<prompt> Human: So Ive been doing some back of the envelope math, and am thinking that if you live in the West Coast, Northeast, Chicago, Honolulu, or Denver, you need to be literally made of money and sweat solid gold to ever even dream of home ownership. So where I live, of the three city county areas Id want to live to not be an hour away from work, and even looking primarily in areas with bad schools for...reasons, the average house cost is 500k for a WWII era run-down shoebox of around 1200 square feet. And we dont even crack the top 10 list of most expensive areas!Going by PF logic, I then need: 20 downpayment 100k 3 closing costs 15k 1 of the cost of the house annually for repairs 5000 Property tax, school tax, asshole tax, you-lookin-at-me-kid tax, etc: 925 a month or 11k annually Mortgage payment and insurance: 2500 per month or 30k annuallyThen you need 6-12 months of expenses saved for an emergency fund. So call it 12 to be safe, and we need 30k mortgage 11k taxes 5k repairs 36k other living expenses 81k. So lets add all these up and see how much we have to save before we can buy our first crappy, 1200 sq ft, WWII era house! 100k down payment 81k emergency fund 15k closing costs 5k repair costs 201k. Just to get in the door and still owe 400k! Lets say the average person can save 10 of their monthly after-tax income. How long does somebody have to save before they can responsibly dream of owning a house? Lets say you make the US median of 50k. At 50k salary 35k take home 3500 annually a mere 54 years! Oh, well, what if you make more? How about 75k, the median for an individual with a doctorate degree? 38 years. Or what if you have an MBA and make the median 100k that folk with Professional degrees make? 29 years. What if youre in the top 1.5 for income and make 200k annually? 11 years!Even if you can save 20 of your after-tax income, youll just cut these numbers in half. What is the average time before changing jobs? Well if youre above 25 and relatively stable, between 70-87 of people will still change jobs within 5 years. So youre between 10 and 45 of your house-saving goal by the time youll get a new job and have to relocate anyways. Conclusion: homeownership in highly populated coastal areas is essentially impossible for 99 of the population to strive for responsibly. Judging by the numerous all-cash no contingencies offers the crappy shoeboxes all around me get within 48 hours of listing, Im going to hazard a guess that either nobody is buying a home responsibly or the rich are buying up literally every property everywhere and were all doomed to be serfs to wealthy landowners forevermore. And that is my cheerful thought of the day! :-D Thoughts from folk here? Assistant: I agree. However, one thing to note it that in general, you as a first time home buyer should not be purchasing an average home. You should look more towards starter homes. These tend to be condos with only 1, maybe 2 bedrooms. However, they are cheaper. I realize in Denver this may be harder, since only like 2 of construction the past 10 years is condos. However, you should still be able to find a condo for under 250k.Human: Its a fair point. However, I have two issues with condos: 1. They fluctuate in value more in downturns, dont grow in value like single family homes, and your property value is highly contingent on a bunch of other people - in addition, youre not getting any land, which is the actually valuable part of most real estate transactions, but you still get to pay taxes like you own land. 2. In my area the LOWEST condo HOA fee I could find was 250 a month, and thats for a crappy ghetto looking building, and many were absolutely absurd, going up to 900 a month one friend of mine pays this now. And that expense will never go away, will only increase in the future, and provides essentially nothing of value in return at least, nothing that I value, I could give a crap if you have a doorman or party rooms or are paying for solid gold toilets for the building admin or wherever that money goes to.  <response>: or wherever that money goes to.Roofs. Foundations. Infrastructure. Some HOAs are horribly mis-managed, but most are actually an honest assessment of what it will cost to replace community assets after theyve reached EOL. Look up special assessment to see what happens when an HOA either squanders their rainy-day fund, or just doesnt collect enough in the first place. Granted, you cant squander what isnt collected, but you also cant count on all of your neighbors to have the financial responsibility to have an emergency fund saved up if a special assessment is necessary. FWIW: the HOA account is owned by the residents. Your HOA board of directors is responsible for managing that fund, so I encourage you to get on the board if you ever live somewhere that has an HOA. Some developers will only hand over ownership of the fund to the community after a certain percentage of units have been sold, so watch out for that as well. 