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‘I feel trapped’: how home ownership has become a nightmare for many Americans
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
64 points (98.5% liked)
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I have no idea where in Minneapolis this person is but this is nothing like my own experience in the metro area.
My wife and I bought our home in 2021, for about the same price as he's describing and with an income far less than theirs, and we're expending less than 30% on our mortgage payment (including our insurance premiums and taxes). Maybe they bought theirs at the interest rate peak in 2020, whereas we bought ours when the interest rates bottomed out, but I can quite confidently say that our home is not the main burden on our finances.
What is killing us is raising food and healthcare costs, as well as our student loans. Our energy utility announced last year that they would be implementing surge pricing that could almost double our energy costs, and since the utility administers the state solar incentive program themselves, they quoted us a PV system cost almost twice what you can find on the open market (they use your average monthly energy bill to determine how much you can afford to pay for the system, which ought to be criminal). We're getting fucked up down and sideways, but our mortgage payment is probably the most stable expense we have.
There are a lot of reasons things are shit and financially precarious, but owning my home has been a rare bright spot in our otherwise gloomy financial picture. If we were still renting, not only would we be in the same strained situation as we are now, but we'd be constantly anxious about our rent skyrocketing, too.
Home ownership isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but the alternative of renting is often just as expensive - on top of being at the whims of landlords. They've been publishing articles for a decade now trying to convince people that home ownership is overrated and renting is the way of the future, and I really wish I could trust them to report on it transparently.