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The only way that houses are any decent of an "investment" is when you rent them and rents continue to keep pace (and increase faster than) with your overall costs whether it be property taxes, your commercial property mortgage, or maintenance of the property itself. It's also not the point of this thread either come to think of it. This is how most of my family has ever made any money off of real estate and what I was encouraged to do back in 2007. My position is that this method has limited sustainability because most of the past observable "growth" has been based upon Americans leveraging themselves further at terrible costs to their quality of life. If this continues, Americans will mostly be a working poor state with zero state-sponsored support and a few rich people - like those Latin American countries we talk about with such pity here. The best returns are in slums anyway it seems, so maybe I'll learn Spanish and buy up various plots later on with play money. I think we can all agree that past performance does not indicate future returns, it's just we disagree on where it'll head in the future. Based upon historical performance, we can say that now's a good time with a fairly decent time, but there are many fundamentals that point to the contrary that weren't as strong factors before. My basic point from above is that the best returns are long gone anyway and that long term prospects aren't that good given the general state of the demand curve for real estate over the next 15 years.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2011 21:23 |
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 20:13 |
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greasyhands posted:People make this argument a lot. Why would you expect houses to revert to the prices of over a decade ago?
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# ¿ Feb 7, 2011 23:30 |
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quaint bucket posted:Is it really that new of a phenomen? I've noticed it going on for 10+ years (at least in Canada) and I wouldn't be surprised if a fair percentage of "canadian buyers" are proxies for foreign buyers. But based upon the fact that the middle classes of China and India have had most of their growth in the past 12 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an increasing trend. And if they were any bit smart, they'd have been waiting for prices to drop like they have in the past few years. I know that when I was selling my place last year at an enormous loss I had several cash buyers bidding, zero of whom were born in the US very obviously.
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# ¿ Feb 8, 2011 00:53 |
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High-k windows won't be much more effective than what you have if the windows are fitting poorly to the frame and leave gaps, but it'll be better than doing nothing. It's just that the return on investment will take longer to recoup (a few years or so from what I estimated on an early 1970s place I looked at before). Now, what you may want to do is look into some window butyl and some weather sealing options that might be cheaper and more effective than all the other options.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2011 20:02 |
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Also, are you prorating based upon square footage? That's a common mistake that people mistake you could be rightfully audited on. You can't deduct 100% of your co-op / HOA dues when the guy takes up 1 bedroom out of, say, 5 of you 2600 sqft place. Similarly, I can't deduct half my rent as business expenses for a home office when it takes up a closet or if I occasionally sleep in it or use it as a guest bedroom. Granted, nobody from the IRS is going to come over and see if you're sleeping in your home office or something, but do try to be sensible. poo poo's complicated living in a place you're partially renting out, yo.
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# ¿ Feb 19, 2011 21:36 |
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devilmouse posted:(Sorry for the whine, it's just really baffling how anyone manages to buy here!) 1. Parents footing the down payment 2. Successful start-up. Big part of how I got my down (and lost with the bubble popping). You can become a millionaire quite literally overnight in Silicon Valley, but I was in Seattle and wasn't that early stage in the start-up, so I got less than six figures. Not bad for 3 months at a start-up though. 3. Aggressive amortization schedule mortgages (meaning very long term) / ARMs. Usually for those that are actually somewhat normal in income. Has always bitten them in the rear end down the road in my secondary experience. 4. Rich, out of town (or country!) buyers. Major cities have interest to people internationally. Note that due to the wealth gap in the US rising immensely in the past 20-30 years, the rich can afford to buy many more houses than before, and that's what a lot of real estate developers have been targeting (no money to be made doing "affordable" housing unless it's a tenement tract of property practically)
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2011 18:47 |
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Interest rate affecting house prices with a microeconomic model is a bit complicated. If you reduce interest rates, that doesn't necessarily push people to go buy a house honestly. Unless combined with really fishy lending policies, lowering interest rates a bit would make a difference of a few hundred bucks a month for most people, which is nothing compared to the down payment you'd likely need. People buy houses oftentimes without looking at much besides "do we need one?" and "how much can we afford?" and won't try to time the market or anything. A new baby could push a couple to buy a house (oftentimes against good financial prudence) whether interest rates are at record lows or at record highs. However, if you increase interest rates, it can immediately push people out of the pool that could have otherwise bought the house. However, similar to the housing tax credit the other year, if that's what pushes you "over the edge" it's probably not a smart move and could weaken the stability of the housing market if anything fucks with demand during the lifetime of the loan. So my point is, there's a lag with pushing interest rates down and on the flipside it has a more prominent, immediate impact upon the market to push it up.
