Glad you're here, duovamp.

But the 10% down payment will require you to pay an extra insurance correct?

Not always. Look for a bank that will do 90% loan-to-value without requiring PMI.

Worst case you do 10% down and get stuck paying PMI, but if you pay it down to 80% then it'll go away.

Down payments are just to protect the bank from your home losing value in case they have to sell it. So don't feel bad about putting the least amount of money down as possible. It's purely because banks want to make sure they don't lose any money if your loan goes bad.

What a weird question. You can get a nice big 2 story in Houston (and many other parts of Texas and the southeast/southwest in general) for 200

With rates right now, 5% down is fine if you're cool with paying PMI (that's the monthly mortgage insurance you mentioned). Ours is only 60-70 am oh, but we had more liquid cash to buy all new furniture (trade off)

I recommend quicken loans, really solid and easy process, very highly rated, very good rates

Like duo said, leave a lot of wiggle room for property taxes. Like up to 100 more a month than you're quoted, possibly more if the area recently has a big increase

Make sure to budget for home and flood insurance and utilities too

how is it over there?? Are you dry?

Also, vix. As you can see, various parts of the USA are affordable. I can vouch for this generally being a good country. Complicated for sure. Definitely diverse. If you can afford a 500K home then you can live well here.

Ya the sun finally came out today and water is receding in my hood. So many parts of Houston are still super fucked though.

Glad my street withstood this historic flooding. That's another piece of advice: never buy in a flood zone (my house is right next to one, not inside it, and we almost got flooded)

Start building a house in America with your bare hands and there's a chance it'll be ready in time for when your residency is approved.

vixnix's idea of a "total shithole" is any place that a poor and/or brown person may possibly be seen.

There aren't that many brown people in Sydney. I'm not making that up. It's mostly white and chinese. There are poorer neighborhoods and by no means is there equality but 500k doesn't go far there. The USA, yes. Australia is a weird place.

My own hometown manages to be more diverse

I saw a lot of very very blatant racism towards immigrants there though.

Not a humblebrag thread. Buzz can tell you what kind of house we could buy with that budget in New Zealand in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch, which are the only places Pete could get a job.

Australia is even worse.

We can only afford that amount because our three bedroom bungalow that was a two hour commute each way from my husband's work, doubled in value. We didn't expect that to happen. We just couldn't afford anything else. We still can't afford anything else because every house in Sydney increased in value. The first house we rented in Sydney was sold while we were tenants and went for just under $900k. Now, it would be around $1.4 million. We can't pay anywhere near those prices, and four hours of travel each day, living in our own house, was very hard on us as a family.

Pete works for bank now, with offices in NY so he might get a transfer with sponsorship or whatever you call it. We have a limited window with his skill set, because there is a shortage of IT nerds with his credentials and a lot of work to do. That'll dry up in the next few years, probably. We didn't expect that to happen either. We came to Sydney for him to work in R&D at a tech firm and figured we'd rent forever.

We bought our house with a 5% deposit. We did have to pay a lot, in insurance.

The agent who sold it to us is now pushing us to sell, because our neighbour's house burned down (he was renting it out, too) and he is looking to buy our place so he has a bigger area to develop. So we're looking at other places to buy.

It's really just because we have a small opportunity to be financially independent from our children in retirement which I feel like is the decent thing to do. I can't imagine having to support my parents or watch them struggle in their old age and I don't want my kids to live with that either.

My husband's parents divorced when he was three (his mum left his Dad) and when his Dad died in an accident, he inherited his Dad's very small estate. His mum has made a living by attaching herself to rich men, but they never marry her and she has nothing. So every time she leaves a boyfriend she ends up crashing with one of my husband's cousins after he makes it clear she is not welcome to stay with us (because she'd never leave). She will probably end up sponging off us and her siblings. It sucks. I don't want us do that when I'm her age.

When I said not a total shithole, I actually meant the house. It was probably the wrong word to use.

I should have said:

Where can you buy a house for $500k that is not a total shitheap, within 1 hour commute of IT jobs.

Approximately 0.53 houses.

Don't expect a housing bubble burst like a decade ago because that large sector of millennials are moving into the marketplace and demand does not look like it will wane anytime soon.

denver is basically run by rent-seekers. my 650 sqft 2/1 apartment with weird low frequency hums is $1300. heard a statistic on the radio that only 1/3 of housing starts in the denver metro area are valued at less than $400k.

capitalism is a disease

i believe that the way to correct the market is to charge a 25% tax on all home sales above $400k that would go to public housing.

Capitalism was a mistake.

I locked in a 15 yr mortgage a few years ago at 2.8%

This was an affordable and charming yet diverse town until all the luxury apartments, Starbucks, and wolfgang's steakhouse popped up

https://m.trulia.com/rental-communit...ille-NJ-08876/

How ridiculous is this? How is anyone meant to afford this? I don't want to know the people that would.

This is why I trash talk granite countertops. It's a small way that neighborhoods become gentrified and also an example of lifestyle creep.

Why can't housing be affordable?

the mistake are the FED Marduk Ass-lickers that print money out their ass and lend it out cheaply to banks who were then ordered by the gubmint to lend it to sub-prime prospects. When it went bust -- and despite 90% of the public not wanting to bail the banks out -- the gubmint bailed out the banks who then leaned on all those defaulted loans and bought back all those houses on the cheap.

Legalised theft, in effect. It's what gubmint does best, besides fooling the likes of you to think privatizing the gains and socializing the losses is what Capitalism is. It's not when the government manipulates markets, that's the other one.

That's awesome. Must have been a huge downpayment huh?

Totally accurate

hate to be a linguistic prescriptivist but:

capitalism

noun

an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.