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Genuinely asking: how do you plan to rent/own property? Where I live working in fast food would only get you a shared bedroom or a small studio, which would be

Genuinely asking: how do you plan to rent/own property? Where I live working in fast food would only get you a shared bedroom or a small studio, which would be cramped for a couple.

rpmisms 5y ago
Our mortgage is ~$1000 a month. If you can make the down payment and get approved, owning is almost always cheaper than renting. edit: $400 of that $1k is property taxes. Live outside of town. It's better. I promise.
- fossuser 5y ago
  The Bay Area is a relevant outlier here - $1k/month would not cover the monthly property tax on a mortgage for a crappy place.
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    The Bay Area is ridiculous in terms of home pricing. We could likely move there and do ok financially, but I'd rather get a nice plot of land in Appalachia and have some farm animals, spend my evenings working on marksmanship and whatever car I'm wrenching on at the moment.
    - fossuser 5y ago
      Yeah - and WNY is really great in terms of housing costs (I grew up outside of Buffalo). There are trade-offs to that cheaper cost too though. Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work), stuff availability (foods, people), and centralization of knowledgable people in software (not many). Weather. Schools and variety of public opinion was also not great, but that's a problem most places and only really matters if you have kids. I wouldn't want to raise my kids there though.
      - rpmisms 5y ago
        > I wouldn't want to raise my kids there though. Congrats, you found the reason why we're leaving. It's a combination of that, tax rates, and gun laws. Upstate NY doesn't need to suffer for the problems of NYC. > Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work) It is. I'm starting a new job in Orlando on Monday.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Not the op, but it all depends on location in a few different ways. First, there's cultural difference around the world about owning property - or if not cultural, than at least pragmatic: FWIW, vast majority of my European friends and family don't plan/anticipate to own a property - ever. Huge percentage of my North American friends and family wouldn't even settle for a condo - it's house or fail. These friends and family are in comparable positions. Second, location location location. Maybe your high tech jobs leads you to live in downtown of a metropolis, but a low-paying job "forces" you to a small town of boonies or boonies of small town or both. You may or may not find that lifestyle better for mental health. Finally, size, size, size. I was born and lived HAPPILY as middle-class family in a 3-room apartment as a five-people nuclear family (parents, one grandmother, two kids [ourselves]). It was fine. It was great. I am now in a house, same family config but a generation down, we have four rooms on top level alone, plus main floor and basement, and we are CRAMPED. We rented a locker until last year when we did a purge. There's stuff everywhere. Not even because we are well to do (though we are), when you have kids in north america the amount of stuff friends and relatives and facebook groups share is awesome but overwhelming. And the household work... GAWD the household work... I don't find peace in it and it overwhelms me just to think of the time and expense owning property entails. Hey, these aren't even first world problems, these are privileged well-to-do first-world-plus problems, I recognize and address that. But owning sizeable house is by far not the only way to happiness. Edit: Let's not forget kids vs no kids. That is a huge differentiator as to options, and I think more of us commenting or advising here should be explicit about current state and plans. I didn't think kids were as "life changing" from economics/lifestyle perspective as I'm now aware :P. This is not to say I didn't think they were a huge deal... just didn't realize intuitively internally just how much it is YourLife:Part2. I went through civil war, change of continents and countries, passage of parent, broken heart and ending up with The One... and ALL of that was a relatively similar "Phase 1" compared to the radically different life after we got kids :D

Genuinely asking: how do you plan to rent/own property? Where I live working in fast food would only get you a shared bedroom or a small studio, which would be cramped for a couple.

rpmisms 5y ago

Our mortgage is ~$1000 a month. If you can make the down payment and get approved, owning is almost always cheaper than renting. edit: $400 of that $1k is property taxes. Live outside of town. It's better. I promise.

fossuser 5y ago
The Bay Area is a relevant outlier here - $1k/month would not cover the monthly property tax on a mortgage for a crappy place.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  The Bay Area is ridiculous in terms of home pricing. We could likely move there and do ok financially, but I'd rather get a nice plot of land in Appalachia and have some farm animals, spend my evenings working on marksmanship and whatever car I'm wrenching on at the moment.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Yeah - and WNY is really great in terms of housing costs (I grew up outside of Buffalo). There are trade-offs to that cheaper cost too though. Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work), stuff availability (foods, people), and centralization of knowledgable people in software (not many). Weather. Schools and variety of public opinion was also not great, but that's a problem most places and only really matters if you have kids. I wouldn't want to raise my kids there though.
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      > I wouldn't want to raise my kids there though. Congrats, you found the reason why we're leaving. It's a combination of that, tax rates, and gun laws. Upstate NY doesn't need to suffer for the problems of NYC. > Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work) It is. I'm starting a new job in Orlando on Monday.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Not the op, but it all depends on location in a few different ways. First, there's cultural difference around the world about owning property - or if not cultural, than at least pragmatic: FWIW, vast majority of my European friends and family don't plan/anticipate to own a property - ever. Huge percentage of my North American friends and family wouldn't even settle for a condo - it's house or fail. These friends and family are in comparable positions. Second, location location location. Maybe your high tech jobs leads you to live in downtown of a metropolis, but a low-paying job "forces" you to a small town of boonies or boonies of small town or both. You may or may not find that lifestyle better for mental health. Finally, size, size, size. I was born and lived HAPPILY as middle-class family in a 3-room apartment as a five-people nuclear family (parents, one grandmother, two kids [ourselves]). It was fine. It was great. I am now in a house, same family config but a generation down, we have four rooms on top level alone, plus main floor and basement, and we are CRAMPED. We rented a locker until last year when we did a purge. There's stuff everywhere. Not even because we are well to do (though we are), when you have kids in north america the amount of stuff friends and relatives and facebook groups share is awesome but overwhelming. And the household work... GAWD the household work... I don't find peace in it and it overwhelms me just to think of the time and expense owning property entails. Hey, these aren't even first world problems, these are privileged well-to-do first-world-plus problems, I recognize and address that. But owning sizeable house is by far not the only way to happiness. Edit: Let's not forget kids vs no kids. That is a huge differentiator as to options, and I think more of us commenting or advising here should be explicit about current state and plans. I didn't think kids were as "life changing" from economics/lifestyle perspective as I'm now aware :P. This is not to say I didn't think they were a huge deal... just didn't realize intuitively internally just how much it is YourLife:Part2. I went through civil war, change of continents and countries, passage of parent, broken heart and ending up with The One... and ALL of that was a relatively similar "Phase 1" compared to the radically different life after we got kids :D