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I was shocked as a homeowner to find that home insurance is not that much more expensive than renters insurance, especially for a condo where the HOA is sharing a large amount of the cost
I mean, especially if you’re already a homeowner and your assessment is years old, this amounts to less than $1k/yr.
Using the above poster’s example both of those costs annualize out to still be cheaper than rent
It’s actually horrifying how fast rent has gone up. Our mortgage in Boston went from being $1000mo more than average rent to $500mo under average rent in only two years. Even with the tax hike we just passed in my town, my total cost of ownership is far below renting even accounting for the savings we set aside for upkeep and emergencies
Plus this whole time we’ve been improving the property. We now have solar on a 0% apr loan and don’t have electricity bills anymore and the mo billing for the panels is less than our old electric bills. We also used a state program to replace all the insulation and windows at cost with another 0 apr loan. So our gas bill is now only ~$80-100 compared to the $400-500 gas bill in the shithole apartments around here with 200 year old paper insulation. And if we want we can use another state program to replace our furnace with a heat pump and lower that further.
So our relative cost went down even more as utilities keep going up and renters have zero control over their homes energy usage
These are very region dependant. My state has no income or sales tax, but the property taxes are higher, my 1 acre with a mobile home is basically 3k. It's almost certainly cheaper than renting, but you can't just make sweeping statements like that.
At the same time. If property tax has always been that high then it would be silly to not realize that cost is baked into the local rents in the same region
Certainly in my town where taxes were just hiked, every landlord is going to hike rent accordingly in September (it’s a Boston thing that 90% of leases always end in September)
Sounds like you have the fortune of living where these things are cheaper. In Ontario, home insurance is much higher and property tax being less than 1K a year is completely unheard of.
The property tax on my house is $7000/year... and that is with a fixed assessment from 12 years ago. If I were to buy my house today, my tax would be $21000/year.
That’s why I caveated with if you are already a homeowner for a while. It’s totally different to be buying a house now and comparing it to rent now. The important bit is the cost is fixed and rent is not. In our case it only took two years for rent to surpass us.
But yeah. Especially if you live in a state with no income taxes, the property tax story is very region dependent. If property taxes are that extreme though, it’s almost certainly also being built into peoples rent which means it’s not contributing heavily to the difference in cost from renting and owning
Only $1k/year in property taxes? I found this really hard to believe, then looked it up to find that Boston has one of the lowest property tax rates in the nation at an average of .49%. Consider yourself lucky I suppose, most of us are paying quite a bit more yearly. If the home you own is in fact a condo, I guess this makes more sense.
Yeah, MA and most towns in MA have made the choice to have higher income taxes and more business taxes and more sales tax than to have high property tax. Putting it all together, the COLA here is just as bad as LA, it just comes out of different types of spending and income cuts.
I actually think part of what drives our property rates so high is that the tax rate is so low. Instead of paying a chunk to taxes, you just have a much bigger mortgage and suddenly it’s a wash.
Plus to your point about condos. It’s definitely more fair to compare a condo to an apartment in terms of costs. since they are usually similar structures with similar sq footage and amenities. Standalone homes are usually what people are thinking of when they compare renting to owning and I think that leads to these extreme studies that are basically comparing apples and oranges.