Owning a home has rarely been this much more expensive than renting
Owning a home has rarely been this much more expensive than renting
The premium for homeownership has grown in recent years as home insurance, upkeep, and high mortgage rates skew the buying vs. renting math.
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Highly dependent on where one lives I guess. My friend just rented a new apartment and his rent is over double what my mortage payments are. That's also money he is never getting back where as in my case my house is paid in about 15 years after which I own the damn thing and the monthly mortage payment drops off entirely. Excluding mortage, the montly cost of owning my house is 275€ which includes water and electricity.
Excluding mortage, the montly cost of owning my house is 275€ which includes water and electricity.
That's also excluding regular maintenance or emergency repairs that a landlord would be (often reluctantly) responsible for. It is also possible to do big, expensive, necessary renovations on a house and have it hardly affect the value at all.
It is also possible to do big, expensive, necessary renovations on a house and have it hardly affect the value at all.
Isn't this kind of irrelevant unless you're a house flipper? If you own a house and make renovations to it, it is because you find some practical value in it.
A house flipper would do everything they can to avoid having to do something like this. It's primarily a normal home owner who would have to shell out for this.
Ex. when I bought my house, they told me the roof had recently been redone. I didn't know enough about it, but the pre-inspection didn't see any issues. Fast forward a year later we have someone look at it because it isn't looking right in some places. Turns out it's a very old "torchdown" roof, and by "redone" the previous owners had someone spray it with a silvercoat paint. This is something you do maybe 2-3 times in the life of this kind of roof. The inspector said there were at least 7 layers of paint, the roof itself was way past its recommended lifetime, and if there were any issues it would be impossible to know without taking the whole roof off. They said we could just wait until we have a leak, and then get it replaced, but (given several weather and money factors involved) we chose to go ahead, bite the bullet, and have a new roof installed. This was enormously expensive, but if I were to put the house on the market right after it was done, the state of the roof was already priced in. If someone wanted to pay $X a year ago thinking the roof was already recently "redone", me getting it actually redone isn't going to move that needle for anyone. It was purely for my peace of mind as the home owner who wants to continue living here. Sure that has value to me, but no tangible value that I can use to justify the purchase vs renting. I could have rented in this place for well over a year for the price of that roof.
A house flipper would have said "well, let's try to get rid of this thing before that becomes a problem for us to worry about, shall we?"
The best thing you can do to improve the value of your house is granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. The next best thing is some kind of fancy bathroom. Finally, a fresh coat of beige paint and moving out almost all of your stuff is a big help.
Apparently granite counters are passé now. Or at least whatever dreck that makes it to my feed says so.
The painting and staging are by far the best bang for the buck, since they’re cheap
No, increasing the value of your home is one way to get out of PMI payments. And it also helps if you get a reverse mortgage.
My mortage payments for one year would cover all maintenance I've done to the house during the 8 years I've lived here including an entire bathroom remodel. Obviously someone less handy would need to hire someone to do the jobs I've done myself so that helps a little with the costs, but still. The maintenance costs for my house aren't even in the top 5 expenses I have.