Buying A House: C or D?

::thinks about beautiful flat of mine own::

::calms down::

Also classic because our outgoings are less than they would be if we were renting, and we get to live on our own and do what we want and IT'S OURS! As Pleasant Plains said, it's the I do like the whole ownership and "this is my wall that I can put holes into" feeling feeling that makes it worthwhile.

Buying new appliances for a house seems like the most fun part of the process. Ooooh stainless steel cooktop. Ooooooh subzero wine fridge.

living room/dining room before
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/pics/livingrm2.jpg
after
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/newpics/house_livroom2.JPG
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/newpics/house_livroom3.JPG

kitchen before
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/pics/kitch2.jpg

after
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/newpics/house_kitchen.JPG

master bedroom before
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/pics/master2.jpg

after (with my old roommate using the computer)
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/newpics/house_bedroom1.JPG

and here is the bathroom, the before pic is too big but it used to be all pink and black.

http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~feb/newpics/house_bathroom1.JPG

My wife and I have owned our house since early 87. We love the place. Single family, 90 plus yrs old, awesome mountain views and we'll be here a while yet. Of course there's always something in need of work, but you gotta live somewhere.

this is the second house we've owned, we sold our condo and made $75000.

Living room before:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/cmvenuti/lvingroombefore.jpg

Living room after (nice hardwoods under shit carpet):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/cmvenuti/livingroomafter.jpg

I have 2 houses *smug grin*, but no money :0( First one was my first ever wee fixer upper flat, that I now rent out to various weirdos and misfits.

The 2nd is the one I just bought off the bastard ex for a HUGE amount of money that I can't really afford - but it's MINE all MINE mwah ha ha...and I LOVE living on my OWN in MY house! It's the best feeling....I've just moved back in, so I still think everything is fab...the bubble will burst very soon methinks...

i am not a fan of white kitchens and bathrooms but at the time i was so tired of renovating that I was just shouting JUST MAKE EVERYTHING WHITE!!! because i could not deal with color schemes and tiles anymore and white appliances are the cheapest and renovating takes 3 times as long as you think it will. when those pics were taken probably 6 months after moving in we still did not have a kitchen trashcan and the vaccuum was always out. IKEA was so helpful. We splurged on things that mattered like faucets and sinks and our custom stainless steel counter, but otherwise we just went to ikea for standard white cabinets and like, the toilet paper holder. I would never get seating there though.

anybody see the documentary about estate agents on bbc last night?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4826444.stm

This seems as good a place as any to ask a question about mortgages...

Me & the missus are about four months away from the end of our fixed-rate term on our repayment mortgage; we want to bundle all our unsecured debts on the new mortgage, cut up those credit cards (possibly only symbolically in my case - y'never know when I might pass a branch of Jessops with a Sigma 30/1.4 going cheap in the window), wipe out those overdrafts and live sensibly within our means like nonidiots for a bit.

Called our vendor today (a lovely Scottish woman named after an Orchids song) and, after she'd done her sums, she said we'd be unlikely to make their affordability criteria for the necessary loan amount (since we last applied Pam has gone self-employed and our joint income is much lower). However, if we got an interest-only version of the same product, the deal was back on (I guess the monthly payments are £100-£150 less or so).

Now, thanks to a little loophole that she probably wasn't supposed to tell me about, we could switch back to a repayment mortgage later cos they're only duty-bound to do affordability assessments when the loan amount changes, not when the product-type changes.

Does this sound like a good plan? As far as I know, the mortgage vendor doesn't have to see any proof that you've taken steps to cover the capital when setting up an interest-only mortgage, do they? I mean, they don't care - they're getting shedloads of interest off you PLUS they get the house at the end of the loan period into the bargain if you've failed to make adequate provision. So it should be straightforward.

There's also the interim possibility of an Additional Loan - a secured loan at a higher rate that's very quick to set up and isn't as picky in its acceptance criteria - to wipe out the debts, that could be bundled with the new mortgage product (at the mortgage rate) when we switch in the new year.

