{"id":129933,"date":"2009-12-29T10:09:49","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T15:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2009:\/\/3.32701"},"modified":"2009-12-29T10:56:50","modified_gmt":"2009-12-29T15:56:50","slug":"the-benefits-of-buying-a-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/129933","title":{"rendered":"The Benefits of Buying a House"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Altucher has a lengthy column<\/a> on why you should rent rather than buy.  Shorter version:  there are a lot of hidden costs, and outside of the bubble, housing has not historically been a great investment.  The phenomena that made it a great investment for some people (the emptying out and then filling up of cities, the introduction of self-amortizing mortgages, rising and then plummeting interest rates, and the special status of mortgage debt after 1986) will not indefinitely continue to push prices up; most of them have played out.  Over the long run, housing prices cannot grow much faster than incomes.<\/p>\n

I agree with all of this.  You should not buy a house because
\n“renting is throwing your money away” or because you expect the house
\nto become a cash cow.  As an investment, housing is a good form of
\nforced savings, but do not expect price appreciation to make you
\nrich–nay, not even if it made your parents and all your neighbors rich. <\/p>\n

But
\nthese articles, and the homeownership-skeptics (of which I am sort of
\none) often give short shrift to the benefits of owning.  Renting has
\nhidden costs, too.  Outside of New York, with its massive stock of
\nprofessional landlords hamstrung by restrictive rent rules, renting
\nmeans you usually have to move every few years, because the landlord
\nwants to live in the house again, or is selling it, or wants to raise
\nthe rent too much in the hope that you’ll be too lazy to move.  Moving
\ncosts a ton of money, between the movers (now that I’m getting old and
\ncreaky), the new furniture that is inevitably required, and the old
\nfurniture that cannot be fit into the new house and must be thrown
\naway.  Moving also soaks up a month or so of your time on each side of
\nthe move, which needs to be factored in for both lost income and sheer
\nmisery. <\/p>\n

Then there is the inability to have your house the way
\nyou want it.  Sure, it’s not like we could afford high-end appliances. 
\nBut if we owned our house, I might be able to hope that someday we
\nwould acquire a water heater bigger than a thimble, rather than
\nhopelessly resigning myself to shallow, lukewarm baths.  I might also
\nbe able to sink screws into the ceiling for a hanging potrack, install
\nblackout curtains so that I could sleep later than 6 am in the summer,
\nand otherwise make the house over more to my specifications.  But the
\nowners are fond of their home the way it is, so it stays. <\/p>\n

For a
\nlong time, I didn’t care so much about this.  I liked the freedom
\nrenting gave me.  But once you’re committed to a city, and another
\nperson, that freedom starts looking overrated.

\n

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James Altucher has a lengthy column on why you should rent rather than buy.  Shorter version:  there are a lot of hidden costs, and outside of the bubble, housing has not historically been a great investment.  The phenomena that made it a great investment for some people (the emptying out and then filling up of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}