This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.
> This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize [rent is throwing money away]
This greatly depends on your specific numbers.
We did the math with my partner: our current rent is 5k/mo. Our mortgage for the same place bought when we moved in would be 9k/mo + transaction cost + maintenance. It will take our rent almost 10 years to catch up to the cost of a mortgage. Max increases are capped in California.
Over those 10 years, investing the delta in index funds puts us about 200k ahead of buying in terms of net worth. We’re also not handcuffed by a mortgage for 30 years which gives us optionality.
Not buying has let us build about 700k net worth debt free in the last 10 years we’ve been together. We’ve also moved 3 times with essentially zero transaction cost. I think that’s fine
you definitely came ahead by not buying and you did the math. Good for you!
Generally, this holds true today for most HCOL and MCOL areas. It is still a good idea to buy in a few LCOL areas.
What I have seen is that in high-earner areas (Bay area for example) buying completely outpaces renting in cost (buy to rent ratio_. Mainly because the pool of buyers outbid each other. This is mainly due to the narrative and social pressure to buy at all cost.
Similarly, renting stays relatively low as people do not compete as much.
> Generally, this holds true today for most HCOL and MCOL areas. It is still a good idea to buy in a few LCOL areas
We have friends who rent to live in SF and buy in LCOL as investment properties. Also seems to work well as a strategy.
I think of primary residence as a consumption expense. It's not really an investment because you can't cash out[1]. So unless you put value on the act of owning itself, it's best to do whatever gives you a lower monthly. In our case that's renting.
[1] yes I know about HELOCs. I'd rather get margin loans on index funds than risk getting kicked out of my home.
I fully agree with you. I also think that there are as many good intangible argument for owning as for renting.
Renting allows you to be flexible for new opportunities. They allow you to focus on other things in life than your house, treat your landlord as a service provider, free your time to do more important things.
Frankly it is sad that as a society we value homeownership so highly and judge people that decide to rent so harshly.
Yes that’s a pretty good strategy achievable by most people who hang out on Hacker News. Lots of variance tho. Poorly timed life events can really mess it up
In the majority of markets an individual that invested the down payment into the SPY500 as opposed to a house comes out a head. Especially if you sell the house on average every 7 years ...
Just do the math yourself; it's pretty easy [1] [2] [3] [4].
That said, not every decision in life needs to be profit maximization. You can enjoy owning a house.
This doesn't take into account that you need to live somewhere.
If you spend $2K on rent (which gets no return) and put $1K into the SPY500 every month or put all $3K into your house, you will be far, far ahead with real estate.
You seem to be completely clueless about the issue. There are many resources to learn about it. One very good one is Ben Felix on YouTube. Search for his owning vs renting videos and spend some time trying to understand the analysis. It will be a bit difficult when you come from "rent is money disappearing" mindset but it will be worth it.
The buy-vs-rent discussion is more aimed at first-time buyers. If you already own a property that is largely paid off and has had the benefit of appreciation over the time you owned it, then yes, it may be more beneficial to keep the property, as you have seen from the calculator.
If the answer was always that rent would be cheaper, then the calculators wouldn't have to exist ;-)
> housing cost would almost DOUBLE
Except that you will now have the profits from selling your previous property, which you can invest. That investment payout can partially or even completely offset the cost of renting, which means your monthly costs will be much lower.
Say you make 500k by selling your house, and invest that against 6% ROI, then you make 30k/year passive income, thats 2.5k/month. So deduct that from the rent you'd pay and compare again.
This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.
this is flatly false for two reasons -- one is that all LLMs are not equal. The models and capacities are quite different, by design. Secondly a large number of standardized LLM testing, tests for sequence of logic or other "reasoning" capacity. Stating the fallacy of stochastic parrots is basically proof of not looking at the battery of standardized tests that are common in LLM development.
Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).
And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.
Irrational rotations of a torus are uniformly distributed and closely resemble the image from the blog. The images you linked, on the other hand, are random sequences with positive entropy (which are also uniformly distributed). Confusing these two things is what happens when someone without the necessary expertise tries to sound smart.
Peer review is important for checking the correctness of the results, among other things. It's not uncommon to find big errors; small mistakes are everywhere.
Peer review is of utmost importance. Any researcher can make mistakes. I can read papers and apply them, but I need expert opinion to trust the papers. I am not skilled enough in any but my specialties.
I do see papers with outlandish claims and very weak support. This kind of excessively bold statement I see in many papers is a red flag for me.
That's a highly biased opinion. The Newtonian conception of physics is trivial for us, and we can say that most people could come up with the ideas by their own, but that's because our world conception is based on those ideas; it's already implicit in how we understand the world. That's why Newton was so important, there was a shift in the whole conceptualization of the physical world. With Maxwell's equations is similar. The interpretation as waves, the fact that the equations are Lorentz symmetric but no Newton symmetric, etc. All that is free for us, and it is not obvious at all.
Protectionism can be dumb, if competition from china is decimation the US LLM market, making the cheaper better competitors illegal sounds like sound advice to someone like trump, probably?
Following typical tropes about China, "we" decided to ban space cooperation with them because they were just going to steal American space tech or whatever. That's why, to this day, you never see Chinese on the ISS. Of course China then became the 2nd largest player in space, behind only SpaceX, launched and manned their own space station, sent a rover to Mars, carried out unprecedented sample return missions from the dark side of the Moon, and just generally ran circles around the US sans SpaceX.
If it wasn't for this dumb law, it's likely NASA would have been able to use Russia, China, and SpaceX as redundancies for getting Americans to the ISS as one country/company fell out of favor with this administration or that. As was we ended up turning to Boeing for a redundancy. For those that don't follow space news, the 2 astronauts Boeing [barely] sent to the ISS are still stranded up there after their vessel was deemed too dangerous to return in.
I oft wondered what it would have been like to live in Rome circa 460.
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