lethal wrote:Woody wrote:jamiethekiller wrote:for the most part, i don't think its quite feasible to own a home by yourself. if you have a LP/SO/Wife/Husband/Roomate then it can become much more managable. but for any decent dwelling in a non-crappy area you're looking at 220k+
Agreed, unless you have a ton of money in down payment, or your salary is approaching 100K. The one income family is mostly gone
I have both and I still can't imagine how I could support a wife and kid(s) on my income alone.
Between the mortgage, student loans, common charges, car parking and insurance, cell phone, cable and internet, power and gas, subway card, that's like 4K+ per month in fixed costs for me. Getting rid of the car would not save me more than a couple hundred a month. Even 100K doesn't leave that much left over and that's for a 1 bedroom condo that a we couldn't live in with a kid. Plus that doesn't include stuff like food and entertainment.
Now on the rent vs buy, my 1 bedroom condo rents for roughly the same price as my mortgage plus common charge minus the tax benefit of ownership.
So it would come down to appreciation of the condo (roughly -10% in 2 years) vs appreciation of the down payment in investments (S&P is up about 40% since I bought the condo). So I could have a 40K profit on my down payment or a 40K loss.
I mean, it all depends on what market you're in, but the buy vs rent debate (for pure profit motives) is not as cut and dried toward buy as it was 5 years ago.
5 years ago, in many markets, rent was clearly the way to go. Unless you sold 2 years later. Contrarian and hindsight.
