You are now entering your spicy years. 🌶️
My office has quite a few fresh grads who own their own places.
Their parents bought it for them for a graduation present.
No no no see you pay a mortgage, but you won’t own anything.
Mortgage payments are cheaper than rent
My wife and I were able to buy a ridiculously priced starter home only because we had the privilege of her parents being able to help with the down payment. We had to move farther away from work than where we were renting just to be able to even consider homes.
Our mortgage is twice what our rent was, and we only gained about ~100 sq ft of interior space. Plus a whole host of problems because the previous owners were jackasses who DIYed everything and did it all wrong.
You get 0% back when you move out of an apartment. It is much more expensive to rent than own considering this, even if you sell at a loss. Only a portion of your mortgage payment (interest) won’t be able to be recouped, whereas all of the rent is gone forever.
You incur interest and fees with a home that you pay in addition to your principle. It can be seven years or more before you begin actually storing any value in that purchase because it’s eaten by the cost of borrowing.
It depends on your time horizon and relative costs of overhead and rent. NYT has a great new rent vs own calculator that really opened my eyes to how long it takes to build home equity.
Affording a mortgage is the easy part.
Then you have to somehow get your mortgage-contingent offer accepted by the seller when you’re up against cash offers, $50k over asking, with no inspection, no appraisal, unlimited possession, and a free hit of adrenochrome.
