I’m guilty of ignoring my water heaters. Had my backup start to leak and it cost $1500 to replace. So I immediately bought a new anode rod for my primary tank. Drained/flushed it and replaced the old rod which was completely gone. It was an easy task but you will need a cheap impact wrench, 1 1/16" socket and chain link anode rod to make it easy.

It’s something you need to do every couple of years. But I never do it.

Whats going on is decades of mismanagement of property taxes and city zoning. People fight tooth and nail to keep their property taxes low, and eventually the city has to do a big increase because they failed to increase incrementally. The bigger issue is how poorly we zone and design most north american cities.

The average car dependant suburb costs more to maintain than it generates in tax revenue. A denser area like mixed use neighbourhoods and “missing middle” housing fares far better and generates enough that it often ends up subsidizing the rest of the city, the same is usually true for denser downtowns. That trend is dying off as those denser areas demolish tax revenue generating businesses and homes to pave parking lots that don’t generate taxes to park cars from the suburbs that don’t generate enough taxes.

You can’t afford a home because for decades suburbs were given a massive tax break while denser downtowns (guess where the poors have to rent and ultimately fund the property taxes) have to subsidize car dependant expensive to maintain subdivisions (which is usually for middle class or wealthier people, especially when built new). Add in some racial demographics and we’ve basically engineered every city to have secret tax cuts for anyone rich enough to get into the suburbs.

The best part is, many cities are keeping the cycle going because the only way they are paying for maintaince of an old subdivision is by using the devleopment taxes and fees from a new subdivision. This is not sustainable and ultimately equates to kicking the can down the road to let a future generation figure it out (which is literally as simple as building cities densely again, as they had been built for 100s of years).

This hasn’t even touched yet on the urban sprawl, energy ineffeciency, and secondary effects of car dependancy that have all spawned from “the american dream” of suburbia. We seriously need to reconsider how we zone, build, and get around our urban spaces.

Renting somewhere centrally located with good access to high quality transit and other amenities would likely be cheaper than owning.

I’d need to see an example. I’ve never heard of a place that was cheaper to rent than own after five years. The break point on rentals tend to be short term stays, and mostly because of the cost of real estate transactions themselves.

For public housing it can be cheaper. But that’s never going to be a centrally located high-rise.

Yeah, that’s the thing. The market went upside down. Maybe 1993? Before that renting made sense even from a financial perspective in many areas. But now when housing is double or treble inflation? Nope. Sink money into real property at your first opportunity.

We have fucked up the entire “developed” world so much that if you start poor you stay poor and housing is a large part of that equation.

I personally grew up quite impoverished and me and my wife did manage to get our home in medium COL area. We don’t have exceptionally high paying jobs nor did we have any help from our families. We just made a lot of effort to build our credit. We’re also not old at all under 30 to not dox myself too much.

A lot of people simply have some wrong assumptions about the amount needed to get a loan. We put down 3%, sure we didn’t get the most competitive rate and our payment is higher, but it worked out to the cost of our then comparable rent. There’s quite a few federal programs that ensure the opportunity for a low downpayment mortgage for first time homeowners.

I never said it was free and I never said it wasn’t a debt. Like obviously it is a debt, anyone that reads “tapping into home equity” as meaning free money doesn’t understand basic finance.

It doesn’t have to extend your mortgage. You can take it out as a second line of credit as an additional loan to pay back monthly. Obviously the ideal would be to have the savings to cover necessary home repairs, but if you don’t this is typically the cheapest way to get a loan to do necessary maintenance.

Sounds like your sister used her equity to refinance her loan and recieved a payout for the difference. That’s going to restart your mortgage and is probably not the best way to go about accessing home equity.

So yeah don’t take on reckless debt you can’t payback. You can responsibly use your home equity for maintenance if you need to though.

Yeah, and I think it's not about history, it's about mortgage initial payment, which is some% of target property cost.

And the idea that it's bad thing is just stupid. Anyone read about previous housing bubble remembers how people took multiple mortgages because you could let your house for more than you pay for mortgage per month, and as crisis hit, they couldn't repay. It was very much enabled by zero mortgage initial payments.