes, and insurance)).

I can’t think of a year where I didn’t have $5K of crap that needed fixing/replacement/improvements*, the year with the fence was 6x that, and I’ve got a boiler coming due that will be a $15K project in all likelihood, $25K if I go higher-end and improve the piping configuration for more even heat on the far end of the piping runs.

* not making improvements is a major saving point in favor of renting. Improvements are a money and time pit and most return less than $0.50 per $1.00 spent on them. It means you live without the improvement, but it’s wildly less expensive over time.

[me_me_me]

This sounds like someone buying 15yrs old heavily used car and complaining that all of the cars are expensive to upkeep.

Therefore its better to use taxis.

My mortgage cost are half the rent for same property I dont see myself loosing money anytime soon on my deal. Plus nobody will kick me out on the whim of truing rental into AirBNB like my parents got few months back.

[jjav]

> I can’t think of a year where I didn’t have $5K of crap that needed fixing/replacement/improvements

For a contrary anecdote, I've been living in my current house for well over 20 years and not once have I spent 5K in a year in maintenance. Rarely have I spent even over 1K.

I can't think how I could even spend that kind of money in maintenance every year. What's there to fix that costs you so much?

[yourapostasy]

> I can’t think of a year where I didn’t have $5K of crap that needed fixing/replacement/improvements,...

To the younger generations out there mortgaging themselves into housing: the closer you are to median income, the more you should make damn sure you're computing PITI+Maintenance when crunching your numbers (there are a couple good calculators out there now, discussed in the past on HN), staying below a 33% post-tax DTI, and taking on as much of the fix/replace/improve work yourself as possible.

With increased US income precarity due to the medical debt adverse lottery selection pressure (major source of bankruptcy), conventional housing is a bigger gamble for median income earners, and conservative personal financial planning around housing mortgaging decisions is completely absent from mainstream American discourse. The field is entirely tilted against the common folk, and young generations in particular are specifically preyed upon.

With the high cost basis of housing today, try to avoid transaction churn and look to stay in one property for as long as the numbers make sense to you, and crunch the numbers for any moves to include round-trip realtor fees. At 2-3X gross pre-tax annual income for a house, while moving around and buying each time you move wasn't optimal, carrying the cost for big career income increases was justifiable. At today's ratios, with today's decreased class/income mobility, the round-trip realtor fees to sell-then-buy are tone-deaf by the industry to the reality on the ground for young customers.

The US real estate industry is tremendously out of alignment with serving the majority of the US population and especially the younger cohorts, and their extractive orientation only eats their seed corn to set up an asset bust down the road. The demographic time bomb that is now unfolding even in the US will be challenging to reverse/slow/halt, and has likely already indelibly written the secular asset bust into the real estate industry's future. No doubt the central bank will bail out the private underwriters again by making the quasi-public underwriting facilities take on the overleveraged valuations at their lows and unload as the private balance sheets can pick them up again to profit off them in the up cycle.

The real estate industry in general thrives upon a population who generally cannot get along with each other living in close quarters with each other as individuals, and that is also a hackable vector (among many others). If you can find extremely close (forged over 7-10 years) friends who you can thrive together even when living with each other under the same roof, then you've found a de-leveraging function against the industry's imposed costs instead of going at it yourself.

While all the efforts at YIMBY and related legislation are great, people need to get on with their lives and fund their retirements today. Hack your own solutions at your own level now instead of waiting for those efforts to bear fruit, because for damn sure the politician meat puppets of the real estate industry and the industry itself aren't ever going to do anything for us.