Expenses to maintain a house should not be so overwhelming that renting is more cost effective. If that were the case how would a landlord make any profit?
It’s more likely that you were just particularly bad at homeownership. That’s on you, not owning a home in itself.
It’s been a decade since I paid off my mortgage. So I’ve kept track of my expenses (tax, two plumber visits, two HVAC visits, air filter replacement, etc. Those expenses have averaged out to me paying only $250 a month on average for the last ten years (no mortgage payment anymore). To be fair, I did spend a lot I’m not counting on solar panels, because a landlord would never have bothered (tenant pays the electric bill, so no incentive to help the tenant reduce that). Even when I had a mortgage, the figure was like 1500 a month.
Meanwhile, a couple of identical houses in this neighborhood are listed on Zillow for rent for $3000 a month. When I bought I’m sure rent would have been 1.5k a month, but the rent goes up over time and a decent mortgage will not.
I never understood this “never ending expenses” stuff. Over the last 25 years, between renting and owning I can recall only a handful of expenses, and half of them were elective that a landlord would either not let me do or at least made me pay for it.
I don’t understand why this idea angers people.
I think it’s the arrogance of thinking that your experience is the norm. A great deal of people who rent have shitty landlords who will only do the very bare minimum of maintenance and only begrudgingly at that. And most people who have a house with a mortgage have much lower expense than those who rent. Mostly due to the fact that mortgages stay the same over the time you are paying them and then they go away once you’ve paid them off and (unless you are lucky enough to be rent controlled) rent usually continually goes up yearly or bi-yearly.
I bought a house because I hate being beholden to unreliable landlords. Shoddy maintenance, selling the place, neverending rent going up every year. Been there, done that.
- You’re paying someone else’s mortgage
- Could be kicked out for no reason
- Can’t modify your home
- In the end, all that rent money goes towards nothing for you.
Enjoy not actually owning anything.
Dude…you think your landlord is loosing money? You’re subsidizing all his expenses with the house and paying a nice extra on top of that. That’s what rent is!
What I really don’t understand is all the people who in the next post tomorrow will mock China’s oversupply of homes. “Haha, stupid dictators who oversupplied the market. Their investors are all screwed because the homes didn’t go up in value.”
The Chinese government overbuilt housing. Housing investors didn’t realize gains because there were more homes than people looking for homes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China
A ponzi scheme is where you collect investments and pay out the first investors high interest with the early money collected to make it appear you are legitimate and thereby trick more into giving you money.
Buying real estate which goes down in value because the government makes more homes isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s no different than losing money investing in wheat futures by betting against the US subsidizing farmers. (which creates a surplus.)
So you agree that it has nothing to do the subsidiaries on building/buying housing nor realizing Profit but everything with a market that overbuilt housing to the point where there were way too many homes than people looking for a home.
You could subside the first house. You could make no Profit and finish the building projects. You just can’t build way too many housing and expect the market to not collapse.
I’m a millennial and own a home and can fix things. I do get experts in sometimes when I am less familiar with the job. What I found was that the previous boomer owner did a lot of things wrong. I can find the code violations, but may need an expert to come up with better solutions. I shadowed my electrician and don’t need him anymore. Still have my plumber in a bit for now.
The previous owner of my place “fixed” the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.
Acetone removes glue typically. Sometimes, when you think something is glued in hard, there is an extra screw that you missed.
My garbage disposal just broke. Turns out that the previous owner rigged the dishwasher drain in-line after the disposal, so that there is a chance that disposal water can kick-back into the clean dishes. Fixing that currently.
The kitchen hood vents into the attic, so have to fix that. The owner created a nest of electrical wires in the attic as well, so ended up creating a channel for them and organizing them so they are fastened nicely to the joists.
They created an unstable loft in the garage, so had to demo it since it was ugly as well. The list goes on and on.
In my house (just bought it, renovating) the light switches by the front door seemed kind of loose behind the cover plate. Finally got around to looking at it and found that the switches and their plate are attached to the wall only with caulk; the metal box they’re supposed to be screwed to was somehow pushed a few inches into the wall. For bonus points, one of these switches produces a few seconds of loud humming when flipped followed by the main circuit breaker tripping.
