Amen to that, this is one of the things that disturbs me about housing in the US. I was looking around Zillow the other day for house values in my neighborhood. My house's value went up by 50% since I bought it, but so did my neighbors'. Nice number on paper, but you can't really sell your house and upgrade. In fact, I would not pay anywhere close to the amount of the price of my house today if I was in the market.Hi there,
2) Contrary to popular belief, it does not help in anyway. In fact it is a hindrance. Again, unless you have overbought shelter (and plan to downsize later), or own investment properties, you are actually worse off with rising house prices. People like to celebrate rising house prices, and that makes sense from the perspective of "I sure am glad I am not paying _these_ prices now and bought when I did".. but it does not make sense from the perspective of "Wow! I made so much money". Fact is, the rising house prices means the cost of shelter went up for you as well, just more slowly compared to a renter. It will feed into rising costs and inflation across the board, making life harder for you. It will cause your property taxes and insurance to go up. In some cases if your house has appreciated by enough, you will need to worry about paying huge capital gains taxes on your house if you decide to sell and move, this means if you are doing a lateral move from one area to another and buying a house that costs exactly the same as the one you are selling, you might still be on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the money lost to capital gains taxes.
People, in general, are too simplistic when they get all happy watching the house value number go up. My home has appreciated significantly since I have purchased it. I am happy in the sense that I bought when I did and partially protected my self from the massive increase in housing costs. In every other sense I am frustrated that I and everyone else has gotten poorer and will need to allocate a larger and larger share of our finances towards providing shelter for ourselves.
Statistics: Posted by qBxCA — Fri Aug 23, 2024 6:41 pm — Replies 53 — Views 6849