Aka Gaza style

And saving the owners hundreds a month in vacant house insurance costs.

You paid a mortgage payment (and then some) and only received shelter, when you should have received shelter and equity in the home. Are you trying to say your friends did you a favor?

It's nice that your friends didn't screw you I suppose, and maybe your friends will give you a payout proportional to the amount you paid towards their mortgage when they sell the home, but until that happens, you did them a favor, not the other way around.

During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.

Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.

The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don't have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.

Taxes and maintenance wouldn't be included in the mortgage. A new roof is expensive, so are HVACs, floors, etc. These things will need to be replaced. A rule of thumb is to budget 1% to 4% of the total house value per year. For a 400k house that could be up to $16k extra per year, or $1333 more per month than your mortgage. Those costs for maintenance and taxes don't go towards paying down your principal so they aren't directly gaining equity. With the rent and invest option, the investing is the counter to equity. When you sell your house you usually pay a realtor commission. There are a lot of factors to include when seeing if rent & invest is better than mortgage & buy.

That being said, I prefer to buy. I don't plan on moving anytime soon.

I just did the math for renting/investing vs buying, including rent/house value yearly increase, income taxes on capital gains, mortgage rate, down payment amount, and initial house price. The results indicate a strong dependence on rent price and taxes/insurance for buying. I found that renting/investing can be a better financial option depending on the inputs. As another commenter pointed out, the main reasons are taxes/insurance and the greater time return rate for market vs home value. This was surprising to me, so I'm glad I ran the numbers. That tells me the real difference is your life choice of wanting a place of your own vs renting and moving around.

It depends, it can definitely be more worthwhile to rent.

As always, you have to run the numbers. Ownership also comes with hidden costs. Property taxes and maintenance aren't cheap.

I'd say that's what separates a good landlord from a bad landlord, is if they are intentionally adding knives and grenades.

mine has a gtr

I tired to rent an apartment once. I had 100k in liquid in my bank account. I showed them this but it wasn't good enough. I'm 1099 and officially make very little money (it's all above board and legal. I have a CPA.)

They needed paystubs. I don't have pay stubs. I don't even get paychecks.

It's kind of a weird catch 22 for them. They're ok with some bloke making 20 bucks an hours with nothing in savings as long as he can "prove" his income but someone with actually money is just too much of a risk.

Fair enough, prioritise people who actually work and do things. They deserve housing before anyone else.

Then also people who do not work and make money off of others people's work may have a house.

As if we'll be allowed to flee, or that the dollar will be worth anything by then.

Vienna isn't a bad model but it's progressively becoming less significant because in capitalism you have to be constantly fighting to maintain the little progresses you make.

We've had better, such as the Soviet Union, where housing was a guaranteed right, rent costed 3% of the average income, and homelessness was abolished.

Oh yes

https://youtu.be/MA3QWPXm9TU