An option for me to buy a house has come up very suddenly and it seemed like a good idea at first - but I look at a mortgage and think “that’s 15 years I’ll spend paying back, at absolute minimum. Probably more like 25 years” - how can I possibly plan that far in advance?

So, how did you feel about getting a mortgage and seeing such a serious commitment stretch so far into the future? I’m mainly talking about the emotional side of things rather than financial

  • shortwavesurfer
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    6 months ago

    I will say I don’t really know about the emotional part so I will go into the financial and say that your country’s currency will depreciate as time moves on. Therefore, you can either get a fixed rate mortgage now and convert it to a lower fixed rate mortgage later or get a variable rate mortgage now and convert it to a fixed rate later when rates decrease again. By doing this you lock in your price and the only thing that will change it is either in increase in taxes or insurance and even that won’t increase it that much. So you have a very good idea of what your bill will be and you are shorting your country’s fiat currency by buying something of value now and paying for it with depreciating currency over time.

    Edit: As one buyer to another, I will say, watch out for electricity prices, though, because environmentally changing a 900-square-foot apartment or a 900-square-foot house are two totally different animals. I am not sure whether it’s because all the other units in the building are doing roughly the same thing so the temperature change you have to make is less or if my landlords were subsidizing electricity but it was way cheaper to run electricity in an apartment than in a house. Like my electricity went up from an average of $30 at my apartments to an average of $120 at my house. As I said, my guess is that since everybody else in your building of apartments is wanting to keep their apartments cool or warm as well, this changes how much you personally spend to warm or cool your part of the building.

    Edit 2: Another thought is that perhaps it’s the attic in my house that caused a lot of that increase because yes my house is technically like a thousand square feet but that is the floor that you can live on not including the attic which would add more to that total if it were included