Quote
happyorb
You're like a virgin telling someone how to fuck because you read about it in a book. Just wait till you have to go through it my friend, and all your loft ideals hit reality. Also paying rent is not very smart when you could be getting an actual return on your investment with a house or condo. You might as well be throwing that money out the window. You don't need to drop 500K on a house when for 150K you could by a condo much nicer then living in someones basement apartment for just a little more a month or even less in some cases. I'm only paying 200 more a month then when I was renting and my condo is already up 40K from when I bought it and I own it.

I've bought properties and items on loans - just not a house. So save the "You're so inexperienced" bullshit copout for someone else.

I am getting a return on my investment by paying rent. You don't pay maintenance fees on your condo? I'm finding it hard to believe that your rent was $200 less than :

1) A mortgage with interest that you claim the payment is $500 in excess of what you expected.
2) Maintenance fees and land taxes.

If that's the case there's another difference at play - such as geographic location or size. A condo that would be of similiar size and location to my apartment would cost in the range of $400,000 or more. My rent is only $1700. Lets assume for number crunching purposes that I did buy a condo at that price with 20% down. That's an $80,000 down payment, a mortgage for $320,000 at 6.25% fixed on a 30 year my payment would be in the range of $1000/month. Lets further assume a maintanance fee of $500 for a total of $1500/month. I'm saving $200/month and building equity at a rate of $11,000/year plus appreciation which on average matches inflation (and condo's FYI don't even match inflation on average). Now, if I just kept that $80,000 in my portfolio which has annualized apprecation of 15-30%, I'm making significantly more money with that. A house is even more skewed in favor of renting by comparison since there's a whole myriad of extra costs involved. I'm also giving you the benefit of not deducting fees or calculating maintenance fee increases or calculating opportunity costs of buying and selling.

A condo is also not a house - which is what we're talking about. A house has a number of extra line item charges - like heater/roof/infrastructure and property maintenance. In short, you're trying to wedge your situation (annoyed at your mortgage broker) into my post which is about mortgages on houses that people cannot afford. You obviously didn't go the route I'm criticizing so why are you offended at what I'm saying when it doesn't apply to you?