Trying to buy a house is 'playing a game you can't win'
Trying to buy a house is 'playing a game you can't win'
Trying to buy a house is 'playing a game you can't win'
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The median home sale price in the US has jumped by nearly 30% since the end of 2019, hitting $420,000 this spring.
At a time of rising property values globally, the leap has been one of the most dramatic in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.
And that's not factoring in the added costs from higher interest rates, which now stand at roughly 7% for the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage that is typical in the US, up from about 3% in 2020.
Homebuyers today need an annual income of more than $100,000 - well above the country's household median of about $75,000 - to comfortably afford a home in most places in the US, research firms such as Zillow and Bankrate say, and face monthly payments that have roughly doubled in just four years.
We own a house. It's a nice house in a nice neighborhood, but in an undesirable town in an undesirable state, so it's worth very little comparatively.
Because of that, we can't afford to move.
We literally have to wait for my mother to die so I can inherit her money and her house. I hate how ghoulish that is, but that's how we've been forced to live. And we're some of the lucky ones.
I had a long talk with my daughter about this last week.
I bought a small 700 square foot house about a year and a half ago. I'll have it completely paid off in ten years.
My daughter made all the right moves and is making more money in her early twenties than she knows what to do with.
So here's the plan:
When my house is paid off, she'll have a house of her own.
I'll retire and go live with her.
Then we rent out my house, but not in the traditional way. We're going to look for somebody who is genuinely looking but unable to buy. We'll go in the rent to own model, so eventually the tenant owns my house and the daughter has cash from the proceeds to go buy another house and rent it to own.
I'm sure somebody on lemmy will find reason to punch holes in this plan and call us horrible capitalist pigs, but short of outright giving everything away, this was the best we could come up with to use family assets for the good of others without starving ourselves.
If I could take living with my mother, I would say that would be a great plan for us.
As some people who saw my threads in Casual Conversation about my trip to the Mayo Clinic, 10 days with her almost killed me.
I love her, but she is a nutcase. Not in any seriously dangerous or offensive way, but she is a nutcase.
I bought a house when I was in college. It was a shitty 900 square foot 2 bedroom for 40k. My mortgage was $109 a month. After I graduated and moved away, I tried two rent to own contracts. First one was a disaster. They paid for a few months and then after a couple of court appearances, they got evicted and owe me several thousand dollars.
The second contract was "successful." It was a professor of mine that went through a nasty divorce and had credit problems. Dude took the full term to pay me off even though I suggested that he take a loan in an attempt to rebuild their credit. Nope. Just gave me money each month.
Three months after paying me off, he left the house and moved into on campus housing for adults. Let someone buy it at a tax sale or something.
I don't get it. I know I'm probably more aligned with boomers than I am with my millennials, but why wouldn't you want to own your house that you've been paying for? Renting is nice because it's not your problem if something breaks, but the vast majority of rental owners are shitty and are going to fix things the cheapest way possible.