Owning VS Renting: Houses, Cars, Appliances..... (long sorry :)) - Page 5

[mattemma04]

Our home lost value,but we bought when prices were inflated. Now you can get a really good deal on a house.Buy cheap.Renting is nice since you do not deal with taxes or repairs,but a bad LL might not do repairs fast/well enough. For cars I would say buy a used car such as a former lease car.Buying new is sweet,but you always lose money.My dh has bought used and new.He also got a good deal on a repo van at an auction. I would not rent (to own)appliances.Better to get them on sale,or even buy used ones on craigs when people are upgrading .

[Logan]

It's had that rate all the 4.5 years I have held that savings account with them. That other account I mentioned has the same base rate as my accounts bonus rate. You only have to add $10 a month on my account to receive the bonus rate, which is pretty easy. I'm actually a little shocked the rates there are so low, is that only since the economy crashed? Maybe it makes sense to rent in Australia and buy in the US 

[SubliminalDarkness]

It really just depends. For us right now, renting a house makes more sense than buying one. We're living in a place where we don't want to be for a long time. It would be silly to buy a house here only to turn around and then have to deal with selling it. We also have debts we're trying to pay off/down, and so we wouldn't be able to put money into a house for things like repairs, upgrades, improvements, etc. 

Also, having owned a house before, it wasn't as much fun as I was expecting. Yes, we could paint it whatever colors we wanted and such, but we also had to keep in mind re-sale value and the fact that we didn't want to be in that house forever. Had we been able to buy our 'dream house' than it would have been a different story, but how many people can afford that when they buy their first house? 

As for the car thing, that totally depends on your lifestyle. We drive nearly every day(DH drives to work, I drive to appointments, stores, what have you). There's no public transportation here, and nothing in walking distance. Our son gets bussed to school, but everything else we have to drive to ourselves. I guess if we really made an effort, we could get down to having only one car. But that would be complicated and a lot of hassle and it's frankly something I don't want to do at this point in our lives. 

Appliances, furniture and such.... I see no point in renting. 

[EFmom]

There's not going to be a one-size-fits-all on this.  There are so many factors that play into it, including timing, costs of housing and rentals in your area, taxes, mortgage rates, etc.

We bought our first house about 25 years ago, and are now on our third house.  We have about 7 years left on the mortgage.  Our current house is worth about twice what we paid for it, and it is a four bedroom, two and a half bath home, with a nice yard, in an excellent school district.  For a time, during the bubble, it was worth about three times what we a paid.  Our mortgage payment is about $1,000/mo.  Where I live, I could barely rent a two bedroom apartment for that much.  While yes, I've paid a bunch of mortgage interest over time, it's been tax deductible, which offsets some of the cost. 

I know that it would have been extremely difficult to save much extra for a huge down payment or all the purchase price, while renting an apartment and paying higher income taxes.  School districts are very important to us, and around here, there is very little rental property in good districts, and what there is tends to be high. 

As for cars, it depends on where you live, what the public transportation is like, and how often you need a car.  I have a friend who lives in a big city, where owning a car and parking said car is extremely expensive. For him, he takes public transportation most of the time and rents a car if he wants to go away for a weekend.  It's much cheaper than owning one.  For me, there is zero public transportation that comes within three miles of my house.  I need a car to get to work on a daily basis.  Leasing a car is never cheaper than owning one if you keep your cars for a very long time, as I do.

[nina_yyc]

We could probably rent our place for less than our mortgage and condo fees. But when we bought, the vacancy rate in town was less than 2%.  My husband's work is downtown and public transit is inconvenient unless you either live downtown or are going downtown, so we chose to live downtown so we could avoid owning a second car (at the time we owned one car outright.)  It's legal here for a landlord to refuse to rent to you if you have kids, and the best rentals downtown are sublets, owned by individuals rather than management companies.  We had a sublet sold out from under us and I'm sure it happens all the time.  We decided to purchase and one baby later the place is too small and we are looking to sell again.  We will probably lose $10K after 3 years but we have paid down about $15K.  If we are very very lucky we will break even after fees and such.

Financially it was possibly a mistake for us to purchase but time is money...owning is the only way we could afford a neighborhood that was so walkable.  If we hadn't bought a home we would have had to move further out and that probably would have required a second car.

I looked at the cost of borrowing on a 40 year mortgage when we got ours and it is insane.  I think if we paid our place off at that rate we would have paid off only $10K in principal over a 5 year term, which seems ridiculous.  We have our place amoritized over 25 years on a variable rate below prime so our cost of borrowing is less crazy.

I can't imagine dealing with a 60 year mortgage.