My salary didn’t change at all, but homes went up 82%. The money I saved for a down payment and my salary no longer are good enough for this home and many others. This ain’t even a “good” home either. It was a 200k meh average ok home before. Now it’s simply unaffordable
Also here in Europe this is the type of construction we use for a garden shed, not a house.
Even when we do modern timber frame, it’s generally still brick or block at the bottom. How long do these houses last in the US? I imagine a lot of the continent is pretty humid
Timber frames are sheathed in treated plywood and then wrapped in siding. Rain doesn’t reach the wood of a barely-maintained house, exterior humidity won’t do damage in any hurry, and wood is rarely making ground contact. These houses last at least a hundred years given that this style is approaching 100 years. It’s usually storm damage through the roof that causes the rotted wood you’re imagining, not normal wear and tear.
In California at least, houses made with a wooden frame are usually on top of concrete (either a concrete slab under the whole house, or a concrete perimeter under the exterior walls), and the frame is bolted into the concrete along the entire perimeter.
Older homes often aren’t bolted into the concrete, but it’s common to retrofit this to improve earthquake resistance. Without the bolting, the house can move around during an earthquake. The government here has a program (Earthquake Brace and Bolt) where they cover part of the cost of doing this work.
Masonry (houses made of bricks, stone, etc) are much less common here, since they perform much worse in earthquakes.
👍 in Europe earthquakes luckily are less of a concern, so we care more about longevity (you’ll find many places where pretty much every house is well over a hundred years old (the oldest one in my village is about 900 years old)) and good isolation (to keep the heat inside in winter and outside in summer so we can heat less / don’t have to use air conditioning on our way to net zero)
My parents’ timber house is from the 1780s and is still solid. So, 240 years at least, give or take. I’m aware of plenty of timber houses from the 1600s that are still standing and functional as well.
Is a timber frame house from back then the same as one built post 1950 though? Some Q’s:
- Have materials/practices decreased in quality?
- Has there been a shift from a sense of pride in craft and duty to build well towards cutting corners and saving $?
- Has the density and properties of wood changed as we use smaller trees grown more quickly in monocultures compared to old-growth harvested lumber of pre 1900s?
This is because venture capitalists are buying all the homes to rent
The answer is to go somewhere cheaper. If you go far enough out of town the prices will go down.
Plus when the town grows your property value will go up and up.
The answer is to go somewhere cheaper. If you go far enough out of town the prices will go down.
So basically, somewhere no one wants to live because of distasters, is boring AF, no jobs there.
If it’s boring, then so are you. There’s plenty to do in the country, just not much that involves “going to crowded places and spending ridiculous amounts of money on things that would be 20x cheaper at a regular store”
No argument on anything else though…
You’ve never been to a rural area of the country, have you? I traveled to Idaho recently and good fuck was it boring. Hiking is fun for a few days, but then there’s 20 degree weather, snow, ice, hail, poor Internet that’s basically DSL so you can’t play any games or access the Internet. People live within 50 miles of cities for their own sanity
I once lived in a town of around 1,000 people. It had everything I needed in walking distance - a grocery store, doctors office, pharmacy, post office, restaurant, bar, and mechanic. A beautiful bike trail and river ran through the town. Fiber Optic internet was available, and there was a medium-sized town 15 minutes away with good jobs.
I just checked and the average home price is still around 100k. A 2br apartment rents for $750/mo. These places still exist, but they’re called hidden gems for a reason.
Real talk, forget about a down payment. There are a bunch of different ways to get a 0 down mortgage with varying qualifiers so that chances you qualify for one of them is quite decent.
Even if not, there are still a bunch of other ways to get low down payment mortgages for ~3% down or less.
Toss out the old adage of “20% down or bust” and keep any money saved towards it for savings for all the other costs of home/closing
This is terrible advice. Paying anything you can up front saves you several times over in the long run.
Let’s talk 500k house, 6%, 30 years, no pmi, no taxes, no extras…
Paying 100k (20%) up front you’ll pay: $863,352.76
Paying 50k (10%) up front you’ll pay: $971,271.85
Paying 0 up front you’ll pay: $1,079,190.95
Paying 20% down (100k) will save you over 200k.
If you intend to live in the house indefinitely, you’re so much better off if you put as much into the down payment as you can.
Edit: List formatting
That’s great, in theory. In reality, you’ll get stuck in a perpetual savings cycle like OP and in many cases never reach the mythical threshold.
200k savings sounds nice, but if you have to spend 5 years saving and housing prices jump 80, 90, 200% in that time that savings lead gets entirely erased.
You can always play around with your interest rate later on, but you can never change what you paid for the house
This is terrible advice. Paying anything you can up front saves you several times over in the long run.
Usually, yes, but it’s situational.
For example, I bought my house in 2009 during the depths of the Great Recession, with no down payment, and got a screaming deal. If I had decided to wait a few years to save up for a down payment, I would’ve been 500% screwed.
(That “500%” isn’t hyperbole, by the way: that’s how much more I would’ve had to spend to buy my house now instead of back then! Actually, I’d have been even more screwed than that, considering that I’d be paying ever-increasing rent the whole time, too.)
This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.
If you declare you want 100k, but let’s say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That’s likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you’ll end up saving on interest, you’ll more than lose out on rent.
Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you’d save.
Good thing what I actually said was
Paying anything you can up front saves you several times over in the long run.
My point was that the advice was terrible. Not that there are other circumstances that could make it useful. Overall, as a general rule you shouldn’t want to just hold onto debt for no reason if you have means to pay it down. It’s also why I specifically showed 10% as well rather than just the typical 20% downpayment, it furthers my point that
you’re so much better off if you put as much into the down payment as you can.
“As much […] as you can” And not just some 20% or whatever magic number.
In the lat 80s / early 90s, my SO and I saved up for 7 years to be able to afford the down payment for our first home. Now, that would be more like 20 years, which is too much.
Time to consider moving to Europe or Costa Rica or Mexico City or somewhere, if you’re in that boat now.
It’s not as bad in Germany, but pretty close. It’s a very good time to sell houses. And on top of that they are generally much more expensive than American houses to begin with.
And on top of that they are generally much more expensive than American houses to begin with.
That very much depends on the area and the house itself.
