Quote:
Originally Posted by de4df1sh
At what point should a poker professional look at home ownership?
We have very little debt, the only debt we have is 240/mo on a car. No student loans, no credit card balance or other stuff.
MrsDeadfish makes 30k or so and I expect to bring in roughly the same. We live a pretty comfortable stress free life, obviously more money is better but we are very content and low maintenance. We are not materialistic and are a very pragmatic people.
our rent is currently 850/mo and our expected mortgage is between 500-650.
I currently have about 18k to my named and about 5k would go towards all of the expenses of home purchasing (down, inspection, closing, ect)
That would leave me with about 12k to play the 1/3 and a 1k emergency roll.
What are you thoughts?
Any advice or insight is greatly appreciated!
two reasons to own a home
- emotional. (not saying this is illegtimate at all btw). the need to feel rooted to a spot/community, to have 'settled down', want to have a place of your own for your family etc etc
- financial. it seems it may not be the case in many parts of the US over the past 10 years, but at least where I live, home ownership provides a significant opportunity for wealth creation and again, where I am, there is no cap gains tax on your own home. of course you can benefit from property market with investment properties but often, you have to pay a slightly higher mortgage rate, you can't borrow as much (= less wealth creation multiplied when market rises) and you have to pay cap gains tax on profits. Again, this may not be relevant to where you live
against that....things go wrong/need fixing and upgrading in houses and this costs $$ every year and is sometimes a **** load.
plus opportunity cost of what you could do with the $$ on your deposit
plus debt is an impediment to innovation in a million ways.
I'm a net believer in home ownership and have done very well from it over the years but I do sometimes get emotionally weighed down by the debt I'm attached to and I also think having a mortgage definitely stopped me from going harder in the early years of my business which may (or may not) have resulted in more growth and a bigger business