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# ¿ Feb 23, 2011 19:15 |
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Being a landlord is tough enough to do profitably when you're not upside down on a mortgage, it's even more risky when you're upside down on a place. When you're barely covering your mortgage, the only "profit" is now in your deductions. Maintenance costs on houses in Michigan can be pretty brutal due to the harsh weather there affecting everything from roofs to siding and pipes. There's a reason why buying is much cheaper than renting in that area - nobody wants to set roots there if given the option. Almost everyone I know in Michigan or from Michigan has no plans to return or to stay. Honestly, I'd have to recommend giving up your plans, foreclosing on your current place, and sucking it up and renting for a while. It's heartbreaking and bittersweet I know, but almost everyone I know of in your position has gone back to renting after being so fed up with the downsides of home ownership, especially in a) a terrible economy b) a housing depression. House prices have fallen more than they have in the Depression (because they blew up more than they have in history), but they're still not where they should be to correct for the fact we still have double digit unemployment and decreasing incomes.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 17:58 |
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TraderStav posted:I think this is absolutely terrible advice. If the net result of either of your situations is foreclosure, why in the hell would I not try to make this work and be profitable? The worst case scenario is ending up in foreclosure, which is what you're advocating I do by just rolling over and accepting it in advance. I already have a tenant on deck that is willing to pay $400 over my fixed costs on a monthly basis for my home. That is a decent margin, despite being in Michigan. My maintenance/vacancy reserve will quickly be filled there and I have income above both payments to work with any vacancies. With regards to risk, I've seen what bad tenants can do to properties, and it can happen regardless of their credit history or employer, etc. For me, the risks wouldn't be worth a passive $300 / month. Only you can be the best judge of the potential costs and cashflow of your place. It's a safe assumption that most people underwater are in pretty grim situations though when they're thinking of moving for any reason.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2011 16:27 |
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slowfoot posted:We've done a bit: we end up at about the same spot, even assuming we sell the house for slightly less than we bought it.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2011 16:13 |
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Most dealers don't look much beyond your credit score as a quick passover anyway. If you had the credit to be able to buy a house with the lowest rates possible, then you should be able to get a car loan. My credit score went up after I bought a place so who knows, maybe you'd get a better deal from them than you would have otherwise?
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# ¿ Apr 11, 2011 16:23 |
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Actually, on the place I bought in 2007 (yeaaahhhh) the owner replaced a couple of the windows with the gas leaks (steam / frosting) and while they were technically mismatched, I never noticed. Was the problem part of the seal with the frame or the window itself?
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2011 18:26 |
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Yeah, it's not a 1031 exchange, which is mostly to offset some of the tax burdens of gaining on selling an existing property. The nuance of most things being taxable when you sell and gain is what tripped me up before - nothing happens when you lose in an investment really.
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# ¿ May 2, 2011 01:51 |
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It isn't worth the headaches of being a landlord for the potential "returns" you're looking for, sell right now, don't look back and keep running.gvibes posted:Sell. No reason to hold onto a significantly cash-flow negative property. Condos are an incredible liability with the once-touted benefits now exposed as not applicable for almost every community, I'd almost say a timeshare is a better option if you have that kind of money to blow. I consider the extra I pay over owning to be the right to walk away from the property within a set period of time.
