Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mlinhares 10 days ago
Life is much harder when you don't have a roof over your head or when that roof can be taken away from your or take more from your salary than you were anticipating. I don't think people understand the psychological safety of knowing you will not pay a single dime more on a loan for your home for 30 years. It completely erases that worry from your head.
2 comments

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in the city my whole life and have seen rents rise. That’s been extremely frustrating for me because I’ve been at the mercy of market trends and have worried about what would happen if, at some point, I didn’t earn as much anymore, or if rents rose so much that they became too expensive even for me. What would I do then? The worry that, despite a relatively good income, I might be at risk of poverty in old age because I have to hand over a good portion of my take-home pay to a landlord month after month is very frustrating in the long run.

A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.

Then come the property taxes
This seems like FUD. Anecdotally, even with property taxes, insurance, and all the rest of it, my 1,000 sq-ft 40s constructed house is 60% the cost of what my girlfriend was previously paying to rent a 1bd apartment on the outskirts of our town. And that is with a "first time homebuyer" $0-down mortgage I got through a local credit union.
The landlord also pays property taxes, so this comment must be trolling.