House Purchase Advice

[G.Irish]

Owning your own house sure beats the shit out of renting an apartment and pissing money away.

It depends, and the attitude that 'owning a house is always the right choice' is part of what caused the real estate bubble.

Renting beats being underwater by $100k in a house you don't want to live in long term. Plenty of people went by the whole, "real estate always goes up" idea and bought houses that have lost so much value that they can't move if they wanted to. Sucks to have 5 digits or even 6 digits of negative equity.

Now prices aren't stupidly inflated anymore so it's making more sense to buy in a lot of areas, but even then you've gotta be prepared for the chance that home values may fall a more or lay stagnant, depending on where the house is.

Buy the first thing you see. Houses arent going to last around here.

Why be in a hurry to make a purchase that has tremendous repercussions on your financial future? It's not like we're going to see housing prices shoot up 20-30% year over year again.