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# ¿ May 2, 2011 23:21 |
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Jorath posted:Worst financial decision of my life- lost %100 of our downpayment. Crawling out now, will probably rent for the same as the total we paying, and save up until we can just buy with more than %50 down for what's hopefully our last house ever. Now I'm saving back up again for another down payment, and now because I'm married and my wife makes less than 20% of what I do, it's basically even harder to save up now. The worst part is that my local housing market is the only one in the nation still going up (DC metro area) which is probably a moderate bubble, saved only by the fact that federal government jobs are so stable.
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# ¿ May 9, 2011 18:29 |
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Bought in 2007 myself as well, but I bought a condo that had HOA costs about doubling (last I heard it was just under $400 / mo - I started at $201) within merely 2 years or so, which aren't tax deductible unlike mortgage interest in the US. I also got screwed in quality of life wasn't any better than some random apartment in the area. In fact, the upstairs neighbor is probably the trashiest (literally - he left his trash outside his door leading to ant infestations) neighbor I've had and I've been renting for like... 7 years now all across the country. I could also easily hear his footsteps above me, not to mention I could hear him snore. I had spent hours and hours in the place at various times to figure out if there was some good soundproofing between the units and thought it was sufficient when it wasn't. Even if there was no market crash, I'd likely have been screwed over anyway. I was unable to sell my place unless the buyer wasn't going to use a lender due to a lawsuit going on with the HOA. The lender I had used ignored it unlike most even during the boom (I spoke with a few independent appraisers for banks that said even during the boom none of their clients would finance condos with major HOA lawsuits going on). In the end, home prices in the Seattle-Bellevue area dropped about 30% or so from peak while mine dropped about 50%. That means even in a "normal" housing market where prices were within affordability I'd have lost my down payment within 3 years of ownership. I don't think they can afford new roofs now and so there's probably going to be a big fat assessment sometime to the tune of $2000 per resident. If there's any place that's a money pit, it's that entire community - even the original buyers of the condo conversion got raw deals at 2004 prices in the Seattle area (the area lagged the nation by about 10 months pricewise).
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# ¿ May 11, 2011 04:16 |
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So one of my wife's coworkers bought a 5000 sq ft mansion in Michigan for $1 and found that houses are so expensive in the DC metro area that it's cheaper to buy some land, do the hook-ups, setup the foundation, and ship the house ($80k). A comparable house in the area would cost about... $1.4 million, so you'd need about $280k just for a down payment, then you'd have a mortgage for a ridiculous amount. I think instead of saving up the $200k for a stupid down payment on massively overpriced housing I might want to try the same thing. That is, buy a good plot of land, pick out a house somewhere in flyover counter, maybe bulldoze whatever's there, put up the money upfront for transportation and setup, and enjoy the immediate equity gain by virtue of having a much bigger house than the cost of buying an existing house in the neighborhood. It'd certainly achieve my goal of having no mortgage ever again in my life. So... anyone want to shoot my idea down?
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# ¿ May 18, 2011 04:50 |
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They managed to be able to have it shipped via barge apparently, so they're not cutting up the house into pieces or anything it seems. I'm totally skeptical myself so I'd like to do some fact checking, but I was just curious to see if my intuition matched with reality. Only way I can see it realistically hitting $80k is if the labor is really cheap in Michigan and DC. Thing about DC is that even though it's the strongest economy in the US overall, manual laborer jobs haven't come back either.
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# ¿ May 18, 2011 08:52 |
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They don't even do filtering of any sort it seems either. I had bought a ground floor condo of a 8-unit building and was getting mail about gutter cleaning, lawn renewal, etc. Given the cost of postage, you would think they'd try to do a LITTLE bit of lead qualification, but they just blow away their money and not care because it's too much work.
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# ¿ May 25, 2011 11:07 |
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I just realized it'd be totally possible for an ARM to reset to a lower interest rate if you had bought during a time of high interest rates (not in the past 12 years) and a recession happened with the Fed cutting interest rates a bunch to stir the economy.
