Thumper Thinks Out Loud

My emails of late oddly look similar. I can parapharase them together and create one cohesive message out of 20.

Renting is like flushing your money down the toilet. You need to buy a house. Build equity.

I don’t disagree. But I should bring up a few things:

• We live in Northern CA in an area where $400,000 will buy you a smallish house in not the best neighborhood.
  
• A mortgage payment on said 400K house is roughly $2300
  
• The property tax rate here is 1.01%, adding approximately $335 to that.
  
• PMI would add, what, $200 a month?
  
• Homeowners insurance is a lot more than renter’s insurance.
  
• We only want to buy once, and right now the houses we most like are priced well over $600,000—and they’re not these huge McMansions.
  
• If we did manage to buy here, the housing bubble would burst and we’d be stuck with a house worth half of what we paid.
  
• According to a piece on the news, houses in the area are overvalued by 55%
  

Granted, if everything fell into place we’d love to buy. But wanting a thing and getting it are two different things. Right now renting is cheaper per month than buying, and in the end we simply can’t afford to buy a house right now.

So yeah. Renting in the long run does seem like a waste, I totally agree with that. But it beats bankruptcy.