this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
446 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
75645 readers
3462 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So old man time. In the early nineties things did not look great. Almost any college degree was not bringing in a salary one could like think about having a family with. Then came the late nineties and dot com and tech jobs were like the only thing that paid to possibly have what was, in many peoples mind, the typical middle class life. You know own your own home thing eventually. Since then its been tech or bust and now tech is bust and there is no go to field for people to run to.
Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.
A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.
It's almost exactly the same house and lot. It's insane.
Have you done the math on it though? Yeah, a mortgage stays constant, but to get a mortgage, you need a down payment, closing costs, and whatever you're paying your real estate agent. And then there's maintenance costs, utilities (most purchasable homes are larger than what you'd otherwise rent), probably extra costs to get around, etc.
If you instead took that down-payment and additional costs and invested it in a diversified stock portfolio, how would they compare?
I'm in a similar boat where my mortgage is now less than half of what rent would be, but my house is growing in value far slower than stocks. Here's a nerdy video discussing rent vs buy, and the result is that it's more of a wash than most people assume. This is extra true if you properly account for repair costs (i.e. if you DIY, what's the value of your time?). The decision to rent vs buy is far less consequential in terms of long-term financial impact than most people assume.
I bought my own house and the price of owning a house is nothing compared to the price of renting.
Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is a moron who genuinely does not know what they're talking about.