Anybody have any opinions on doing a townhome/condo vs buying a house? Typically yard work is done professionally although resale can be tougher.

Giving up autonomy to have common areas controlled by a board is a pretty big negative. You ut up with it with a highrise because there is no choice.

When it comes to a house you can get the same type of condo-maintenance services by contracting them out yourself so why put up with the hassle and risk of having to deal with a collective.

this is not true for a large % of people. I'm a salaried employee so if i spend an hour on saturday mowing my lawn instead of working, i dont gain/lose any money in opportunity cost. Thats time i can spend doing something else i enjoy, but thats not the same argument.

The thing that always bothers me about condos is that if you get the wrong neighbors it can really suck.

Something like your upstairs neighbor has three kids under 10 and they wake you up 5 days a week even after you talked reasonably to the parents and complained to the condo board four times and everyone tells you "kids just gonna be kids".

Or you have a kid and your upstairs neighbor keeps waking the kid up between 8:30-10:00pm by practicing piano or watching loud TV or something (I know a couple who bought a house to get away from this).

Basically, my problem with a condo would be not being able to vet my upstairs neighbor... I have the same problem in a rental apartment, but it is much easier to move if necessary.

The issue is that you could potentially monetize that time, and in some ways you are. By mowing your own lawn instead of hiring somebody else you are adjusting your opportunity cost overhead.

Yeah. The government incentives it by offer tax deductions on interest paid, but it also severely restricts peoples ability to move for work when the market ****s itself.

The current working generation is less mobile than at any time in history, in large part because of the high percentage of home ownership and the number of people who can't get out of their mortgages without incurring additional cost.

Owning a home is great in the right scenario and has obvious benefits. People think too pie in the sky though and are much to willing to buy when it's a dumb decision at best.

Potential buyers have to be very careful in certain areas of the country. Vegas, Phoenix, Florida, Atlanta, Detroit and certain areas of California have always had wide swings in value.

most of the people that work for salary aren't concerned with overhead opportunity cost because they wouldn't work for a fixed salary in the first place

This is the type of crazy talk where sane and smart people make idiot proclamations. I guess Warren Buffett was wrong to pay cash for his house 50 years ago. After all, he knew he could beat the markets.

As a general rule, paying cash is always the best option for buying anything in the world. After all, if you aren't paying cash, then someone is lending you the money, and they are going to make a profit on that money.

The only scenario where borrowing money makes sense is if you can walk away without the penalty being significant. For example, if you you can somehow borrow a few million to invest, and if you blow the money, all you get is bad credit, or have your company file bankruptcy, then you might as well risk other people's money. Businesses do this all of the time, with the individuals being responsible not being personally liable.

People have no concept of the bad things that can happen in life. Having a roof over your head that is fully paid for (aside from taxes), means that you and your family will weather any economic storm that comes.

There is just so much garbage advice out there. People with calculators running around talking about all of the advantages of going into debt. These fools even suggested keeping mortgages when rates were 6 and 7 percent. Such terrible advice to tell someone to give up a guaranteed rate of return of 6 or 7 percent, while securing their family. The argument was that stocks go up 9 percent long term...lol. Joke advice.

Think of it like this. Imagine that you had an apartment building that you could live in for the rest of your life. You love the apartment, and it will be there forever, so you can stay forever. But you could sell the lease to someone else if you wanted.

Now, you can make one payment to the landlord now and never pay another dollar in rent, or you can pay monthly payments for the rest of your life, which will be the equivalent to a mortgage with interest.

If you can lock up a roof over your head it is good advice. Buffett must be a moron. Maybe he should go out and get a mortgage on his house and invest the proceeds...lol?

People make way too many assumptions about future financial returns, and people mostly disregard the advantages of not having debt. Bad things happen when you have debt. And when really bad things happen to your individual circumstances, you do not want to be owing a lot of money.

99 percent of the world's economic problems right now are directly related to horse**** money assumptions and too much debt. And all financial problems can be solved with one thing. And that one thing is CASH. It can solve every single financial problem that ever existed, and yet people thumb their noses at it and agree to give it away to lenders for things that don't make sense.

In the old days, people actually used to work and have discipline, so that they could save the 20 percent down payment for a house. This often took them years, and many people worked real blue collar jobs in order to do that. Once that mindset changed, the whole game changed forever. Nobody sacrifices anything now.

So, basically, the public got what it deserved with the housing mess. If you are going to buy, the time to buy is after the bubble collapses, which is now, but if you have tons of cash sitting around, and you decide to take out a mortgage, then you are just a sucker to the system.

I would rather rent in all cases. Freedom of movement. And yo avoid all of the time consuming maintenance that cannot possibly be the way that people really want to live their lives. Do people really daydream bout calling the plumber, mowing lawns, and all of the other time wasting things that come with owning a home?

I don't think so.

potleemit,

You are confusing psychological and financial arguments. If you need the peace of mind of not having a mortgage then that is a psychological justification for making a sub-optimal financial decision. It doesn't change the fact that it is a sub-optimal financial decision.

? I am saying that by mowing your own lawn or changing your own oil you are "making money" compared to paying somebody else to do it.

I don't know how much it costs to get someone to do the yard work in KY. In many places, it's really not expensive. I pay a company $80 per month to do my lawn. It's cheap enough that it would take serious money issues for me to go back to doing it myself. If this is something keeping anyone from buying a house, they can easily make a few phone calls and see if it's something they should really be concerned about.

The reason you see the problem with HOA fees is because home owners have the same fees, but they are more hidden. When your A/C breaks, you spend $5-10K on a new one. When you need to mow the lawn, you do it yourself or hire a service. You don't count those things towards cost of a home, but they are there. In fact, the HOA fees are likely a bargain compared to what you have to pay to own your own home.

The condo boards are the bigger problem.

Haha I contradicted, I'm saying that skilled people pay that sort of thing since they can make more money using their time usefully thus the opportunity cost of spending your time on dull jobs. And the second part is implying that most of the fixed salary workers don't belong to that skilled people group. Nor do they understand the term opportunity cost.

I tend to reject the second portion about the salary workers not being skilled, but it all depends on the industry/job. Lets say you are working 40 hours a week and index and can't monetize your time in other ways then doing menial chores around the house if you have the time and don't hate doing it isn't a terrible trade off. It all depends on what you consider your hourly rate to be and how much free time you want.