What single item improved the quality of your life over you got it? (Buyed it/got as present/made it)

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A house. My mortgage is cheaper than rent, and now I get to actually address annoyances with my living conditions.
It's almost 100 years old, and a bit of an fixer upper, but the important stuff is solid. Last summer I invested in proper drainage around the foundation so that I can start making the basement livable. This year I invested in a proper bathroom. Next year it's a new kitchen. And if time allows I'll start rebuilding the basement mainly for one extra bed room and an office.
- God I wish my mortgage was cheaper than rent lol.
  
  Hold onto it long enough and it will be eventually. Home ownership is the only real cheat code we have against inflation.
  
  Oh yea 💯
  It’s just gonna take a while. My PITI is 3350/month.
  
  Depends on market. In Vancouver existing rentals are controlled until you move, the house sells, or you are reno-evicted. This involves evicting the tenant to "fix up the suite" and then renting it out at a much higher rate.
  There is also the move to evict for a " family member" to move in but often this is abused to get low paying tenants out.
  New mortgages are much more than existing rent here. As much as renters go through credit checks, I think landlords should too as you don't want to rent a place where they can't afford the interest rate increases. Often they cheap out on repairs and usually sees the place being sold or one of the above abuses of the evictions to get a higher paying tenant in.
  The market is really tight in places like Vancouver and Toronto. The interest rate hikes will eventually catch up to most renters as properties are moved/sold.
- This is a good one. I finally teamed up with family to invest in a house last year. I've found a lot of issues that I've since fixed, especially with the electrical. There's still a lot to fix, but I'm elated that I can actually take action to fix stuff.
  While renting, my hands were severely tied. The only benefit with renting was that if anything was literally broken, it would be fixed by the landlord, free to me. "Fixed" is subjective, usually done as cheaply as possible, which is often making things less convenient.
  Now I can have things fixed correctly, making things more convenient overall for me and my family.
  Long term, we're planning on renovating and adding another kitchen and bathroom, possibly another entrance and I'm considering splitting the HVAC for one portion of the place and almost splitting it into two independent homes that are conjoined.
- Same, cut my monthly housing cost by almost $1000 two years ago. So many good things have happened as a result as well, because it was a move between regions and opened up alternative employment options not previously available. As a result I also doubled my income.
- My mortgage is cheaper than Rest
  That doesn't make any sense. Unless the market at your country is completly broken, that simply does not happen.
  
  Australia checking in: mortgage repayments are absolutely cheaper than rents. Especially if you bought pre-pandemic.
  Source.
  
  This only talks about rent. And when rent increases, so does the value of the property, because you can get more money as rents are higher.
  If you now consider the amount of work you have to invest into owning property and the associated risk of owning a house or flat, in an ideal market its simply not possible.
  And while the housing market is imperfect due to the high burden for entrance, I have never seen a proper calculation where mortage, insurance and maintanance comes out lower than renting.
  And, as a matter of fact, it doesnt even in your own example Sydney: https://www.smh.com.au/money/saving/as-costs-soar-is-it-cheaper-to-rent-or-buy-20230407-p5cywp.html
  
  I'm not going to doxx myself by giving the exact address, but my landlady in 2019 wanted to sell the house we were in. She first offered the place to us for $430,000 - which would have been a discount because she wouldn't have needed an agent etc.
  Assuming we had the 20% deposit to borrow $344,000 and taken her up on that offer, our current repayments would have been about $464 per week. Even without the discount, repayments would have been under $500.
  Instead, she eventually sold the property and we had to move to a smaller house where we are now paying $650 per week. Going from a 4 bedroom house with a yard to a 3 bedroom townhouse sharing the block with two other residences. No yard. Admittedly, we moved a suburb closer to the CBD.
  Take a look at Real estate for a 3+ bedroom house within 10km of any Australian city, you'll see that $650 is not extravagant by any means.
  
  The 20 % deposit has to be taken into the calculation as well.
  You are completly neglecting insurance.
  You are negleticing maintanance.
  You are comparing two different properties.
  
  The 20% deposit is the entire point. It's the barrier of entry to home ownership that keeps people renting. Of course I factored it in, it's why I spoke of a mortgage of $344k and not $430k.
  What does insurance have to do with anything? We are comparing rent to repayments. We have renter's insurance now. We'd be changing that.
  Are you saying you spend over $100 per week, every week on maintenance?
  True. We've downsized from a four bedroom house to a three bedroom townhouse. You'll just have to take my word for it that 4 bedroom houses in the next suburb go for about the same as the place we have because I've already told Lemmy enough about where I live.
  
  Often rent covers the owner's mortgage plus their benefit, so yes, it's easy for your mortgage to be cheaper than rent.
  
  Mortgage cheaper than rent here - just outside of Washington DC. (Only true when comparing like for like living spaces, same bedrooms, square feet, etc)

538 comments