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# ¿ Jun 6, 2011 23:02 |
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I owned a condo in a 4-story building built in 1988 that was originally built as an apartment building. I could hear my neighbors above and below me when they talked in their bedrooms. I'm pretty sure they could hear me as well in my bedroom. However, in high-rise buildings there's a greater structural need to have 12+ inches of concrete between each floor absorbing and dampening the sound and supporting everything, so when I've stayed in friends high-rise apartments 40+ years old in NYC, Chicago, etc. I haven't heard the neighbors. Apartment -> Condo conversions should be avoided like the plague.
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# ¿ Jul 12, 2011 02:30 |
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I stopped paying my mortgage for about 110 days before my short sale with residual $125k (of an original $285k mortgage) closed and my credit score went from about 780 to 660, but that didn't show up until after my shortsale. It was confusing to me because most said their credit score dropped from not paying the mortgage rather than the short sale itself. I'll note I had PMI and so the bank likely lost only about... $80k in the end. But that's still a rather substantial loss on a once $320k place.
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# ¿ Jul 28, 2011 19:00 |
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The home mortgage forgiveness act of 2007 (or 2008?) allows people to more or less write off the 1099-C that comes back to you from the bank for cancellation of debt. It's kinda lovely because apparently someone canceling debt you wouldn't have gotten a deduction for (the principal) winds up counting as INCOME when you're already reeling from a short sale or foreclosure. So, if you bought a house within the past 6 years or so and you qualify under that act, it shouldn't be so bad. Also, if you rented your place out and are taking a loss (most likely) while you don't qualify, your deductions for capital losses due to the basis value of the property at time you bought it can result in evening things out just fine for you. Under no probable circumstances though can you realistically come out ahead though financially from any of these forms of loss. The closest thing I could think of would be to have bought a house in 2004 with NO money down, rented it out profitably somehow until now somehow (likely due to the depreciation deduction), and sell at a loss for another deduction. It just used to be that for a lot of people, until recent times foreclosure usually also meant a bankruptcy.
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2011 20:34 |
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Uh, I did mention that you don't qualify if you're renting your place out though, although it seems a tad obscure now I read it back. It isn't a tax credit either, but a deduction to offset the 1099-C I bought at $320k in 2007, rented out throughout most of 2009 at about a $900 / mo loss (after tax deductions), and finally closed in August 2010 for a short sale of $175k after stopping my mortgage payment in March. I got my 1099-C for about $95k (my balance was $278k when I stopped paying, the PMI I had covered the rest I believe) and went from a credit score of 770-ish to 650. It's now passed 700 after paying every bill I've got like I did before all this. If it wasn't for me having to keep a drat good credit score during 2009 to pass some high-level security clearances, I absolutely would have stopped paying my mortgage instead of bothering with renting it out. With so many factors keeping my property's value permanently depressed, there's no way I could have ever recovered and every dollar I was putting in was truly sunk cost. I didn't qualify for poo poo on my 2010 taxes and I actually got a tax return despite me making a fair bit of money in 2010 on sale of some stock. My recommendation to anyone severely underwater that can't rent to cover the mortgage is to just default mostly because I doubt property values will recover in the time period a foreclosure goes off your record. If our inflation is that bad to get prices back into alignment with Case-Schiller indexes within the bankruptcy recovery time, you just might be trying to decide whether to buy a 24-pack of ramen from Costco-Mart or pay your mortgage.
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2011 21:15 |
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We can always point to Japan as an example of what could happen to housing prices (in decline for 12+ years and counting), especially because their situation is so similar to what has happened in the US.
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2011 23:50 |
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archangelwar posted:I know it may not feel like it, but your combined income puts you in the top 3%-4% of US households. I believe you mentioned something about saving roughly 40% of your net monthly earnings. This is not something the vast majority of the Americans are capable of doing, no matter how frugal they are. I am not saying this to inflate your ego, or for any other reason than to show you that you have opportunity that is simply not available to the average American, and it is up to you whether you capitalize on it or not. I wouldn't necessarily look for a financial advisor while making even $250k. The basics that apply for everyone else still applies, and they haven't shown they've gotten a grip on the basics besides "save something!" which should be retardedly easy at their income range. Until you get to an income where you can't follow the usual advice I'd advocate sticking with the same thing as everyone else like low-cost index funds, 401k maxing, Roth IRAs, etc.