I'm entering the club and discovering a whole new world of paranoia about dodgy roofs and walls...

Buying a house: dud. Having a mortgage: dud. Owning a house: classic!

Living in Australia off the back of the Howard era: DUD DUD BIG FUCKING DUD. We both work and we can't afford a cardboard box in the country.

anyone have experience buying a home in pre-foreclosure?

I have friends who are fundamentally against this concept and cited 'house of sand and fog' (which I have neither read nor watched) as an example of why this is 'mean' but frankly, fuck that. the bank is going to take it anyway. and people in my own family have lost homes to foreclosure themselves.

UK people, is it worth buying the freehold on my flat?

My upstairs neighbour has been talking to the owner of the building about it, however, we all have to agree before we can do it.

Obviously it will increase the value of the property (as if that means anything in the current climate) - but what kind of control/liabilities does it give us as leaseholders turned freeholders?

Apart from escaping service charges - does that outweight the lump sum that I'd have to come with up front?

What is the length of your lease?

You won't escape all service charges as you will still have to buy buildings insurance between you and it would be wise to keep a contingency fund going for future repairs, exterior painting and the like. Generally how it works is that you and your neighbour set up a company that buys the freehold and the share of the company gets sold along with the flat and I think you can write that into the deeds. This is very ordinary stuff for solicitors. The company then charges you a service charge which then goes for buildings insurance, contingency fund, cleaning of the common parts (Which you don't have) and you generally set out how this is to be calculated in the articles of the company, again bread and butter stuff for a solicitor.

Might be a good time to do it as you will get it cheap and be able to lower your outgoings on service charge a bit. Not sure about the affect on price but a share of a freehold is more attractive and might make it easier to sell at some future point.

Depends on sooooo many things, and with all due respect to ilx peeps you might want to take legal advice on the leaseholder/freeholder aspect. Why does the owner want to do this now I wonder?

Basically what Ed said.

It's not the owner's idea, it's the upstairs neighbour's idea. I believe it is quite cheap, as far as buying freeholds go - if I had steady employment right now, I probably would scrape together the cash and do it.

However, there's not much point in buying the freehold if I can't pay the mortgage 2 months from now when my contract runs out!

I guess I have to go and have tea with my neighbour and talk about it.

I had a fantasy about living in the NYC area when I was in my early 20s. Which seems laughably naive and impossible now.

garbage city

Yeah I think it's basically a post-lotto-winning fantasy for most normal humans, and yet there are still millions of people there. A mystery.

I live outside DC, which is also out of reach for most humans. I have a sister in San Francisco (I have lost count but I think she has more than one house).

But even for ridiculously privileged folks, NYC just seems about as plausible as living on the moon.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SalarytoBuyaHome_Aug3-1.jpg

oh sorry that's 2022, i.e. 6% rates. here it is now:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/OC_Salary-Own-Home_1200PX.jpg

Yow. I don't know if "well, at least you aren't in San Jose" is especially comforting but I guess that is where we are.

Dang, that escalated quickly.

San Jose punishing Dionne Warwick more each year

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/realestate/zurich-switzerland-renting-homes.html

But any preference for renting here collides with a stark financial reality: National surveys show that in recent decades, Swiss homeowners have been better off, at least in terms of wealth. The median net worth of a Swiss homeowner in their 30s is six times higher than that of a renter of the same age. And the wealth gap only widens with age. In their 70s, Swiss homeowners are 11 times wealthier than renters their age, according to a study by Ursina Kuhn at the Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences in Lausanne.

The catch is that in order to become a homeowner, “you need wealth to get more wealth,” as Ms. Kuhn put it.

certainly seems like rentier capitalism to me

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/09/realestate/brooklyn-apartment-prospect-heights-clinton-hill.html

not sure if pooling together their money gave them any sort of financial advantage here

a well known former ilxor just did this in bk. aside from a bigger downpayment, four adults on the mortgage meant the bank would give them a bigger loan iiuc.

