There's also loan "origination fees". If you're too poor to up front like a 1/3 of the cost then there's Private Mortgage Insurance fees tacked onto your payment which can be several hundred dollars a month until the principal, which you could be paying down with that PMI is below a certain threshold.

Then there's "closing costs" which is just a fuck you fee with the bank. If rates drop down and you want to refinance then you ahve to pay the origination fees and closing costs for that too.

It's expensive being not fabulously wealthy.

Yeah, it's fucking terrifying and a needlessly fast/complex process that seems designed to intimidate people doing it for the first time. Like everything else, it is extremely tilted in favor of people who have limitless money to burn and are doing what they're doing in order to make a profit, not survive. Solidarity, comrade.

The idea of buying a house stresses me out so much. I'm mid-forties, and the more I save, the more expensive houses get, and the higher the interest rate goes! Not to mention, I take 3 months to decide on a laptop, but you gotta pick a house quick before some asshole swoops in with a cash offer just to flip it a year later.

Don’t forget the bidding! Even if you can barely afford it, don’t you love how buying a house is like getting something on eBay?

Dont worry though, kamalas got you covered with her $25k tax credit. That should solve the housing crisis

Buying a horse is such house dick bullshit

I need to fucking put money down AND PAY FOR THE FUCKING INSPECTION

Put money down on the house or money down on the inspection? You want to be the one who pays the inspector. Otherwise the owner will hire an overlooker. Also be sure to get a real inspector and not some specialist moonlighting as a general inspector.

But otherwise, buying a house is one of if not the most Byzantine part of american society. The stakes are so high that its caked in two centuries of laws. Land ownership is the cornerstone of the cornerstone of american society. And if there is anything more important, its land scams.

If you have an experienced inspector, try to get them to give you their hunch. Hunches by experienced people mean a LOT.

Yes its stupid. What id do to make the experience a little more bearable is this. First look over the house in detail yourself before putting down money, you cant spot everything but you can look for common major problems that can be found online. Then once you get an inspection done demand a decrease in price to cover the costs of repairs to any issues you do find. Not a perfect solution but should help a bit hopefully.

Another more unorthodox tip. Look up previous owners of the house via tax records online. Not the one selling to you ones from before. Give them a call and see if they can tell you anything about the properties history let them know your a potential buyer and want to know what your getting in to. Most people will be willing to help. This only works if the house had multiple owners fairly recently BUT most houses with major issues don't stay with an owner long since they want to get rid of it.

Learn what a contingency is.

The fun don’t stop once you get the house, then you get to deal with the fun of your mortgage getting sold to a different bank every six months and having to re-register with their new system and hoping they remember to pay the insurance and taxes out of the escrow.

Not only that but you're often competing against buyers who have the entire value of the house in cash and are willing to pay over asking price and waive inspections

Oh, here is the REAL kicker too because you're doing an inspection because you don't want to get fucked by a house that is insulated with black mold, you're going to lose out on bid on the house because there are petite bourgeois dropping literal stacks of cash on the table well above asking price and forgoing inspections so they can buy the house and flip it.

Houses and cars are both terrible. Really, anything that requires going into debt to get is guaranteed to fuck you over somehow. Shit, college too.

yeah I did it for the first time 3 years ago. I had a cannonball in my gut about everything for about 60 days and at least had a friend who had gone through it I could ask all my stupid questions to.

but I will say, once you are in one, so long as you had enough cash and decent enough credit to get a non predatory loan, it's nice not living at the whims of a landlord. and you can fix shit correctly or make it how you want it. which all costs more money, but when you get something fixed the right way or make a change to suit what you want, it fucking rules every time you see it/use it.

it's one of those things that is better over time as you live in the house and cumulatively make your little changes and fixes and have more of it paid-off.

which I guess ends in an ecstatic crescendo when it's paid off and you're just paying taxes and insurance and using that discretionary income on like gold trim and leather couches and chandeliers or whatever.

has a slab foundation so like i don't fucking know what condition the plumbing is in

where I live, you can pay a plumber a few hundred dollars to snake an endoscope through all the pipes and they can catch some (but not all) serious issues

Unfortunately you have to treat it like applying for jobs. 90% of it is bullshit and basically the only way to sift through the bullshit is to already be secured.

If it requires you to put money down before an inspection than it's like a job that doesn't list the salary, you know it's bullshit.

Unfourtunatly rhenonly way to be on equal footing with the people selling is to already have housing so they can't hold it over you to accept bullshit conditins, just like job hunting.

There are decent jobs out there just like there's decent houses out there but you basically have to hear about it from a friend of a friend and skip as much of the formal "normal" process as normal for it to work.

It sucks, pretty much all of american culture is finding the 10% of something that isn't predatory capitalist bullshit.

We'll only make laws for banks (better get that inspection for the property we're lien-owners of), and even then we need to make sure you pay for it.

That's capitalism, at least now. We'll make laws, but only for capitalist ownership. (But we pinky swear-promise, we all participate in capitalism, so you're like an owner too! We Swear!)

I’d rather risk having to replace the plumbing than have to continue dealing with having a landlord. Our house was affordable because it’s falling apart and I’d pick buying it again over having to continue rolling the dice with landlords. Every time. Buying our house absolutely ruined our finances and it took us about 2 years to fully recover. I still don’t know how we afforded all the hidden fees and closing costs and shit. But we did. Again, worth. Not to mention our bank doesn’t give us a hard time about being late on our mortgage as long as I make a payment arrangement and stick to it. I’ve never had a landlord who didn’t immediately give me an ultimatum if I didn’t pay in full exactly on time.

You don't need to pay anyone to get it inspected, at least in the UK. I inspected my own house with a few mates who are in trades. Cost me the price of a few beers.

yeah it sucks. I want to get out of apartments but I'm dreading having to participate in the housing market