Dithering over real estate
Mar. 30th, 2018 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcWe rent our house. It is livable but a bit small for us: doubling the size of the kitchen and adding an extra bedroom would be a boon that we would ongoingly appreciate. Still, our landlord stays out of our hair, has not raised our £695 per month rent and calls out people to fix things when we ask.
We could, for example, buy a £190k upper maisonette in the center of Perth. We would gain more living space and our monthly payments would then be going to our own equity rather than another's. I could take the train into Dundee instead of driving. The children would have to walk a couple of miles into school instead of being provided with a bus. I have very mixed feelings about this possibility and some of my reluctance is irrational.
We once bought a house in rural Ohio. I much liked it. It cost a lot to heat in the winter but apart from that I enjoyed living there and I thought it was great. However, cutting a long story very short: our circumstances changed such that we had to move and the financial crisis had happened in the meantime so our negative equity caused much stress and cost us dearly. So, seeing that the maisonette has been on the market for months, one of my fears would be being stuck with it if we had to move. Why would we have to move? The obvious thought is that my job is not secure but given that I have now been in the role for more than five years, my annual performance appraisals go well and my boss keeps winning further grant funding, perhaps it is above averagely secure.
Intuitively I would much prefer a detached house. Having neighbors on both sides and below bothers me. However, it might bother others too which is why the maisonette is affordable to us at all. I can't concretely think of bothersome issues that are likely to come up but I don't like the idea of perhaps having to negotiate with neighbors over shared issues with the property. I really want a simple life.
Another complication is that one constraint over where we live is being in the catchment area for the children's high school. In four years' time that disappears as a constraint. If they both are off to university elsewhere and work summer jobs there then we may need such a large house no longer. Once the children are more properly independent then I can do what I actually want to do and buy a small rural house in the US. Especially, one with a basement: I very much miss those. I don't know if the local problem is the water table or volcanic bedrock or what but there is so little storage space in local properties.
So, even if it makes practical sense to buy the maisonette, I have emotional resistance to buying a family home at all given how disastrously it went last time, also to buying one somewhere I don't even want to be long-term. My current existence is not too bad and perhaps I ought to favor the devil I know.
I wonder if instead the cash that I could have put down for a house could still be made to work for me in some other way. I don't think that it would make sense to actually instead buy a house in the US and rent that out for a few years because it would be a hassle to figure what that does to my taxes, especially on the UK side, and I would expect the answer to be that it's more tax efficient to live in the house one owns instead of being a landlord who themself rents.
Not binding our cash up in property also means that I am more able to use it to ride out a period of unemployment or start my own business or somesuch if it came to that. I can't shake the sense that buying in Perth is the obvious, conventional choice and that I am missing some better option because my thinking is too limited and I am not clear-headed enough to see the real problem and solution.
We could, for example, buy a £190k upper maisonette in the center of Perth. We would gain more living space and our monthly payments would then be going to our own equity rather than another's. I could take the train into Dundee instead of driving. The children would have to walk a couple of miles into school instead of being provided with a bus. I have very mixed feelings about this possibility and some of my reluctance is irrational.
We once bought a house in rural Ohio. I much liked it. It cost a lot to heat in the winter but apart from that I enjoyed living there and I thought it was great. However, cutting a long story very short: our circumstances changed such that we had to move and the financial crisis had happened in the meantime so our negative equity caused much stress and cost us dearly. So, seeing that the maisonette has been on the market for months, one of my fears would be being stuck with it if we had to move. Why would we have to move? The obvious thought is that my job is not secure but given that I have now been in the role for more than five years, my annual performance appraisals go well and my boss keeps winning further grant funding, perhaps it is above averagely secure.
Intuitively I would much prefer a detached house. Having neighbors on both sides and below bothers me. However, it might bother others too which is why the maisonette is affordable to us at all. I can't concretely think of bothersome issues that are likely to come up but I don't like the idea of perhaps having to negotiate with neighbors over shared issues with the property. I really want a simple life.
Another complication is that one constraint over where we live is being in the catchment area for the children's high school. In four years' time that disappears as a constraint. If they both are off to university elsewhere and work summer jobs there then we may need such a large house no longer. Once the children are more properly independent then I can do what I actually want to do and buy a small rural house in the US. Especially, one with a basement: I very much miss those. I don't know if the local problem is the water table or volcanic bedrock or what but there is so little storage space in local properties.
So, even if it makes practical sense to buy the maisonette, I have emotional resistance to buying a family home at all given how disastrously it went last time, also to buying one somewhere I don't even want to be long-term. My current existence is not too bad and perhaps I ought to favor the devil I know.
I wonder if instead the cash that I could have put down for a house could still be made to work for me in some other way. I don't think that it would make sense to actually instead buy a house in the US and rent that out for a few years because it would be a hassle to figure what that does to my taxes, especially on the UK side, and I would expect the answer to be that it's more tax efficient to live in the house one owns instead of being a landlord who themself rents.
Not binding our cash up in property also means that I am more able to use it to ride out a period of unemployment or start my own business or somesuch if it came to that. I can't shake the sense that buying in Perth is the obvious, conventional choice and that I am missing some better option because my thinking is too limited and I am not clear-headed enough to see the real problem and solution.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-30 10:15 am (UTC)Housing gets very illiquid very quickly in depressions. It's a bet on future economic confidence.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-30 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-30 07:30 pm (UTC)