What about instead of buying a house you buy a piece of land and build a house or buy a small house that needs complete gutting and add an addition if needed when you renovate. In the US the property owner is allowed to do everything themselves. No licenses or certifications required. It takes a ton of work over several years to do it but you come out stronger on the other side and save a fortune. Basically half of the cost in a home build is the labor. I’ve done this twice in the last 18 years and estimate I saved over 250,000$. Seems daunting, but I learned everything by reading books and YouTube. Wiring is actually pretty easy and plumbing even more so. It all just feels overwhelming if youve never done it, but once you learn home to wire the first plug the rest are easy. Frame your first wall and then it’ll all seem clear. This approach will likely require significant sacrifice and your yoyo practice time will basically drop to zero, but without taking a risk you never get the reward and just stay trapped in the system.
There are about five or six reasons for me not to post anything right now (including: cultural and personal aversions to discussing finances, no good advice to give, what I have to say is bleak and yet somehow feels like I’m showing off good fortune.) On the other hand I’ve slept since deleting the previous message-in-progress, so I guess I need to get something off my chest.
But yes, it’s rough. Utilities are up, and rent is up too. I wouldn’t be in a house right now if it weren’t for money that came from my father-in-law’s life insurance policy and I wouldn’t be (slowly) on my way out of debt if my spouse hadn’t overcome long-term (years long) issues with anxiety and gotten a job that earns almost as much as mine at the start of this summer. This time last year when I started selling off my hoard of B.C. Lightnings and some of the more desirable yoyos from my collection, I was looking for anything I could do to supplement my income and at least slow down the growing balances. Anything I bought, I bought after convincing myself I could at least break even on it if it came down to it. (Etc., etc.)
Never mind how sound that reasoning was, I think that it might have helped convince me that I couldn’t afford not to get a house, since I’d at least be building equity. (Although it wasn’t nearly as persuasive as the simple fact that my rent had gone up by over 20% when I renewed my lease during the same month I renewed my utility contract.)
Anyway, that’s my talk, lol. It also turns out that I don’t really miss any of the throws I sold. If anything, I get more happiness out of seeing them in other people’s collections. Everything that was in my “listed for sale” box at the time I suspended my sales thread for the move has found its way back into my general collection, but who knows? I’m handling ONE July well enough. Maybe it’s time to KonMari.
@TheThrowingGnome, did you work a full-time job while learning all the house-building stuff? Is it doable on one’s spare time?
I would love to learn more about home building and fixing things do you have any books or tutorials you suggest to start learning? @TheThrowingGnome
When I bought my first home I was 25 and working 2 jobs (pizza restaurant manager & golf caddie). It was an old abandoned farmhouse built in 1905 on 1 acre. Since it was a foreclosure and unlivable it did not qualify for a regular mortgage. I had to take out a construction loan for the purchase price and 30k for repairs as I had no savings. I created a cost spreadsheet and written plan which I took too a local bank and convinced them to give us the loan. The house was nearly an hour from where we were at the time so after work I would go down and work on the house all night and often sleep on a cot. Once I got it to barely habitable point I convinced my wife we should leave the apartment and move in. We lived in one room of the house and the bathroom doubled as a kitchen (Coleman stove) and had no heat or air. We gutted much of it and I ended up having to rip off over 700 sq ft that were old additions and were unsavable. After two years of extreme roughing it we had everything done except the new kitchen was only a plywood floor and we had run out of money. The bank refused to roll the construction loan into a mortgage until we had an actual kitchen with cabinets and appliances. The next week a miracle happened and a dump truck flipped over in our side yard spilling hot asphalt everywhere. The trucking company paid to fix everything and gave us a check for 10,000 dollars which was exactly enough to finish the kitchen and cabinets.
Several years later the property next door was foreclosed on. It was an even older farmhouse built in 1900 and in worse condition than the first house. I sold everything that wasn’t essential to raise enough for a down payment on a personal loan and purchased that rotting pile of a mold filled house on 2 acres for 36,000. I made tiny bits of progress here and there on this house (all demo) over many years. But I was working more now to pay on the multiple loans and had two children as well. There was no time or money to do anything on the house. We kept falling further into debt so about 5 years ago we sold the first house and had an estate sale and moved through the back yard into a camper travel trailer. The next 2 years were pretty rough I’m not gonna lie, but we managed to rebuild the second house entirely off the proceeds from the sale of the first house and now live there happily mortgage free.
There was never a time during any of this that I didn’t have a full time job and changed careers two times as well.
Knowing what I know now I would much rather just build new. Gutting 120 year old houses and trying to rebuild them is very dirty and tedious work. Building a modest wood frame house yourself is very doable for most able bodied young men. Obviously it feels impossible if you have no idea how to build a house though, so most people never try.
I think today I could build a modest (1500 sq ft) one story home for around 75,000 - 100,00$. This includes paying someone to install the septic, HVAC and the drywall cuz I ant never gonna hang, mud, and sand no mo sheet rock.
