<story><title>Rational Home Buying</title><url>http://lesswrong.com/lw/7am/rational_home_buying/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>forkandwait</author><text>We just bought a house, in a peripheral part of a big urban market. Here is why:&lt;p&gt;The house was 3x our annual income (well, 2.5).&lt;p&gt;We can probably rent it for our mortgage.  (This for me is the most important thing -- basically we bought the rental we would have lived in).&lt;p&gt;My job is moderately safe.&lt;p&gt;We don&apos;t expect to sell for 5 years (which is the conventional wisdom unless you are a professional and know what you are doing).&lt;p&gt;I hated our last four landlords.&lt;p&gt;We have to live somewhere.&lt;p&gt;No kids, so no worries about kid like things except in terms of n-hood value.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rational Home Buying</title><url>http://lesswrong.com/lw/7am/rational_home_buying/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Estragon</author><text>I expected this to be about the wisdom of buying a house in the current US market.  It is an interesting article even though it doesn&apos;t address that question.  But for most people, financially speaking, buying a house at the moment would be a really bad idea.  Yes, there&apos;s cheap credit, but there is also essentially no chance of significantly appreciating prices for at least the next five years, and a strong chance of prices dropping further as a result of further recession and uncertainty about the legal status of foreclosure procedures.</text></comment>