Buying a House?

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Right now I live in an apartment that costs $450 a month for rent. It's about 750 square feet, and is a decent place to live. However, I've been seeing and hearing a lot lately that buying a house and making monthly payments on it is actually cheaper than paying rent. Is this true? Or is this only for people who are renting, like, really high level apartments?

Well I don't know about over there but here you can set how much you pay per month but doing this extends the time of how long you'll be paying the mortgage off. When I was looking at a house a while ago it would've been £300 a month over 25 years. But, this doesn't matter as you can optionally pay off big chunks of it whenever you want.

Plus, the house is yours so you can do whatever you want to it within building regulations your country has, which is a huge advantage.

The hard part of buying a house is coming up with a big down payment, typically 20% of the purchase price. If you don't, you may need to buy private mortgage insurance, which is money you pay to insure that the lender gets paid if you default on the mortgage.

In the USA, depending on your tax situation, you may be able to deduct the money you spend on mortgage interest.

What I found is that once you pay off the mortgage, you have way more money for saving, investing, and spending. So, I'd advise getting a shorter, rather than a longer term mortgage.

I save a lot of money by doing my own maintenance and repairs. It helps that I know how to use the machine shop in the basement.

I ended up [after saving for decades] getting a low-end tin can to get away from rent, it was all the money I could beg/borrow/steal, but it was worth it. no more rent. it is awfully far out in the sticks but that is a small price to pay for no more rent. anybody that can do likewise is highly recommended to.

Rent must be cheap where your at OP. The rent here is over 2wice that & it's a small two bedroom townhouse apartment. Perhaps it's more expensive here because it's the biggest city in Vermont. My girlfriend's Section 8 pays most of it thou.

Markets vary from location to location. I paid about as much for my mortgage as I would have for rent, but as a homeowner, I also had to pay property taxes and insurance. Since I put 20% down and had excellent credit, I was able to pay those out of pocket rather than paying extra on my mortgage each month into escrow.

If you want to pay your loan off a lot faster, make extra payments to principal from the start. In the first year, if you make only the minimum payments, you will only pay interest for the most part.

Also, repairs are expensive, and contractors can be unreliable. Overall, I'd still recommend home ownership if you can swing it.

median home value where i live:

$1,059,000


(i bloody hate local tourism, end me now)

if the OP is willing to make a long commute every day, exurban properties are both generally cheaper by far than the city, as well as having a fraction of the property tax a city dweller would have to pay. my property tax is a THIRD of what i'd have to pay had I gotten a place closer to civilization. the potential homebuyer is also gonna have to consider limiting his house search to HUD houses that require some sweat equity, to get the best deal. home inspector is your friend. also, a house is a lot more to heat and cool than a flat, so you might give higher priority to finding a house with its own heat pump as well as up to date insulation. consider the neighborhood also, are there noisy or obnoxious neighbors near the houses you are checking out? remember them so as to avoid them. make sure you are not TOO FAR from a hospital. you might do a little detective work and scope out the neighborhood in advance, ask the locals about how things are in the neighborhood, crime rate and such.
p.s., the median home value in my neck of the woods is prolly about $90k. most of us are poor. thankfully we are not too close together.