Their is a fault in the circuit. What is the switch supposed to control? Had the same thing with the circuit for the lamppost. The wire for it wasn’t buried deep enough by the previous owner and became compromised over time. For the plates, they make longer screws and also spacers for times when the box is seated too recessed. If you don’t have those on-hand, you can remove the box and seat a new one properly, but that can be a lot of trouble depending upon the circumstances.
JFC boomers are retarded.
Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.
They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master’s Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we’d end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.
The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can’t pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don’t have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.
Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the “young people” in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy’s money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.
The target audience for ALL these articles is “daddy”, the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.
If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the “millennials” have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that’s why they can’t stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.
And that’s the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.
The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.
So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they’re “the help”, but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.
Nope. You’re “the help”. You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It’s a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.
So that’s why the articles are so “clueless”. The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.
They know why you’re poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That’s not news. They know why you can’t buy a house because they made sure you wouldn’t have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you’re fucked, because they’re fucking you.
But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they’re liable to read news articles about it. They don’t think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You’re the help.
Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, “knowledge worker” head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.
At CNBC Make It, we want to help you get smarter about how you earn, save and spend your money.
With a focus on success, money, work and life, we provide information and inspiration to navigate your big financial firsts: from landing your dream job, to starting a business, to investing in your future and leading a rich life.
Children of the wealthy don’t need to “get smarter” to “make it”. Also, pretty sure they can afford homes. I really don’t think this article is about them.
I love Mr. Robot. Reminds me a little about it. Not a cup of tea for everyone, but there was a lot to love about that show, from acting, dear gods the editing and some of the shots are just amazing, to being able to resonate with each and every character in one way or another.
Anyway, I send you virtual hugs because we are all fucked and sometimes we just need a damn hug in-between the horror show we dance to. And if you don’t want to be touched, then that is ok too.
Some folks are able to buy a home but choose to rent because they can also afford a landlord that’ll actually do the job a landlord is hypothetically there to do and fix the place up if there’s an issue
Wait that’s what landlords have to do. Idk how it is in America. But in Europe is pretty much a law
It is one of the perks of renting the landlords have to fix the place for you. It will not be up to code for them to rent it out.
Unfortunately “up to code” leaves a lot of room for cutting corners. You’ll be safe but not necessarily comfortable.
In theory American renters are protected by the contract they sign with their landlord, with some basic protections guaranteed by law.
In practice,
-
landlords have essentially no competition, since they own many properties in an area, meaning that contract terms rarely differ in any way that matters;
-
landlords don’t compete meaningfully with home ownership (see OP);
-
alleging breach of contract requires an expensive court case against a landlord who has more money than you and can hire a better lawyer;
-
those basic legal protections are rarely enforced, and when they are it’s in civil court, not criminal court, meaning that they can be ordered to comply, but any penalty is financial (and only a pittance goes to the claimant), considered by many landlords to be the cost of doing business and an acceptable loss.
Weird to me how hypothetical a landlord’s “job” is compared to, y’know, any actual job.
Yeah they’re all parasites unless I’m demanding they fix something then I need them and life sucks unless they do a bunch of work.
People love to trash landlords for not working 24/7 the same way they trash teachers for having summers off, but when it rains it pours for landlords and problems always come at the worst time.
There are good landlords and there are bad landlords. Just like tenants.
Even if a particular landlord is a decent person otherwise, landlording is wrong. It is the hoarding of essential resources to for the purposes of being released for profit. If landlording was restricted to renting vacation houses (in appropriate areas) or something it might be OK.
The advantages of a rental (not worrying directly about maintenance, just paying someone to take care of it) can be had with a property management company.
The difference here is teachers provide a valuable service, and landlords do not. I don’t care how good the good ones are, their entire job is “had enough money some years ago to buy a building, and now lives off other people’s income”.
In all my years renting from individuals to big property management companies, good and bad alike, never was it easy to get things fixed which is apparently the only advantage to renting. Days/weeks/months go by, all the while I’m dumping money into their pockets for the privilege.
At least when owning, the money I have to spend on my mortgage and repairs is going toward the value of my house, and not the ethereal void that is a landlord.
