this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Obama (or Illinois?) gave me 10k down payment in 2009 and I got a tiny townhome at 23 right after I got a job outta college. I stayed in it for 10 years and traded it in for a bigger house like a crab after I got married.
I was not money conscious at the time but my dad pretty much forced me to get a house if I had the means. I'm glad he did.
So I guess I was also gifted my down payment from my parents and other tax payers parents.
I think that there's two things to keep in mind when buying a house:
the first is that notwithstanding rising interest rates which you especially in America should be able to mitigate with long-term mortgage rates, it locks your cost of housing in time. What you pay for a house is going to be what you pay for house. And so that's obviously a bit of a problem with house prices go down, but if they go sideways you're fine and if they go way out like they have it's really good.
But the second part of that is that people need to buy a house that they can actually afford because the cost of their house is stuck in time and so if you buy something really expensive and it's never really not expensive for you, then you have just made a long-term commitment to something that you can't really afford.
In canada, many mortgages are variable rate, and of the fixed rate options the longest lock in that most people do is 5 years. Once you start rising above that, the cost of money goes up considerably. In spite of that, I locked in at a decent rate in 2020 for 10 years which is virtually unheard of up here, and reduce my amortization by 10 years. I'm not going to lie, I am bragging. Really proud of myself for correctly predicting exactly what was going to happen in spite of every politician in central banker assuring me that it wasn't going to happen.