Everyone I know keeps telling me to buy a house I stead of renting a “luxury” apartment in a big city. I lived I. NYC for 5 years and was paying anywhere from $2500-2700/month for a studio apartment (anywhere from like 400-600 SQ ft). I just moved down to Downtown Miami and got a place for $2600/month in an apartment complex that is truly luxury compared to what they call “luxury” in Manhattan.
Everyone keeps telling me that I’m stupid because I’m not building equity and I’m just throwing money away. My parents own 5 properties (both of their parents houses and a rental property my grandfather owned, their own house, and a small cabin in PA), and in the past two months they’ve had to put a new sewer line in and a new gas line, along with a new heater into my dad’s parents house because it sat empty for a few years and now friends of the family are moving in. It was weeks of back and forth with the city and the furnace people. It cost about $15k. They also had to re-shingle that house. My mom has roofers working on the house that was her parents. That was about $10 grand. Our shower broke about 2 months back and since my dad didn’t want to pay people he decided to do it himself… Which took like 5-6 days.
When something breaks in one the places I live in, I put in a maintenance ticket and it’s fixed in a day. I’ve had ACs break and a dishwasher break, and they were fixed in like 2 days. I didn’t have to spend a penny or lift a finger.
My buddy spent 80 grand on a cabin about 20 minutes from where we grew up and had put about another 60-70 grand into it and he said he’s nowhere near finished.