How would your point of view differ if you had bought your house right before the crash? Your entire outlook on the wisdom of paying yourself via principal vs a landlord seems to be based on your particular (lucky) circumstance that you got into the market at a time where your monthly cost for mortgage was comparable to rent prices at the time. So locking it in time was a good decision.
That is not the case anymore. I have presented numbers to support that argument, even if it’s overly simplified for simple calculations.
And you’re seemingly ignoring the distinct possibility that housing prices may tank, at which case locking your rate at twice comparable rent would be a terrible situation.
Right now, my money is parked in other investments. We are keeping an eye on the housing market, but paying $300k as a down-payment for the privilege of doubling my monthly housing cost does not seem like a financially prudent decision, when my money is making more in its current investments. And given that if we took a loan out now, we’d probably refinance for a lower interest rate at a later time, reseting the interest/principal schedule anyway.
This is the reality of the market right now. Your outlook is not applicable in today’s paradigm.
How would your point of view differ if you had bought your house right before the crash?
Just fine, because I kept it for longer than the recommended time that good mortgage brokers tell you to plan for evening out costs and riding out dips. It would have cost me an extra $300k to buy it before the crash, plus the four years it took to recover from the crash before prices started climbing again. In the four years that housing prices were dropping (2008 to 2012), my rent went up, not down. Sure it didn’t go up very much in those 4 years, but it didn’t stay flat like my mortgage would have (I don’t know if the property tax went down during the time due to assessments dropping, but I don’t think they did). And I wasn’t paying down principle like on the mortgage. Yeah, my house value would have only doubled in 10 years instead of tripled, which only means I wouldn’t have been able to leverage the equity to buy a vacation property that I still haven’t built on.
Also, remember that the stock market ALSO crashed during that time. It took nearly 5 years for the stock market to recover from the 2008 crash.
Finally, the guy who tried flipping it just before the crash made some questionable decisions on what changes to make for his flip, some of which I have had to undo. If he had just kept the house as it was and lived here instead of trying to be a flipper making a profit, he would have been fine after 5 years. But since I owned it instead of renting, I was able to change the house as I saw fit to be happier living in it.
How would your point of view differ if you had bought your house right before the crash? Your entire outlook on the wisdom of paying yourself via principal vs a landlord seems to be based on your particular (lucky) circumstance that you got into the market at a time where your monthly cost for mortgage was comparable to rent prices at the time. So locking it in time was a good decision.
That is not the case anymore. I have presented numbers to support that argument, even if it’s overly simplified for simple calculations.
And you’re seemingly ignoring the distinct possibility that housing prices may tank, at which case locking your rate at twice comparable rent would be a terrible situation.
Right now, my money is parked in other investments. We are keeping an eye on the housing market, but paying $300k as a down-payment for the privilege of doubling my monthly housing cost does not seem like a financially prudent decision, when my money is making more in its current investments. And given that if we took a loan out now, we’d probably refinance for a lower interest rate at a later time, reseting the interest/principal schedule anyway.
This is the reality of the market right now. Your outlook is not applicable in today’s paradigm.
Just fine, because I kept it for longer than the recommended time that good mortgage brokers tell you to plan for evening out costs and riding out dips. It would have cost me an extra $300k to buy it before the crash, plus the four years it took to recover from the crash before prices started climbing again. In the four years that housing prices were dropping (2008 to 2012), my rent went up, not down. Sure it didn’t go up very much in those 4 years, but it didn’t stay flat like my mortgage would have (I don’t know if the property tax went down during the time due to assessments dropping, but I don’t think they did). And I wasn’t paying down principle like on the mortgage. Yeah, my house value would have only doubled in 10 years instead of tripled, which only means I wouldn’t have been able to leverage the equity to buy a vacation property that I still haven’t built on.
Also, remember that the stock market ALSO crashed during that time. It took nearly 5 years for the stock market to recover from the 2008 crash.
Finally, the guy who tried flipping it just before the crash made some questionable decisions on what changes to make for his flip, some of which I have had to undo. If he had just kept the house as it was and lived here instead of trying to be a flipper making a profit, he would have been fine after 5 years. But since I owned it instead of renting, I was able to change the house as I saw fit to be happier living in it.