Nothing specific. If you seek the knowledge it will come.
Start with this for inspiration. Larry Haun is a legend. Shows how to frame a whole house and uses only a hammer (no nail gun) as I recall.
You make it sound so easy 
It’ll be the hardest thing you ever do, but it’ll be worth it.
Once things get more stable I expect I’ll try building an “accessory dwelling unit” in the back yard, or maybe one of those tumbleweed-style trailer houses.
My current house (built in 1905, lol) should probably get some attention first. Do you have any DIY advice for foundation leveling? I’m on pier and beam.
Are they original brick piers? How tall is the crawl space?
My partner and i have been looking for a home but unfortunately here in Toronto and surrounding areas its hard to find anything for below the 1 million dollar mark . Regardless of home pricing getting approved for a $700,000 mortgage even if we could hypothetically put 300,000 down the interest rates are around 6-7% which is absurd .
This gold-standard stuff is always amusing to me. Why on earth should the cost of capital reflect the current price of gold? Being on the gold-standard did one thing: restricted access to capital.
If the US had remained on the gold standard, there would never have been a tech-boom; there would be very little innovation or wealth-disrupting industries. Why? Because the cost of capital would have made investments like this not feasible. Capital is what creates growth. Using gold as a proxy for capital does not reflect the value currently in an economy. More importantly, it has no way to measure pent up innovation. How would Google get money to start up if they had to prove a better return on limited capital than established businesses did? With the risk that high, no one would invest in anything but a sure return on investment.
Second, what do you think the interest rate would be on US bonds if we did not print enough to meet the insatiable worldwide demand for US debt? It would be negative. This interest rate would quickly overheat the US economy by making capital too cheap and causing speculation and runaway prices. The money that could not flow into US bonds would find other places to go.
The gold standard has been relegated to the dustbin of history for a reason. What modern economy is on this holy-grail of economic stability and bliss?
First check all your beams for rot. If you find areas that have minor rot, but the wood isn’t compressed and failing then you can drill holes in those areas and fill with lots of Abatron. Hopefully you won’t have to replace any large sections of sill beam because that can require supporting the walls and roof with bracing on the exterior. It appears your crawl space is closed in with sheet metal so that will be easy to pull off and put back as you go so you can work.
Once your beams are all good use several large bottle jacks on cap blocks and some 6x6s to jack up on each side of the piers (I’d use at least 4 and do 2 piers at a time). You’re not really trying to get perfectly level here. If your interior floors are fairly level then you are fine. If a corner or section is bad out of level then you’ll need more jacks and have to lift at several piers at the same time. Jack the beam up just a bit higher than you need.
Remove the wood on top of the pier and replace with more block or high psi mortar (requires you make a little form). Install a piece of flashing between the top of the pier and the beam as a termite shield. Then slowly release the jacks together and let it back down onto the pier.
Then use spray foam under the floors and install a vapor barrier.
Your argument is nothing but hypotheticals.
Assuming your hypotheticals are correct (which I don’t think they are) then I am fine with trading google and a tech boom with not leaving trillions for future generations to pay off and a world where the average person can still buy a house and support their family.
Can you site where this ever occurred while we were under the gold standard? Serious question. I have no idea. Are you referring to the Great Depression?
How modern are we talking?
Inflation is very useful for growing the economy…to a point. Printing trillions of dollars per year isn’t the sole reason, but it’s definitely one facet of why we’re currently in this debt-slave system. I don’t think fiat [read: violence-backed currency] is a good system, personally; in fact I remember years ago buying a $100 TRILLION Zimbabwean dollar bill for about $10 USD.
I’ve been dipping my toe in the housing market, but seeing houses selling for 100k+ more than they did a year prior is fairly disheartening. I’m half tempted to just buy some land and build a pole barn and live in that.
Didn’t expect the thread to go this way but I guess (it’s happening dot gif)
Barndominiums are all the rage right now. My neighbors built one.
Since we left the gold standard under Nixon your argument is speculation.
The international demand for US bonds is simply immense. If we limited the supply of US bonds, then this limited supply would cause prices to go up. As a bond increases in price its yield goes down.
You need to look at this from the perspective of a Saudi Prince- Or a corrupt SE Asian politician. Where do you put your money where it will be safe? Only western economies offer the rule of law and the surety of investment principal. This is the dynamic that most people miss. A nation is not like a household. You absolutely can spend more than you make if there are others willing to give you $90 today for the promise of $100 tomorrow. As long as people pony up the cash - this can go on for as long as the US remains the #1 economy.
Any paying back? Ha. Just as you can print bonds - you can also refuse to pay them off. If we have too much debt when the economy is no longer #1; defaulting will be the least of our problems. The US can call bonds with interest rates that are too high - and any bonds held outside the US are technically worthless.
When foreign investors buy US bonds with over $2 trillion in debt - do they really think we will pay it all off?
I always see Americans complaining about inflation, gas prices, housing prices… Compared to Canada, Europe, and Oceania the US is doing amazingly well in these aspects.