Quote:
Originally Posted by joshgun
I read the article and a lot of people are misinterpreting the cost. It isn’t the purchase price of home, it includes purchase price insurance, interest, taxes and maintenance. Also, it isn’t an average and Orange County or Tupelo MS would be more or less.
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Our first home was a condo. We took a loss on that, got back only half of our purchase price. So we were down around $60k when we bought our new house at $138k. Since it was a condo and had new appliances, we paid nothing in maintenance but we did pay condo fees. So the price of "living within four walls with indoor plumbing, electricity, etc" set us back a total of maybe $80k over 11 years.
Then we made improvements on our new house - new roof, new fence, couple of tree removals, renovated the bathroom, put up drywall to create a "man cave" in the basement, added a patio behind the garage. All that, plus utilities and property taxes, maybe $100k total over 13 years of living in it. So total cost for our first free-standing house including improvements, purchase price, utilities and taxes, came to around $238. Minus the $60k we got back from our condo and sunk back into the new house, so total expense came to $238-60= $178,000
We got $195 when we sold the house, so we're now $17,000 ahead. We took that $17k and sunk it into our current house, our Villages house. So far we've spent, including purchase price, amenity fees, maintenance, minor improvements and taxes, maybe $200k, after deducting the $17 we already had in profit from our previous home.
So - to recap: we've spent around $260k in total, for living somewhere other than our parent's house, since the year before we got married 35 years ago. That's the $200 we've had to spend since we bought our first house, plus the $60 we lost on our condo.
I think it's easy to misunderstand your own math, when you stack the price you pay for your homes, without including the proceeds from SELLING those homes before buying a new one. Yes, you paid $500k for your house. But you sold it for $600k. So your net expense is -100, meaning - you profited, not spent.