XKCD: It's more than a comic

It annoys me that food is single-use too. Not that I'm considering routing my toilet into my fridge or anything.

Not sure what the mortgage rules are where you live. Mortgages here are amortized over a maximum of 30 years - no matter what, if you keep up your monthly payments, after 30 years you own the house, without having to pay anything over and above the monthly payments that were calculated when you first got the mortgage. Basically you can think of a mortgage as a rental (pay X per month no matter what) but when you're done, you own the house and stop paying rental entirely.

I also find it kind of surprising that you have to pay property taxes on a unit you rent? That seems... really weird.

The property taxes thing varies from state to state in the United States. Whoever pays it also gets to deduct it from their income tax. I know that when I was in New Jersey, an apartment complex got dinged for claiming property tax when in fact their tenants were paying it (they got caught essentially because Turbo Tax started prompting the tenants to include it on their taxes and the IRS caught on that two people were claiming having paid the same tax on multiple units). Of course, then the complex just raised all of the rents by the amount of the tax...

One of the benefits of mortgages is that you basically own the value you've put in unless you go through foreclosure or the like. I'm pretty sure that the laws are in place that prevent it from acting like one of those Rent to Own places where the fine print basically says that one missed payment means you lose everything.

Oh, you don't pay the property tax directly, but tax is overhead that the company needs to factor into what rent to set.

I don't agree with Reagan on much, but he was right that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.

No, I don't have to pay property taxes when renting. I would have to pay them if I bought a house.

Well, I talked to a realtor who calculated that each mortgage payment would be 50% interest and 50% principal, meaning I'd pay $600k for a $300k home. That works out to $20,000/yr, which is well above my price range.

And once you've paid off the mortgage, you keep paying property taxes, condo fees, and utilities, which add up to about $700/mo, versus paying $1025/mo for rent if you don't buy a place. That's not a huge saving.

edited 26th Sep '17 2:01:32 PM by Galadriel

Take into consideration the amount by which you can expect the property to gain value over time. If it exceeds inflation, then it can be worth buying it even if you never expect to fully pay off the principle.

You must have an interesting housing market for a space equivalent to $1k monthly rest costing $300k to purchase. Around here, in Pittsburgh, a nice-sized house costs about $120k and renting the same space would be about $1.3k a month. Or were you looking at getting a much larger space?

Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with the condo market. It just never seemed to make much sense to me, basically seeming to work out to buying your house while also paying rental fees. Of course, I felt the same way about trailer parks, where you generally buy the house and continue renting the land.

No, the condo would be about the same size as the place I'm now renting. $300k for a one-bedroom. Property prices are just through the roof here, and we're not even close to the most expensive place in Canada.

One difference is that most of the condos around here are fairly new construction, while the building I'm renting is is from the 50s or 60s. And there's a degree of rent control (once you're in an apartment, there's a limit on how much the price can go up each year). And speculation in the property market is really bad in Canada - there's loads of wealthy people buying them for investments and leaving them empty, which drives up purchase prices.

I agree with your skepticism of the condo market, but there's no way I could afford a house, and even if I could, it's ridiculous for a single person to have a whole house.

edited 26th Sep '17 3:01:23 PM by Galadriel

The real estate market is just one of those things that has to die and stay dead. I don't want owning homes to be an investment. I want it to be affordable. Let those people with money to burn play around in the stock market instead.

edited 26th Sep '17 3:19:02 PM by danime91

I agree entirely. Housing should be for people to live in.

& Yes! I cannot wrap my mind around owning property and letting it sit vacant for speculation purposes.

I live in a housing co-op. And it's pretty cool. I guess they're popular in New York City, but most people have never heard of the concept. Housing prices here in Omaha are pretty reasonable, but you cannot beat buying a two bedroom townhouse for a mere $35k.

#1895: Worrying Scientist Interviews

"NEVER MIND THAT! TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"

On the plus side, they're actually discussing a vacant house tax, which if done right should be really nice. I live in Toronto, where housing prices have basically increased by 300-400% in about 10 years (average price of a house is over $1 million). Nobody has a good explanation for it and almost nobody is happy about it. The only people who really benefit are people who are a) downsizing, b) moving away, or c) speculating.

I purchased my house four years ago, right at the cusp of the crazy growth, and if I'd waited three months I would have been priced out of the market entirely (and I only got the house due to my mother helping with the down payment). Speaking as a current homeowner, I really want the market to go down, because I get no benefit from the increased prices except that my property taxes are going up. :( I bought a starter house which now looks like I'll be living in for the rest of my life.

I feel ornithologists should be further up the scale. Maybe economists too.

Anyone who's watched The Birds (or Birdemic...) would probably put ornithologists further right on that chart.

While the two kinds of astronomers are not far from each other, I'm more worried about a potential asteroid impact than the Sun going out. That just won't happen. Increased solar activity may cause distruptions in electrical systems (there was one predicted for 2013, but it didn't do much apparently), but even losing all electricity (which would probably be temporary) is not as bad as a big asteroid hitting Earth.

Maybe those people watched Knowing and are afraid of Giant Solar Flares of Doom.

edited 27th Sep '17 10:20:28 AM by danime91

It's the virologist I would worry about the most. Actually I would put a chemist at the very top of the list (if it's specifically local reporters, that's potentially very bad news).

Actually, losing all running electrical devices AND the entire electrical infrastructure supporting it would plunge any country back to pre-industrial standards at best. It would take decades to rebuild the infrastucture we have today from scratch. And if this happened worldwide, there would not be much importing either. It would basically be a worldwide EMP.

Yeah, I'd say its slightly worse than an asteroid, which would be more local than a solar flare.

That depends on the size of the asteroid. A small one, that's a local problem. One big enough to cause global climate change would make it impossible to grew the food we are relying on for Humanity to survive. That's at least as bad as a global EMP. And again, much depends on the size of the solar flare too. If it kills all satellite communication (including GPS), that's bad enough, but not catastrophic. You need something much bigger for permanently disabling all electric devices on the planet.

Big enough, and the electrical grid going down would be the least of our problems. But you have to take probabilities into account. The Sun basically going Nova is a lot less likely than some terrorist releasing a new bio/chem weapon.

A virologist is realistically the most likely science expert to be telling you about something that'll be threatening your life within the next ~30 days. And they're DEFINITELY the most likely to be telling you about a local threat.

True, your GP should probably be pretty high on that list.

#1896: Active Ingredients Only

No fillers or binders, here. Just a bunch of active chemicals that we threw into a box. Sort it out yourself.

Sounds safe.