11 ms·

You get old enough, and you get tired of somebody else making decisions from afar that affect your day to day life with no real consequences to them. Little t

• hatchnyc 5y ago
  Yeah, I wish we had German-style "unfurnished" apartments available in the US where you can rent an apartment that's literally concrete subfloor and unpainted walls, no kitchen appliances or cabinets, etc. I guess Americans move too frequently to make this viable.
  • dougmwne 5y ago
    Would your landlord pay you for the improvements you make? Is seems a full interior build out could cost tens of thousands of euros. Why not just buy if you have that much free cash sitting around for a down payment? And what happens if your landlord tries to push you out?
    • hatchnyc 5y ago
      I think this is not going to make sense if your only point of reference is residential rentals in a typical American city, but this is how it is done in at least some places in Europe. People tend to stay in one place for much longer than Americans. If you're on a budget you can go to Ikea and buy a kitchen...based on my friends' places I'd say that's the norm.
      • mapmap 5y ago
        Do you take the kitchen with you when you leave or does the landlord tear it down?
        • mateo411 5y ago
          You can only move IKEA furniture once. If you move it twice it will fall apart.
        • jamil7 5y ago
          Some people do yes, I’ve heard a few people dismantle and take it with them, more common is that you offer the next tenants to pay for the kitchen at a reduced rate. Keep in mind it’s very difficult to kick a tenant out of a rental here and you can often keep a flat for as long as you want so doing large renovations to a rented flat isn’t uncommon.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      Longer leases are the norm. You’re not stuck in annual lease hell when the market is hot.
    • User23 5y ago
      Germany has national rent control[1][2] and leases are heritable. Leasing in Germany is much more like owning than it is in the USA. [1] https://mietspiegeltabelle.de/ https://mietspiegeltabelle.de/ [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietspiegel https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietspiegel
  • benglish11 5y ago
    Don’t Germans generally move their whole kitchen? I think I remember this correctly from taking German a bunch of years ago.
    • Thrymr 5y ago
      I really do not get the appeal of moving your own cabinets from apartment to apartment. But I guess it does allow you to customize your rented place more than is possible in the US.
      • chii 5y ago
        > cabinets from apartment to apartment. unless these cabinets are somehow standarized sizes, how can they be moved?
• codegeek 5y ago
  In other words, buying vs renting shouldn't only be based on numbers/math. I own a home for 8+ years and I have probably spent shit load of money in maintenance/prop.taxes/repairs that I probably wouldn't if I was just renting but there is no way in hell I am giving up my freedom of doing whatever I want to my home (yes yes there are limits with township/HOA etc). I don't need no landlord to tell me what I can and cannot do with my home for the most part. That itself is worth it for me. And yes there are added benefits like Building equity over years, hopefully having a place of your own to retire etc etc. Owning your own home is an emotion. It is a feeling that you have a place of your own. You cannot just put numbers on it. Yes don't buy a home if you are 23 and move every 2 years in your car etc. But if you are looking to raise a family, want to settle down in a place, owning a home is almost always worth it as long as you are doing it within your means.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah. By all means run the numbers. But at the end of the day most people probably shouldn't make a decision based on the numbers except maybe in some specific apartment vs. condo scenarios where they plan to stay in the area for a while. Otherwise, the type of place you want, how important mobility is to you, your freedom to make changes (and conversely your interest and willingness to do maintenance/repairs/manage projects), etc. should probably mostly be the deciding factors.
    • strken 5y ago
      I think it's implicitly assumed that anyone looking at the numbers is on the fence about buying vs renting to begin with, otherwise why would they care? This can be true even if you've got strong opinions on lifestyle, in the case where you're pulled in multiple directions by different needs (e.g. you want to manage the risk of rent increasing at the same time as future house prices rise but you still value mobility, or you're frustrated with landlords but don't have a lot of project work planned, and so on).
    • Breza 5y ago
      I've heard people say they want to buy because they're tired of "throwing their money away." I think it's easy to underestimate how much money homeowners pay every month and never see again. I love the house I own but I don't know if I would have bought it for purely financial reasons. Though living in Washington DC, Zillow claims it's now worth a lot of money (which isn't really relevant to me since I'm not going anywhere for a long time).
• gedy 5y ago
  Similarly I've hated renting from owners doing it for the "investment", where the going rent is typically much cheaper than the mortgage for the property (California). Many landlords think they are giving you some great deal when they are the ones who bought beyond their means..
