Pretty great. Had a small (1050 sq/ft) house built in a semi-rural area and live comfortably. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, was only ~$210k. Bought about $6k in points to get the interest rate at 2.25%. My mortgage is less than I was paying in rent for a ratty old single bed/bath 640 sq/ft townhome.
Plus I got out of the city. It’s quiet. Night sky is beautiful out here. Just stars as far as the eye can see. I got mountain views, deer chilling outside my house. I’ve got one neighbor across the street and my next closest neighbor is like a quarter mile up the road. It’s lovely.
Also, I don’t plan on selling, but apparently the place is already worth something like 30% more than the purchase price.
We bought in August of 2020 and paid a little less than the previous homeowner paid in 2013. Locked in at 2.75% interest on the mortgage and pay today about $500 more than we did for our apartment rent right before we bought.
The house we bought has two stories but would allow for single floor living as we age. We might move to something smaller when that time comes though.
All in all we feel pretty great and absolutely love our house! It’s on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and we call it our treehouse.
It’s technically our second place and it’s bigger, newer, but needs a bit of updating.
It’s not everything we wanted and between closing costs, moving costs, the exhaustion of moving and adjusting to the move I don’t think we’re going to do it again before we’re priced out of the thing we want.
We were hedging against either a bigger market correction or a bigger price explosion. Instead we just got weird global stress and fatigue.
it always amazes me to see people who think buying a house and immediately renting it to pay their mortgage doesn’t make them part of the problem.
If you buy a house pay for it yourself, otherwise you’re just a parasite and deserve to be lumped in with the billionaires and politicians when the guillotines come out.
Class warfare I what you are describing. Keep drinking that propaganda. A few homes being purchased to be rented by what are basically poor people aren’t hurting the housing economy. A low level landlord is no where near the same as a billionaire. Billionaires should learn to reach into wood chippers as a hobby, but my god a landlord is not an automatic enemy of the average person.
I’m sorry if I offended you, can I ask what exactly I said that you think is propaganda? Why should I have to pay someone else’s mortgage and property taxes just because they have a better credit score to take out a loan? I’m open to changing my mind but you have to give me something convincing enough to believe that the working class should be exploiting each other without consequence.
Bought super cheap in early 2020, refinanced almost immediately to make it even cheaper.
Then I found out I can rent the place out for more than my payment, so o basically couldn’t afford to live there since I get paid to not live there. So I’m renting it out now and it’s free real estate.
Bought another one basically immediately after the first was rented, the bank saw the balance sheet and said another loan is a no-brainer even at a higher rate. Lived in that one for a year, but now I’m renting it out too because again, it’s just better financial sense to do so.
Moved back in with my parents because buying a third house feels risky and I’m tired of moving.
I know a lot of homeowners with low-interest mortgages from 2020-21 rent out instead of selling if they need to move and rent something else for themselves until it makes sense jump back in the market. But this one was new.
The Mrs and I have agreed we’ll never buy and rent out an investment property, even if it makes financial sense.
To fight with other investors over someone else’s first home to boulster my own portfolio and then harvest other people’s wages because I had a higher initial deposit seems dirty to me.
I refuse to pull the ladder up behind me if and when we can buy our first home.
Wasn’t my idea at first either, but then its hard to say no to free money.
I agree the system is wrong and bad, but we are all living in it. I decided I’m not going to make choices against my own best interest. Hard to compete with people who play by fewer rules than you, so giving myself artificial rules would certainly limit my happiness/wellbeing/etc.
Anyways we all “harvest” money from others in some way or other, either directly or indirectly. Someone working at a restaurant harvests other peoples wages when they want a hamburger. The only way it’s different is that housing is scarce because you can’t build any more in most places where people want to live, but hamburgers are easily obtainable.
