My companion, Alex, and I have been living in our house for about nine years(?) now. We decided to go ahead and buy the place this year, mostly because we could get a mortgage for about the same price as our rent. I'll leave out the boring details, but financially it was a good move. We did this just a couple of months ago. In fact, we haven't even made our second payment yet! One of the first things we decided to do was to get cable hookup. We needed to have the internet on our home computer, so we just bought the bundle. The house has never had cable put in it, so the installer had to do the whole shebang. While doing it, he put one of his legs through the ceiling in our office. The company he works for promptly sent someone out to repair the ceiling, and they did a good job with it, so really besides the cleanup after the initial break, it wasn't a big deal. Well, about a week and a half ago, I noticed water dripping from our a/c vent in the bathroom. Before two days had past, a good portion of the ceiling in there was wet, dripping, and stained. To make a long story short, we had to have our a/c unit replaced this past week. The bathroom ceiling now needs to be replaced too. Now, it's been a long time since last I was a homeowner, and I remember the cost and work that can be involved with it, but two months/two ceilings is getting a bit ridiculous. This certainly has the potential to be a cumbersome adventure. I feel like the warranty just ran out on my car!
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Dude, seriously! We had to replace the fridge, stove, hot water heater and furnace in the first two years we owned this house. Crazy.
I hear a lot of the "financial gurus" argue that a house is not an asset, because in order to maintain value, you have to reinvest so much money. That has certainly been my experience thus far. When we sold the house in Motown, it was for the same amount of money which we paid for it. So all the money we put into improving it, maintaining it, etc... disappeared. I think we still ended up ahead compared to renting for the same time period, but it took five years or so to sell it from its initial listing.
Maybe I should restate that in case someone who doesn't know me is reading this. That's five years after a divorce, with neither of us living in it! We were forced to rent it out and play that whole landlord thing just because the market was soft, and even at a great price, it took that long to get out from under it. Maybe that's how we should refer to the home buying experience. You don't move "into" a new home, you move "under" it. I guess the alternative is to rent, and give ALL of your money to someone else with absolutely no return. I'll save my "landlord rhetoric" for another blog.
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