  • hardtke 5y ago
    For multifamily housing the price of a building is usually such that if you put around 40% of the purchase price down the building is cash flow break even after mortgage, taxes, expenses. The same is basically true if you buy a house to rent out. This is the case because over long periods of time real estate has appreciated by 8% per year with much less volatility compared to the stock market, and favorable tax rules (particularly depreciation) mean you can "lose" a lot of money on paper and claim those losses to offset other income. Your landlord is not giving you a great deal.
    • refurb 5y ago
      I don’t know about CA, but in Toronto there are so many “investment” condos that renters can get great deals. Renting a new condo for $2,000 per month that costs $800,000 to buy (~$4,000 per month total costs with HOA and down payment opportunity cost) is an amazing deal.
    • ransom1538 5y ago
      "..claim those losses to offset other income" Be careful. If you are thinking of renting out a house remember you need to return a large portion of that depreciation back to the IRS. It isn't free money. Even professional landlords don't know about this. https://homeguides.sfgate.com/paying-back-depreciation-rental-property-42080.html https://homeguides.sfgate.com/paying-back-depreciation-renta...
      • Spooky23 5y ago
        Anyone with a competent accountant will avoid that. You can invest in like investments and avoid recapture. There’s a whole industry around this generation of “free money”. The owner of a Hampton Inn / Fairfield Inn, etc, makes more money on selling off accelerated depreciation than on renting rooms.
• crazygringo 5y ago
  Funny, I'm the opposite. The more I get older the less I want to deal with bullshit home maintenance, and the infinite time suck that is customization and endless improvements. Really part of a general life shift from "if you want it done right, do it yourself" and "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right" -- to "outsourcing is a valuable tool" and "perfection is the enemy of the good". I realize my time is valuable and I want to make sure I spend it where it counts -- on people, activities, experiences, travel. When I rent a place, the kitchen layout and drawers are already good enough or else I wouldn't have rented it. And the things that aren't "perfect" I've decided I can live with, because nothing is perfect and there are more important things in the world to pay attention to. To be clear: your viewpoint is entirely valid too, for yourself. But you're not speaking for everyone who "gets old enough" -- other people grow in the exact opposite direction.
  • chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Regardless of age, needs and priorities change. There's no joy in moving, but it's still better than the time suck of hiring a contractor, electrician, and/or plumber. AND having to pay them. Owning is nice. But it's more limited and more time consuming. There's a cost associated with that.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      As you say, needs and priorities are different. Yes, home maintenance is a pain--and at this point I have pretty much no interests other than maintenance or otherwise proactively dealing with issues. But I dread the thought of moving. And I probably have too much stuff but things are as they are.
    • Johnny555 5y ago
      Owning is nice. But it's more limited and more time consuming. There's a cost associated with that. I'm not sure I agree that owning is limiting, it can be more time consuming if you don't want to hire people to do the work that the condo gives you "for free", but there are few limits. In my last condo, a neighbor spent months trying to get approval to put a pre-fab sauna on her outdoor patio, she submitted the architectural review forms, made several changes so it would "fit into the character of the complex" even though it was on a back deck facing a natural area, no one would see it unless they walked in that 5 foot strip of land behind the complex. I'm not sure if it ever go approved, I moved out before she had final approval. On the other hand, my wife and I decided on a whim a few months ago that we wanted to put in a hot tub in our new house’s back yard. We talked to a contractor, he came out and did a site survey, then put us on a wait list for a hot tub. A few weeks later, he had a returned unit (new owner didn't like the way it looked) that matched what we wanted, the next week he brought it out and installed it. The whole process took about a month from start to finish, and probably could have taken a week or two if demand wasn't so high.
• autarch 5y ago
  > I'm pretty convinced most people buy because they're either tired of the bullshit that comes with renting or want to buy into a specific school district, not because they're worried about making a return on their investment. Another big factor is noise. A detached house is going to be quieter than most apartments in a shared building. That was the big reason we moved to a house. I'm a light sleeper and noise from people walking around upstairs was driving me nuts. Moving to a house with no one walking around above me was a huge improvement in my sleep. Edit: Yes, you can rent houses too, but at least where I live (Minneapolis) this doesn't seem to be very common.
  • ngngngng 5y ago
    Noise was a big one for us, but it was the opposite problem. We were starting to have children and I didn't want to worry about making noise and disturbing my neighbors. In single family detached housing we can make as much noise as we want and only disturb ourselves.
    • autarch 5y ago
      Yeah, that's a good point. Sometimes my landlord (who lived above me) asked me to turn the music down while I was working from home.
