“I would actually like more people to be ready to go “burn things down”, literally is optional, figuratively is a must.”

That’s one thing we agree on for sure! The way things are trending is not sustainable and people will only put up with so much, so things will have to change at some point.

Thanks for letting me vent haha. I hope you get your own money pit and plant some nice trees in the yard someday.

“Loan interest payments are absolutely not something that should be covered by rent - you just take someone’s labor and to pay for something in order for you to eventually own it.”

Where will the money come from then? I’m not rich, I can’t afford to lose money every month renting out a place for less than it costs me. I also can’t afford to sell it. The concept sounds great to me though, I shouldn’t have to pay any interest just for a place to live. Hell, I shouldn’t have to pay anything at all. Help me go burn down the mortgage company and tax office and then I can let people live there for free if I have to leave town for a few years. Everyone wins. Except the people with money to lend of course, so you’ll need to have cash to buy a house, which means only the rich will have houses.

“Wait, why would people buy houses with 30y loans just to rent them?”
Because you didn’t buy it to rent it, you bought it to live in, but your situation changed. You need to move for work or family and that move may be temporary. You can’t sell your house without taking a massive loss and anyway, you’ll probably just get laid off again in the city you moved to to find work. Or maybe the aging parent you left to care for finally died and you want to come home, maybe you took a 2 year gig in another country to try and make more money. Maybe you dream of coming home to retire there after you spent all your good years working somewhere shitty.
The alternative is to sell your house and buy another one in the new place which can be financially disastrous (ask me how I fucking know) or sell and rent, knowing that you might well never be able to afford another house due to interest rates rising.
I’m not selling my only home and taking a massive financial loss to help reduce housing prices by 0.00001%. Fuck that.
For the record I’ve never rented my house out because I dislike the idea of renters as much as I dislike landlords. But in retrospect, I wish I had done exactly what we’re talking about in this thread because then I could at least go home, even if the renters trashed the place, at least I’d have a place. Now I can’t go home, I’m just trapped in this new place.
Some people on Lemmy seem to be under the impression that everyone who “owns” a home is a French Duke lounging around in Ibiza eating soft cheeses and drinking fine wine with your rent money. It’s weird and I don’t understand it because if you’ve ever tried to buy a house and used the “what will my monthly payment be” calculator, then you would know that being a landlord is not profitable unless you have a lot of cash, a lot of houses and/or decades of time.

Taxes, maintenance, a management company but probably most of all the interest on the insanely large loan you took out to get it. We “bought” a house with a 30 year loan and if we were to rent it out right now at market rate, there would be no profit. We would probably take a small loss other than the opportunity to hold the property hoping that the price of housing continues to rise. It hasn’t risen since we bought the house a couple of years ago. If you’re old enough to remember 2008, then you also know that it doesn’t always go up. Sometimes it goes down pretty dramatically and you’re left holding the bag.

If the house sits empty between tenants, those costs don’t go away. So for me, in my one bathroom house, that would be $2,400 a month (not including maintenance.) Where is that money gonna come from? I don’t have it because I’m paying rent somewhere else to try and make more money to dig my way out of this hole in this hypothetical situation.

So why not sell? To sell it, we have to pay 6% to real estate agents. If we actually owned the house, not just a massive soul-crushing loan, fine. But we don’t. So that 6% is a SHITLOAD of money when you borrowed all of it besides the 15% down payment that was two people’s life savings plus begging for more from relatives. So selling means half your combined life savings and the money you begged from relatives, poof gone.

Most people have a mortgage like this and amortized interest rates mean that in the beginning, 90% of the money you give the mortgage company goes straight to interest because you pay off 30 year’s worth of interest up front so that they’re sure they get their profit (and because paying the full 5% interest on a note that big every year would be impossible for most people.)

People who bought recently, have a mortgage and a single home that they rent out are not making any profit in areas with expensive housing. It’s not like houses are cheap to “buy” in the first place. They get you good.

Why buy at all then? Because I don’t like landlords telling me what I can and can’t do. So much so that I gambled it all on “buying” a place.