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# ¿ Aug 18, 2011 19:13 |
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If you want to invest in real estate but don't know much, you are almost invariably going to get better returns on your time by investing in REITs, which encapsulate the risks (and profits) accordingly. These are investments in large-scale commercial properties which produce far better profits than even duplexes and quadplexes.cannibustacap posted:With interest rates at all time lows, I am trying to talk my parents into buying a home in a nice area and rent it out. I can barely forgive my family for pushing me into property buying when I was resistant to it, I'm not sure how you could be on the other end for people so close to retirement. I would consider buying a house when commercial real estate stops leaking money like a tuna net... and perhaps a foreclosure that I paid cash for while doing favors for the county judge or sheriff to get in early on. My parents bought a new place near their 60s and are now going to have to work basically for the rest of their lives because the property market fell out of the bottom and will likely not come back until well past they reach federal retirement age. In the process, they completely destroyed any chance they had of achieving the last of their life goals, all because they had this stupid idea that property could only go up when "conditions are right." Leperflesh posted:Do you have an incurable disease that is likely to kill you before you hit age 62 or something?
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# ¿ Sep 6, 2011 17:17 |
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Yeah, on a similar note, my parents spent a good while trying to convince me to buy a house with them during the bubble and I refused on several grounds. They were planning on leaving the country for their retirement and wanted some place carved out instead of being in a hotel when they visited. Well recently they had to declare bankruptcy and that would mean that I'd have to cover their portion of the mortgage too while they got their business sorted out. Buying a house has enough risks as it is when the economy is going great, tripling-down on it by buying with friends or even family is not recommended unless you truly are the loving Brady Bunch and even if you guys shot each other in the face you'd smile and go "gee, I don't hold it against them!" completely without question. At that point I'd consider you crazy anyway, so point proven.
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# ¿ Sep 12, 2011 05:06 |
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I think the market "discount" for cash offers is correlated with interest rates, so I'd say that these days there's almost no discount, if any, but it certainly varies considerably from place to place. This is partly due to the fact that a number of people buy houses because the houses will appreciate faster than letting it just sit in a bank account, and at least you could rent the place out for a while and get what amounts to dividends, which can be better than dividends in your taxable accounts (for example, Tennessee has no income tax except on dividends I believe it is).
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# ¿ Sep 23, 2011 00:08 |
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The thing is that there are fewer and fewer people now with the sort of life stability that they could realistically plan to stay in an area for several years. This has to do with the sheer instability of the economy as a whole, and I don't foresee that changing for the next several years. For me, I'm in IT / software and if you're in the niche I'm in, it's a massive clusterfuck of change at all times, and opportunities come up randomly while companies die off within a year or two when they were doing just fine. This is part of why I don't think I could buy a house even if I had millions in the bank - I'd have to sell it off within a year or two probably, and moving poo poo in and out of houses is an immense pain in the rear end to boot. I've moved cross-country almost annually for the past several years and most of my personal projects are aimed at getting rid of as many possessions as possible to where I could grab a suitcase, ship a couple freight boxes, and leave behind the state or country.
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# ¿ Oct 3, 2011 23:10 |
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I'd get a roof that has solar panels and pray every night that I don't get hail. They're fairly common in Hawaii I noticed when I was there last year, but it's probably because they have the highest cost of electricity in the US and it makes economical and seasonal sense there.
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# ¿ Oct 4, 2011 15:15 |
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Tragicomic posted:Hey guys, looking for advice on a lender for a refinance. archangelwar posted:Defense and budget cuts are already resulting in a slowing of employment, and and that could accelerate soon given the current Congressional bent. Things could turn around, but honestly I would not make long term assumptions about the DC market right now.
