That was the sense in which I was using it. Game Developer magazine always used to have a section where they had developers do a "post mortem" on projects they had finished and they were very instructive on what had gone well/poorly.
This argument only makes sense when home prices stay flat or go up, which isn't always the case. I'd rather be "flushing my money away" each month than get stuck tens of thousands of dollars underwater on a mortgage.
Except you are not necessarily "building equity". House prices can decline and at the same time you do have to put money into the building in the form of renovations to maintain its current substance. What is even worse is that buying a house on a mortage with say a 10 or 20% down payment means three things:
1) The majority of your net worth is probably in that building so you're badly diversified across asset classes,
3) You are massively leveraged on that one position.
2) You are holding an extremely illiquid investment that could take months or even years to sell. This will probably be worst when when you want to sell the most.
All three of those are marks of a questionable investment.
You're flushing money every month with the interest on a mortgage + taxes + maintenance. You just have to hope that this is less than the amount you'd be paying in rent. (assuming property prices stay flat)
Property prices never stay flat because of inflation.
This matters because the payments on a fixed-rate mortgage do stay flat; they don't adjust with inflation.
I just refinanced to 4.5%. Long-run inflation is 3% so my actual cost to borrow is 1.5%. With the mortgage deduction it is just over 1.1%--nearly free money, in other words.
It's true that I pay property taxes. In my jurisdiction they are just over 1%, so now my actual cost to own is maybe about 2.2%.
Maintenance is a bit of a red herring...most straight maintenance is inexpensive (cleaning, painting) or optional (fancy landscaping).
Most expensive "maintenance" is actually improvements. For example last year I replaced both my A/C unit and furnace. It was a substantial cash outlay, but the new units are far more performant and efficient than the old ones. If I stay in the house another 5 years I will completely recoup that investment in lower monthly energy payments. And if I don't, the modern new appliances will allow me to set a higher asking price in a sale.
LOL the political reported rate is what the .gov is willing to provide in COLA increases. It has nothing to do with actual costs. You're budgeting based on made up numbers provided for someone elses "pay" rate increases.
Look at say... gas prices. Double in a decade. Thats about 7% per year. Or the price of food, or medical insurance, or tuition, or price of cars, etc. Think of what real people actually spend money on.
You can get better numbers from shadowstats. Somewhere toward the low end of 6% to 10% is about right. We'll call it 7% long term average.
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.
Lets say J6P gets a 3% pay raise but the cost of everything else increased by 7%, for a generation or so. That means the money left over after food, car, etc aka the rent either directly for land or indirectly for money to buy land, will drop by about 4% per year. For awhile you can mask that by lowering interest rates, but once you reach "basically zero" like now, problems develop.
Finally the mortgage interest deduction doesn't work like that. If you pay more interest to the bank than the standard deduction fraction then you don't have to pay income tax on the fraction above that. Basically you need low income, high interest payments, and then all you save is taxes on the portion above the standard level. You're still out the same money, just not out the income tax on a small sliver of the total interest over a certain limit. I've paid enough of my mortgage off that I no longer get a mortgage interest deduction. Oh, I could file it anyway, but I'd have to pay more in taxes than just taking the std deduction. Eventually you reach AMT range and then things get weird.
If you want to rely on some random website for your financial data, that is certainly your right, but I don't think we could have much of a conversation about it.
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.
Actually you end up inflation poor, not house poor. Your house payment stays mostly fixed. In your scenario of much higher inflation than reported, rents are also likely going up. In such a case the renter will be worse off than the home owner.
No, renting is paying to put a roof over your head. In the same way that some people rent or lease cars, because it's a better financial relationship for them than owning.
And in a lot of places, rent can actually be quite a bit cheaper than interest + taxes + whatever other costs borne by the owner. This was especially true at the height of the bubble. I was paying 6% interest on a place that would have rented for about what the interest alone cost me. So I was paying as much as rent would have cost in interest, plus taxes, plus condo fees, plus losing out on the ability to earn interest on the money I had put in for the down payment.
On the other hand, I'm now paying ~3.4% interest on a place that would rent for, again, about 6% of the purchase price per year. Even including other costs, I'm coming out decently ahead.
Of course there are other reasons to own rather than rent (or vice versa) aside from just which costs more, like stability, or freedom to move. But it is not a slam dunk easy decision as to which option costs less, even after accounting for the potential equity you build when owning with a mortgage.
+1. I live in an extremely rural community where you can afford to buy a 3 bedroom home for under $100k. If you can put 20% down on a 15 year loan and pay it off in 12 years, then yes, buying is much better than renting. If you're 25 years old, from the age of 37 to retirement you've just earned almost 30 years of free living (with the exception of taxes, utilities, etc.).
At the expense of permanantly undermining your earning power and raising other living expenses by committing to live in an extremely rural community. There's a reason those houses are so cheap.
Actually if you read the article he argues otherwise. Don't fall into the banks mentality.
> If a buyer puts 10% down and the house goes down 10%, he has lost 100% of his money on paper. If he has to sell due to job loss or a mortgage rate adjustment, he lost 100% in the real world.
This reminds me of the "I will not do your tech interview." post. [1]
There's a good chance if you're applying you're either a. unemployed, looking for a job, or b. you really want to work at stripe.
If you're passionate about what you do, you're going to enjoy designing anyways, so what better way to make you stand out than doing something that benefits the company you're applying for -- working on something you'd actually be working on.
Anyone can copy designs from dribbble to make themselves look like an amazing designer.
It's not like they're going to take your design, implement it and never reply to your email.
That way someone who is saying it's crap on an iPhone5 running iOS7 won't influence the vote of someone who is on an iPhone4 running 6. Same way someone on a 3S won't be able to post "It's too slow" to put off 5 users.
Look up markupwand.com an YC alumni. The problem is harder than it looks. Now, I am not an expert in PSD format but a PSD that can be automatically converted to HTML has to be specifically formatted. For example, if you merge text layers with image layers, it becomes difficult to extract the information.
We've actually solved this and will be launching in about a week. We've been working on it for over a year now.
It runs inside Photoshop (there is no upload stage nor do you have to open up separate software) and it generates HTML and CSS that looks like a designer wrote it and slices up all your images. It also outputs LESS, SASS, HAML, Slim, Jade and I think there are some other formats I may be forgetting.
Text is output as text. If you use a Google font, it automatically links the fonts in for you.
It does not use absolute positioning so if you modify things like text and it grows taller or shrinks shorter, other items will be positioned properly (initially we did it with absolute positioning but later I figured out an algorithm to make it work the way it should, even with overlapping elements).
It's definitely not an easy problem to solve (hence why we've been working on it for over a year although not full time).
We've done some outputs now and the results are amazing.
I would link you to the website but it looks so bad right now that I don't want to show it. Anyways, we will launch in about a week so look for an announcement. If you have any questions about it, please leave a comment.
There are a bunch of those tools which run inside PS, but the point is that I really don't want to run PS. Ever. My designers do and now I have to pay / upgrade licenses too because there is no solution. I think PS is overused and abused for anything 'design' while for programmers it's an annoyance more often than not.
There is going to be some aspects of the design that can't be pixel perfect when it comes to a fully responsive site. This is because of the use of % based width to make the grid fluid.
If you're looking for pixel-perfect versions you're best off working with breakpoints and keeping the design rigid up until each breakpoint.
It's more work, but if you really want/need pixel-perfection then it's really the only way to go.