Being complicit in the system is what props it up. If everyone acted like my partner and I, there would be no housing crisis. Your “the system is broken so I might as well take advantage” mindset is the cornerstone of so much wrong in this planet. It’s why slavery existed, it’s why factory farming exists, it’s why child sweat shops still operate, it’s why global warming runs rampant. Your hamburger analogy also isn’t very applicable. A hamburger salesman provides me with a product that I choose to occasionally enjoy. If hamburgerlords suddenly bought up every hamburger and started scalping them, I’d go without hamburgers. Whereas you’ve used your wealth to scalp houses, something people can’t go without.
I think that’s wrong. Slavery existed because the government allowed it. If you were a farmer and you could afford slaves but didn’t have any, you wouldn’t be competitive with other farmers who had slaves. You were encentivized to do it. But then ol Abe did an amendment and a war, and then once it’s illegal you aren’t pressured to be terrible. You’re off the hook. It was the amendment and the war that ended slavery, not people voluntarily doing anything.
It’s literally why we have laws. If people would just do the right thing otherwise, we wouldn’t need them.
It sounds like your morals are beholden to whatever reprehensible things are allowed by the government, if you are competitively incentivised. If slavery became legalised today, would you buy yourself some slaves to make sure you’re keeping up with the Jonese’s? Just because the government allows you to negatively gear and buy stacks of houses off of an initial investment, depriving others of their first home - solely because you legally can - doesn’t mean you have to, or should. This opulence of multiple home ownership, where you literally charge your tenants more than your mortgage costs, profiteering during a housing crisis, is really reprehensible. Look, I’m sure if we were at the pub together we’d have a great time, but buddy, you’re objectively an immoral person.
We built in 2018, and refinanced twice in twelve months over the course of the pandemic. We’re on a 15-year now with payments only slightly higher than our original 30-yr payments were, which makes me feel like everything is completely arbitrary.
But in any case, I’m glad we like the house. There’s no way we could ever move, in this economy.
Bought a fixer upper in June 2020 from a couple way in over their head. Zillow’s estimate puts me up 38% from my purchase but with everything Ive added/built/fixed, I think I could double the price if I wanted to sell it- cool house in a now popular neighborhood. Doing well, I guess.
We sold our rural starter home in Dec 2020 and made a decent profit, which we used to move back to the city in June 2021. We definitely overpaid on the purchase price (not a lot of choices in our housing market), but our rate is good and the payment is doable, so I think it was a good decision.
Well, rate is good and though I felt we paid a high price at the time, we’ve actually built a lot of equity in a short time. In hindsight the price was low.
That said, inventory was really limited in 2020, so we had to compromise on location a bit.
I’d like to move to a different neighborhood, but now prices and interest rates are higher. To trade up, I’d be paying 2-3x what my current mortgage payment is.
Offer accepted on a listed c16 farmhouse in q4 2021, after thinking about the original 3y fix mortgage we lined up, I convinced the wife to put up all the profit from the last house, the entire renovation budget (as well as a bunch of profit from a potentially foolish foray into $GME) to get to 75% LTV and a 10y fix on just over £500k @ 1.7%
It took until July 2022 to complete, managed a big discount on offer price due to some confusing wording on the estate agents listing (and the vendors being a bit silly and telling us they needed to sell ASAP cause they were getting a divorce) but managed it before the mortgage offer expired
I’ll be almost 40 by the time i need to worry about payments going up, and we’ll have way more equity by then - safe to say I’m pretty chuffed
Where I am there are no fixed-for-the-life-of-the-loan mortgages, so I will have to remortgage at a higher rate in 2025. I expect by then things will have calmed down a little from the worst this year, but will still be significantly more expensive than they are now. However, I will have had five years paying very low interest rates (about 1.6%) and am overpaying. It makes more sense than renting and the place I bought has been a great place to live during the pandemic. I don’t know how much the value has increased since I bought it - despite small falls though the wider area has seen average property prices go up about 25% over this time so I’m not in any danger of being stuck unable to move. Even if prices collapsed I would likely be safe from negative equity due to having had a large deposit.
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