  • SilverRed 5y ago
    This is highly dependent on the building. I have been in houses where all night you hear loud motorbikes and bogans doing burnouts while my current apartment has incredible sound insulation and double glazed windows to the point I wouldn't know other people live here if I didn't see them in the hallway.
    • autarch 5y ago
      I've lived in a number of apartments and none were like this. Sounds amazing! But does it also have good sound insulation between apartments?
      • 5y ago
• sokoloff 5y ago
  If you're worried about losing a couple months' rent, kitchen remodels are not for you...
  • bluefirebrand 5y ago
    A kitchen remodel is done once and probably not again until you sell and someone else moves in. Moving rentals every time something annoys you could be very frequent.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      The household who would move every time something annoyed them in a rental does not seem likely to remodel only the kitchen and nothing else between the time they buy a house and sell it. (You have to either tradeoff kitchen remodel costs against kitchen annoyances or many remodels against many annoyances, but it seems unreasonable to tradeoff kitchen remodel against all annoyances.)
    • sjg007 5y ago
      Kitchen remodel is probably 30k plus. You can move many man times for cheaper. Lots of places accept $500 security don’t have to put in 1.5 months.
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    Some people move (rental) apartments every 12 months. Thats very common and adds up fast even if you're not broke.
    • neogodless 5y ago
      I've never lost a deposit or watched extra rent vanish by moving. I'm confused why anyone would let that happen. Maybe it's a regional thing?
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        In some areas, tenants pay a broker placement fee of a month's rent, plus an application and credit check fee. In all regions, tenants pay for the move costs itself. Many times you discover that your furniture isn't quite right, your Ikea-grade knockdown furniture didn't all survive the move intact, you "need" to buy a different rug for one of the rooms, you might want to have more than 0 days of overlap between the places to make the move easier (or you might be forced to take a month overlap to secure the place you want), and add some custom-sized blackout window shades to sleep, etc... I read the above as "[an amount of extra expenses equal to] a couple months' rent" rather than literally "an extra two months' of rent checks to the landlord".
• ramraj07 5y ago
  Eh, almost no one I’ve seen has ever spent less by moving to their own home. They’ll typically end up spending at least half of what they spent as rent just on things other than the mortgage (which would typically be much higher than the rent by itself). Now of course they often would get a larger, nicer place that’s exactly what they wanted, but let’s not kid ourselves that home ownership is somehow cheaper. It never is (except during the times when the prices went up no matter what).
  • ghaff 5y ago
    At some point, though, the mortgage is paid off and maybe you're paying something like $1K/month for taxes and maintenance for a property that may have a decent amount of land if you're outside a city--an amount that isn't going to go up. (Taxes vary a lot of course although that is presumably reflected in area rents as well.) You may be right, especially absent property appreciation, but there's a lot of value in having a fairly predictable set of costs into an indefinite future absent really unpredictable problems. And not being forced to move at some point.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • supernovae 5y ago
    I bought my house for 225k, our neighborhood is selling for 650k now. My mortgage is much more affordable than the rents that have gone up over the years to more closely reflect the 650k pricing. But damn the taxes are gonna hurt everyone here... renter or owner (as the renter you're just covering them for the owner)
    • TravHatesMe 5y ago
      Taxes are a function of municipal costs and the value of all properties. If they all go up equally in value and costs remain constant then your taxes should not increase
      • Spooky23 5y ago
• slavapestov 5y ago
  We bought because we wanted a rural property where we could keep horses. Can't really get that with renting or put a monetary value on that.
• jb775 5y ago
  The people buying are millennials (currently the largest generation) that are settling down in their location of choice. I predicted this would have happened slowly over the next 15 years, but covid and inner-city violence triggered a flight to the suburbs....hence increases in real estate.
• packetlost 5y ago
  Conversely, to me that the flexibility to just pick up and leave is far more appealing than settling down and owning something. I've moved 7 times in the last 6 years, and I'll probably move again when my current lease is up next year.
• FireBeyond 5y ago
  > And then your current landlord gets some shitheel realtor to rent the place who repeatedly tries to schedule showings on an hour's notice. Yup. "We know you work from home so we've told the realtor to be considerate of your time". Bear in mind I have a dog and a cat. 4 days and FOURTEEN showings later (often spaced with little gaps, so it's in and out not blocks of time), I'm complaining to the landlord, who agrees that that is ridiculous. Realtor: "Oh well, it's a hot market and they'll be out of the house soon enough."