Owning your own house is thus exposed to significant downside risks that can hit both your income and your assets simultaneously. Imagine being a Ford employee who bought a house in Detroit in 2007. The auto employers ran into severe issues and many cut employee pay in 2008, right when Detroit's housing prices basically fell by half. The only way to make matters worse would be to own significant amounts of Ford stock, too.
>First step is the generation of interest bearing loans, secured against the non paying owner's equity. (Effectively auto sale of part of the non-paying owner's portion of the house.)
Yeah, that's actually a great point that I should have thought more about. Co-owners have home equity, which means that you have an asset right there that the other owners can lay claim to in case of non-performance. This works better with significant down payment to ensure positive equity, too.
>Stage two is an actual sale process, which might be owner to owner, or might be dissolving entirely and selling the house. All of this is in our TiC contact.
Suppose a co-owner got a job offer halfway across the country that pays significantly more than their current salary. Would they be able to unwind their position here without significant loss of equity? Or does an entering agreement like this effectively limit your labor mobility?
(Which, fwiw, is equivalent to what any home owner taking a distant job offer would face, though more people are impacted. The fall back to renting, though, leaves other owners in the house, to ensure things are well taken care of, at least; much better than the absence landlord situation...)
Wow that's strong. Do you really believe anyone who offers property for rent at market price is morally equivalent to a conventional thief?
Part of rent pays for goods and services: construction costs, upkeep costs, administration costs, insurance costs, etc. Insofar as it does that, I believe that it is a healthy net-positive economic exchange.
Rent also partly goes to pay an individual or company for the service of everyone else staying away from that particular chunk of space. That's the problematic part.
See also: banks selling mortgages are financial arms dealers profiting off of exacerbating all of this.
The real trick is figuring out what to do about it and how, of course.
That sounds like a general aversion to any property rights or right to privacy at all, if you mean that you're paying for nobody else to come and be in the property at the same time as you. Not sure how it's specific to rent?
It's not an aversion to property rights in general. In particular, it isn't an aversion to allowing private ownership of the means of production (communism) or, on the flip side of the modern acceptability coin, private ownership of people (slavery).
You're right that the phrasing of the argument was general. There are more specific moral arguments on every side of every one of these, but the practical side of it always boils down to: how do you preserve incentives in a market's growth phase while discouraging rents (in the economic sense of the word) in the steady state?
That's a tricky one, and I don't claim to have a general answer, but I'm pretty sure that in the particular case of land it has something to do with society not making unbounded promises in exchange for bounded goods, e.g. of eternal, transferable land exclusivity to a private entity in exchange for building a log cabin on it. From that perspective, the government of past generations stole the exclusivity rights from modern citizens, and the present landowners are in a situation similar to any other possessor of stolen goods.
Conversely, if there's an earthquake/fire/mold problem, then the equity holder is on the hook and the renters can just move on.
It also means: no property taxes, maintenance costs, stamp duty, and it makes it easy to move.
No rent means you're spending more on housing, as you need to pay for someone's mortgage, costs and their profit, so it means you save less and so have less liquid capital, and also don't have any non-liquid capital in your equity.
> It also means: no property taxes, maintenance costs, stamp duty
No you're paying for all that, via your rent.
> Rent means you're spending more on housing
That's not a contradiction; liquidity has a cost. Yes, by tieing up capital in property purchase, you can, on average, trade liquidity for lower total cost if you are using the property forever. (Whether the actual total cost ends up being lower if you ever decide to move depends on market conditions and timing and transaction costs; transaction costs on both ends of a home purchase or sale are a lot higher than entering or exiting a residential lease.)
If I pay $2000 a month rent I'm always going to have less liquid capital than if I pay $1000 a month mortgage, aren't I? The mortgage payer ties up their money in the equity so it's not liquid, but the rent payer's money is just gone, so it's infinitely not liquid, and on top of that more of their money is gone.
When you've paid off the mortgage the mortgage payer has more liquid capital, and a property.
I don't know who you think ends up paying for maintenance and taxes in a rented property - it's the renter, through their rent.
Equally correctly, the landlord pays them, and landlords that can't at market rents on top of any purchase financing that they are still paying go out of the landlord business.
Most precisely, where, as is usually the case, neither supply nor demand are either haveperfectly elastic or inelastic, the costs are effectively split between renters and landlords in some ratio; the market rents are higher but the financial profits are lower than they would be if the costs involved were not a factor.
What I’m saying is that you don’t (usually) get to buy a house for $0 down. So it’s never a choice of $2000/mo for rent vs $1000/mo for mortgage. It’s more like $20k cash + $2000/mo for rent vs $20k equity + $1000/mo mortgage. Over long enough time horizons the monthly payments don’t matter and it’s a question of which investment appreciates more.
Even if your mortgage interest is greater than property value appreciation you could conditionally still come out ahead as compared to the available alternatives.
Diversity, leverage, better appreciation: if you're not already wealthy you can really only pick 1 (maybe 2) out of the 3.
And this ignores the value of having stable monthly living expenses, something not otherwise possible without rent control. You can of course buy cheap land, but such places are typically remote from employment opportunities and, while possible, that approach is just another form of speculation--people will readily share stories about living in the country and telecommuting to a high paying job (successful speculation), but few would ever discuss how they ended up stuck in a cycle of minimum wage employment (unsuccessful speculation).
That's wrong - the futures market is easily available if you have $10k, and offers rock-bottom costs for embedded leverage due to arbitrageurs. It varies based on the contract in question, but the two-year treasury futures contract offers roughly 400x leverage. Generally they offer you as much leverage as you can handle before overnight price moves will eventually wipe you out, so you definitely want to use less than they're offering.
But what's your exposure? Home mortgages are almost always non-recourse loans, limiting your losses to your initial down payment.
I don't think speculation in the futures market is a very good justification to the argument that home ownership is in general a poor investment--IME the conventional thinking in economic circles. I stand by my larger point that home ownership is a categorically sub-par investment only for those already with substantial wealth.
If you pay 20% down plus 4% upfront in closing costs on a $1 million dwelling, and then pay mortgage of $3,800/mo (which is fairly realistic for a conventional loan), it'll be more than 5 years before you break even, in liquid capital and presuming nothing is extracted from equity and ignoring any property maintenance costs that landlords have that would be rolled into rent for most renters, with a renter paying $7,600 for a similar dwelling which would actually represent a quite high rental yield.
To add to this, if you own, you are stuck in one area. Selling and buying has closing costs. I might be biased because I prefer the markets more than anything but index fund investing on its own can give you better returns than owning. IMO, owning and renting out a portion is the best return, or rental properties run by a property management company, especially if you own property in a LCOL area.
Fundamentally, landlords capture any and all surplus value.
https://business.financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgage...
I co bought a house with my wife and another couple. We spent about 18 months figuring out the legal agreement, including many permutations on failure to pay. Fwiw, our 'failure to pay' arrangement is in two steps. First step is the generation of interest bearing loans, secured against the non paying owner's equity. (Effectively auto sale of part of the non-paying owner's portion of the house.) Stage two is an actual sale process, which might be owner to owner, or might be dissolving entirely and selling the house. All of this is in our TiC contact.
On the flip side, we were able to pay 40% down on an awesome place that we couldn't have done individually, and even the lowest earner is getting significant equity because of the way we've structured our terms.
Rent is theft.