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# ¿ Oct 19, 2011 17:31 |
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There is only one reason to buy a condo and that is to rent out, which has a lot of risks in one's portfolio that are much higher than the market aggregate because you're getting screwed by economy of scale as a small-time property owner. It's possible to be successful doing this long-term but the general consensus I've read is that the low hanging fruit of real estate is over and people won't be getting the same kinds of returns for the next 30 years as the past 30 (pre-crisis). Even if you think you're getting a good deal you stand a fair risk of things getting worse. The lady that bought my condo at a price she thought was a steal has lost 10% of her house value within 7 months and will probably never get that much higher unless the Seattle area starts approaching population density like NYC or San Francisco. My place sold in mid-2010 for about 55% of what I paid for in 2007. My HOA warning in the OP should be read by anyone considering a condo especially if you're in a housing market that makes it difficult to NOT be in an HOA. There are plenty of people that are happy with their condos, but there's also lots of cancer survivors in the world too. I would buy a timeshare before I buy a condo, and most people don't consider timeshares investments whatsoever. I would buy a block of condos before either, but I'd need a million or two before I'd feel comfortable with that.
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# ¿ Nov 1, 2011 03:27 |
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The Aphasian posted:I mean, getting a $250,000 house (what is in our comfort zone) for $125,000 with a few hundred down + closing and additional inspection seems like some sort of fairy tale. Which it probably is because of the odds of finding something, but still.
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# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 18:13 |
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You're still not off the hook when you're "forgiven" debt though. In a non-recourse state the bank still has to file a 1099-C form for the residual of forgiven debt and you get taxed on that as regular income (not a joke - part of why foreclosure used to mean bankruptcy until recent years after a law passed during the housing crisis). Because you cannot claim losses on a primary residence, I might recommend renting out a house at least briefly before short selling it or something so you can avoid the potential tax burden of the 1099-C. This is moreso relevant if your property value tanked so badly from your purchase price that you'd get a 1099-C for something crazy like your annual income. All this has led me to one conclusion: do never buy during a housing bubble in a recourse state with any more than a 0% down mortgage investment.
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# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 18:42 |
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Daeus posted:In a non recourse state you have no debt with the bank after a foreclosure so there is nothing to be forgiven.
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# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 20:22 |
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Ingraman posted:Any condo buyers that don't regret their purchase? I keep hearing about some people saying condos are great for the right kind of buyer, but every time I do the math the only people that could benefit from buying one or two condos would rent it out the majority of the time (and deduct the HOA dues while also getting depreciation deductions) or have so much money and go on vacation (or are retired with plenty of disposable yet fixed income) so much they'd get more value out of owning a vacation condo or bungalow than just getting a hotel every time. Almost nobody looking in this thread is in that demographic.
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# ¿ Dec 10, 2011 04:09 |
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enraged_camel posted:How do I convince them that they are being stupid? Personally I don't plan to buy a house until I get married and start thinking about kids. BTW, there's some ghost towns popping up in China with real estate prices dropping 30%+ in a year. And everyone said China's got a strong economy.
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# ¿ Dec 13, 2011 17:29 |
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My brother in law is in Phoenix and tells me prices are definitely still declining. He had put 40% down on his place in 2004 and still had to do a short sale in 2009. While renting tends to come at a premium in markets where people are scared to buy, you can think of the premium as your insurance against your house value going down on a hypothetical house you'd be buying now. While it's great to have financial cushion and have a house paid off, it isn't exactly the end of the line when it comes to big financial decisions in life like paying for your kids' college education, for example.
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# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 17:33 |
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 20:13 |
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Christ, a house for $55k not in flyover country has a lot of questions I'd be asking about, but you answered the majority I suppose. It's not exactly a "nice" neighborhood (which in the context of many conversations means "white, affluent") but if the house passes inspections and your future source of income while residing there (and beyond after converting to a rental property) is pretty solid and is solidly affordable, I pretty much can't turn down such a place. I'd have enough cash to buy that place for pure cash though, jesus. Over across the Potomac in Virginia $55k is your down payment on a lovely 1BR condo, not an actual house.
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2012 17:57 |