I had the same home ownership experience...I kept waiting for it to get better but it just got worse. Really took a toll on my partner and I's mental health. Owned for just shy of 10 years. Been renting for a little over 2 years now after finally getting out of it. Renting has its own pains, but that stuck feeling of home ownership + all the maintenance it entails far eclipses rental annoyances in my opinion.

I never hear anyone discuss that - everyone I ever talk to seem to experience nothing but joy - I'm glad that I'm not crazy for having a less than stellar outlook on the whole endeavour.

Definitely not crazy. I think some people feel pressured to make their life look like it's going well at all times so the ones that are having a hard time just don't talk about it.

Are these problems that would have shown up on a survey, I assume that like in the UK you did due diligence on the property first.

Due diligence will only go so far, though. Last time we bought, our surveyor was clear that there were parts of the property they would not be able to inspect, and obviously they could not give any assessment of the state of those parts. For example, they weren't allowed to move the seller's furniture to check underneath or behind it, and naturally there would be structures and services that couldn't be inspected without taking floors up or the like. We have since identified several significant defects that were missed as a result of those limitations, but there is nothing either we or our surveyor could realistically have done to anticipate them given there were no visible warning signs in accessible areas.

Some were - we knew we needed a new furnace, and needed to get our fascia repainted, but others, like having our waterline freeze, weren't things I don't think the inspector can look for. Ultimately the inspector can only see what they see, and you're taking on responsibility for the rest.

Information asymmetry between buyers and sellers is pretty high. Most home "inspectors" rely upon referrals from agents, so they tend to provide favorable inspections. And their agreements usually indemnify them against recourse. Many buyers don't realize this and think that their stamp of approval is valid.

You can always try to find someone you can relatively trust to do an inspection but a good contractor can be just as hard to find, and finding one willing to take a day out of his busy schedule to checkout the home you're interested in can be difficult.

It's not an investment if you live in the property.

Yes and no.

I don’t consider a home an investment in the traditional sense.

I do consider a paid off house to be worth the amount of money that I would have to save to have a safe rate of return to live somewhere minus maintenance and property taxes.

If a paid off house will save me $12000 a year. The value of that house to me is $12000/.04

Also, a house is a great inflation hedge. Rent goes up with the market. The mortgage stays the same. Property taxes and insurance can go up.

> Also, a house is a great inflation hedge. Rent goes up with the market. The mortgage stays the same. Property taxes and insurance can go up.

It's actually even better than that: if inflation goes up, you pay back the mortgage with cheaper dollars than you bought it with. If you're expecting higher inflation in the future (and it hasn't yet been priced into interest rates) a house is a great purchase.

The flip side is that if you get deflation (say, an economic recession hits and a lot of people in your area lose theirs jobs, possibly including you), a house is a leveraged asset, and you can quickly lose everything. As many homeowners found out in 2009.

But you have to live somewhere. The eviction process is a lot faster than the foreclosure process. A landlord is incentivize to evict you as fast as possible. The bank does not want your house - especially during a recession where the value is dropping and then they become responsible for insurance and upkeep.

Anecdotally when my parents bought their house in 1978, the $600 a month they were paying on their mortgage was a slight stretch. When they were in their last year in 2008, that amount was laughably small.

> Anecdotally when my parents bought their house in 1978, the $600 a month they were paying on their mortgage was a slight stretch. When they were in their last year in 2008, that amount was laughably small.

Hopefully wage growth keeps up with inflation then.

That’s the beauty of a fixed mortgage. Wage growth doesn’t have to keep up with inflation. The mortgage stays the sane - the only thing that goes up is the property taxes and insurance. One of the few benefits of living in one of the most conservative suburbs of one of the more conservative states is their aversion to raising taxes.

But the only way to make it hurt less is if you have more spending power in relation to it - if your wages don't rise much, but the price of living goes up, the mortgage is still going to hurt just as much.

The eviction process varies quite a bit by municipality. Evicting someone in San Francisco is _much_ harder than evicting someone in another city. I would much rather rent in SF than own a home.