Comment by cblum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cblum | Hacker News Reader

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Glad to see this near the top and glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks like this.

Like you, I only own a place as a compromise with my wife. And like you, I hate everything that comes with homeownership. People don’t realize there are a lot of hidden costs in owning a home.

When you rent, if you secure a 12 month lease, you know exactly how much you’re spending in housing over the next year.

When you own, all bets are off. This year for example we’ve already spent a couple thousand dollars on appliances that broke. There are things around the place we know are gonna need repairs soon and those are gonna cost us a few hundred more.

Our situation is compounded by being under an HOA, so special assessments are always a possibility.

I know two people who sold their homes and went back to renting specifically because they couldn’t put up with maintaining a home anymore.

I saw renting as paying for a service. I know I wasn’t building equity, but I saw it as paying for not having to worry about all the crap I have to worry about now. Any issue was a phone call and $0 away from getting resolved and the maintenance folks were always awesome at the place where we lived.

> When you rent, if you secure a 12 month lease, you know exactly how much you’re spending in housing over the next year.

Only for exactly 12 months though. After that, your rent could double for all you know, and there’d be nothing you could do. You can move, of course, but now you’ve been forced to upend your life.

I live in a rent stablized apartment, and I feel lucky not just because my current price is lower than market rate overall. But of course, that’s not a scalable economic solution.

True, but from my perspective moving is a small, point in time hassle that you go through every couple years as a renter, as opposed to a lifelong stream of issues that you have to deal with as a homeowner.

If the rent is going up where you live, it’s probably going up everywhere else you would want to live in lockstep.

Oh, I forgot that benefit of renting!

* As my ol' granma used to say, two moves is the same as a fire. New furniture all around!

And from my perspective moving is an enormous hassle. Multiple vehicles, recreational vehicles, even a project car, and then of course a garage full of tools. Thousands of pounds of weights and gym equipment. King size latex beds that weigh a small ton, 4 beds altogether. Couches, dressers, half a dozen large TV's, file cabinets, a six-monitor desktop setup. Moving once a decade is more than enough, thanks.

When you rent, if you secure a 12 month lease, you know exactly how much you’re spending in housing over the next year.

But you don’t know what you are going to be paying in year 2,3,4,5 etc.

Our rent went up from $1300 in 2012 to $1700 in 2016. It’s now $1900/month.

Besides that, I don’t have people making noise all around me and everyone had the apartment mandated Comcast bundle including the wireless router where we had 10-15 wireless signals interfering with ours.

> Besides that, I don’t have people making noise all around me

I had the opposite problem. When I lived in a condo previously, I had the poor luck to live next to a shitty neighbor who would have parties at 5AM on Monday morning because she didn't work. The fact is anyone can get unlucky and have a shitty neighbor, but at least when you rent if the hassle is bad enough you can much more easily up and move.

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