Renter to Owner
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- 34 Responses
- inkpink0
buy low sell high.
s'all you need to know.
- nocomply0
Well the problem for me is that if we move, it will most likely be to LA which we can't afford.
Better to buy a place in San Diego and rent it out if we move, or buy nothing and move to LA and potentially miss out on the housing prices right now? Of course, there's no telling if we'll really move or not.
It's a tough decision, no doubt, but honestly I just feel lucky to be in the position to buy anything at all.
- L.A suck. Avg. house price its 500k, something. and it still look like a dump.akrokdesign
- Exactly. I've done a bit of research. Not a pretty picture.nocomply
- san diego isn't that cheap either. i guess the far in, east you go, the cheaper it gets.akrokdesign
- moth0
I wouldn't buy now knowing what I know.
Doesn't save you money (in fact the complete opposite) and the shitty terms with lenders pretty much leave the house owning you. I'm in the UK though...
- monNom0
...being a landlord sounds like a bunch of bullshit too. FWIW
- designbot0
No plan to buy anytime soon, and I have a wife and 2 kids. Aside from the obvious financial part of it, we just don't have a desire to buy even in the current market. I think it's more of an American ideal than anything else. You start to feel like, since I am X age, I should really own my own place by now. Not saying it's a bad thing, just make sure it's for the right reasons. Remember as soon as you owe money to any bank, you become a slave to them. Until you pay off your mortgage loan, you are a slave to your debt. I don't mean to sound overly harsh but my advice would be, buy only if you can pay cash or have a huge amount to put on a down payment. Most people will end up paying x2,x3 or even 4 times what their property is worth by the time they get done paying all the interest.
The key is this, if you rent, put money away where you will get a return on your investment. The days of the housing boom are over (where people were seeing huge returns on their property), and if anything it's more of a hedge against inflation than a real "investment" these days.
Just my 2 cents.
- fooler20
buy as soon as you can. I bought late during the boom and now my house is worth 30% less than what I paid for it. Will take 5-10 years before I get my money back.
- arthur0
I own a house and a condo. Live in the house, rent out the condo as a vacation rental, handled by an agency.
- let me visit for free =)ceiling_cat
- calls arthur up for a discount vacation rental.fooler2
- moldero0
I own a house in SF, well, my bank does. I moved out of the country to have another sorry sap pay our ridiculous mortgage as their rent.
it sucks because I miss my working on my house. but its not so bad because SF weather sucks ass.
- Countryman0
I rent to own
- Countryman0
I think if your going to buy a house, you really need to make sure you know what your doing, you know you can put escrow into it, and you know that someday there is potential to get money out of the deal.
Otherwise you are just throwing money away. If its your first house, chances are your throwing money away on a pos.
- Long term real estate always goes up... even a POS property.ETM
- ETM0
I rented for 11 months before I decided to buy a house. Just seemed smart to put my money somewhere. My gf (now wife) and I built our house when I was only 22. It was tough at first, but we thank our stars because the city boomed and property values doubled over the next several years . We could never buy our house for what it would go for now, even with the recession.
- If you can afford to do it. Prices are low, lots of desperate sales. Buyer's market.ETM
- Knuckleberry0
I rent, but own 2 tents
- exador10
My wife and I got married in 1999 and at the time we probably had enough for a down payment, but we were young and wanted to live downtown toronto for awhile, just for the fun of it...I was already living downtown and had a nice place, so we did just that for about 3 years.
after we had saved what we considered enough, we spoke to her dad (he did real estate on the side) and he helped us shop around looking for a place.
i guess the big deciding factors were:
a) we felt we'd saved enough to get what we wanted
b) we were getting to the point of wanting to have kids and didn't want to raise them in the city
c) my wife had grown up in Mississauga (suburb of toronto basically) and felt it would be a good idea to have a home near enough to her folks if we had kids
d) both of us during the previous 3 years had landed decent jobs that were IN mississauga, so we'd been commuting 45 minutes every morning and evening from downtown and were getting pretty tired of it
e) felt that 3 years of throwing our money down the renters hole was enough...we've now been in our home for 7 years.
we had our daughter 1 year after moving in.
we've got a son now as well :)we love having our own home...
while we miss somethings from downtown (we had some great neighbours, and we lived in a fantastic neighbourhood - little italy) there's just no comparison..having your own home is great.
sure, having a mortgage can be a bit of a heavy feeling, but if you save a large enough down payment, it's more than manageable.I say, buy buy buy.
a market like this is about as rare as it gets, and prices like this won't last forever ...
- Brainiac0
I own, I bought when I was 21 for the investment. I simply worked out that for a bit more money per week you end up owning something. Rent is dead money, You end up paying for some other persons investment.
I hear people say "but you pay sooooo much interest" but in reality the increase in property value pretty much offsets that. I paid $280,000 in 1997 and now (after the Aussie housing boom a few years back) I wouldn't sell for under $800,000.
- well done. man, at 21 i was blowing all my cash on piss and failing at picking up chicks.airey