Maine prices have gone off a trampoline of gold. I don't know what younger people looking for a starter home are going to do

We have these in SF, they are called tenancies-in-common and while most major lenders shy away from them there are smaller lenders (RIP SVB) that I believe continue to underwrite them.

There's a very dark article in this week's New York Review of Books about the coming homeowners' insurance crash. It's behind their paywall, but I'm a subscriber, so if anybody wants to read it I'll paste it here.

climate change = more destruction of houses - :(

We have these in SF, they are called tenancies-in-common and while most major lenders shy away from them there are smaller lenders (RIP SVB) that I believe continue to underwrite them.

― citation needed (Steve Shasta), Thursday, November 9, 2023 11:54 AM (one month ago)

SF strictly regulated them as they were a common means of eliminating affordable rental housing from the market, and it wasn't uncommon for the new owners to not actually live in their units and basically convert them to market rate rentals.

There's a very dark article in this week's New York Review of Books about the coming homeowners' insurance crash. It's behind their paywall, but I'm a subscriber, so if anybody wants to read it I'll paste it here.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Sunday, 12 November 2023 00:07 (four weeks ago) link

just got a letter saying we're getting a deductible rate adjustment due to hurricanes.

I just posted this in the Los Angeles thread today:

Found out today that the house insurance has been cancelled. We're a mile away from the state defined Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone border (hell, we're closer to the 210 freeway than we are to the hillside) but nevertheless...

Background to all this from Sept. 2021: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-26/california-fire-insurance-moratorium-expire

A California moratorium guaranteeing insurance in wildfire-threatened areas lapsed Saturday, putting 347,000 homes in Pasadena and other Los Angeles foothills communities at the mercy of the market.

As many as 2.4 million homes are at risk of losing protection in 2021 as yearlong grace periods expire — though new disasters may extend their shields. In all, 18% of the state’s households could effectively lose protection, the largest single group since the moratorium law took effect three years ago.

“We’re going to pay the bill for climate change one way or the other, and it’s just a question of how we divvy up that cost,” said David Russell, co-director of the Center for Risk Management and Insurance at Cal State Northridge. “What California politicians are trying to do is tinker with how we do that. They’re buying time, hoping they get a break.”

Climate change has been rough on the world’s fifth-biggest economy: Wildfires torched nearly 4 million acres last year and more than 2 million so far this year; the Dixie and Caldor fires, two of the biggest, still aren’t entirely contained.

Fires in 2017 and 2018 alone wiped out more than a quarter-century of underwriting profits for the California insurance market, according to Milliman Inc., a risk assessment company. As insurers rushed to recalibrate risks, consumers were shocked by canceled policies and soaring rates.

In 2018, after the Camp fire destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, lawmakers in Sacramento prevented insurance companies from canceling homeowner policies in or adjacent to wildfire areas for 12 months after the day of an emergency declaration. The idea was to protect consumers after traumatic episodes and to give them time to make their homes more fire resistant. That, ideally, would prevent higher rates or cancellations.

“Even when these moratoriums end, they have given people time to make their homes safer,” California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, said in a statement to Bloomberg, an argument he has made on numerous occasions. “I expect insurance companies to take that into account.”

It’s hard to tell whether this is wishful thinking or effective policy. Even before the law was enacted, California’s highly regulated market was seeing insurers quit the state or refuse to write new policies. In 2019, the last period for which information was available, the state saw a 31% uptick in non-renewals. Over the same period there was a 36% increase in homeowners using the California FAIR Plan, the state’s bare-bones alternative for those who can’t get insurance in the traditional market.

What are you going to do Elvis?

An inspector from AAA is visiting tomorrow, but I get on edge when I see stories like this: https://abc7news.com/ca-homeowners-insurance-homeowner-cancellation-policy-nonrenewal-not-renewed/13619472/