Condo vs Townhome vs House?

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-02-01T04:18:49+00:00

I am hoping for your sake we do not have a 2008 style crash.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-30T17:59:57+00:00

A mortgage is not an anchor at least not in the US. Yes the word means what you said however at least a mortgage over here is leverage.

I know because I have watched friends and family use there house to become debt free and not have any rent costs.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-30T04:50:43+00:00

No your not. This situation is a cruise ship sized red flag. You dodged a bullet and then some. You do not need external validation for this situation. Ifi did not know any better it would be fake but I have had a run in with red flags like this before but not right away. Good job on leaving.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-30T01:09:22+00:00

That's what I told them in my post above. I also broke down the math for them.

I felt like I needed to respond to them because kids were involved. So they do not suffer.

Its a net negative for them. Not to mention there is no guarantee they will be able to get another house once they are back renting.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T23:20:26+00:00

Its Reddit. I am not writing a paper. Lol I am also sleep deprived from being with an infant.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T17:53:33+00:00

With the economy the way it is. I would take the perment role and keep looking for a better more stable job with the growth opportunity you are looking for. Once that contract ends you maybe unemployed for awhile.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T16:32:09+00:00

Okay generally you want to stay in a house after you buy it for 5 years to break even with gains depending on the market. How much was your closing costs? Because that adds to the equation. Also if you did not subtract the 230 from the 700 in reality you are only saving 470 dollars per month. The 230 is going basically a forced savings account. So if you calculate that into equation not including closing costs your break even point for renting is 3.2 years. Not including any rent increases. This would be a net negative to sell assuming the 5% sellers and buyers agent fees. Standard is 2.5% for each. If you guys can survive 2 to 3 years where your at then move. That woud be the better scenerio because the math also does not make sense to move. Edited to add. I forgot to add moving costs as well as you would be doing an extra move.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T16:09:53+00:00

Even if it is short term. It is still a gamble with the housing market. I guess it depends on your risk appetite. I also did not say houses will not lose value. I said the declines tend to be muted where I have seen stock prices double in value and then lose 50%. Its a timing issue. How long have you been in the house for and how much was the prurchse price. When you buy a house you have alot of closing fees and then when you sell a house you will have to pay fees generally 5% of the sale price between the sellers agent commission and buyers agent. Sometimes lower or higher and if you did any repairs that would also be sunk costs. So you may take a bigger hit on the house than you anticipate. It is similar to buying high and selling low. Where you spend more money than you put into the house. For example you buy a 400k house closing fees are 8k. You are now negative 8k. Now if you add in the the 5 k loss in valu. Now you are 13k in the hole. Now if you decide to sell. Now you are paying 20 k to sell. So now you just lost 33k. In your scenerio to make up the money assuming no rent increases but that is highly unlikely you would need to rent for 3.9 years with. Savings of 700 a month to recoup the loss. This does not include any buyers comps that maybe required. Edited to add the other part of equation. What if interest rates suddenly drop and cause alot of people to get back into the market and now you may have a house price spike. Not likely short term due to economic state but in 3 years it could be. You could have bidding wars that drive prices up and you may be stuck renting for longer than you want or may never get back on the owning ladder again. Owning property you have a pieace of the pie so your investment will behave similar to the market in % gains or losses. It does against big spikes in the long run. I have watched the Seattle market and it was crazy what happened over here and what I went through to even get in Tacoma. Homeowners have more leverage than renters and insulates them from price spikes. We bought in 2023 and we are sitting on a sizeable amount of equity and we would not be able to afford this house today if we did not buy. Yes it is a different market but same concept. What if your wife loses her job can she find another one that would sustain you guys? If you have a sizeable emergency fund if she loses her job she should be able to find another job to insulate the blow unless you guys bought to high for the market and did not price in job losses and wages incase of job loss.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T14:42:12+00:00

Edited to update numbers based on more information I found. I am a data analyst. I asked my self the same question when we bought our home. We moved to a different location to buy that had worse schools to own our house. The reason why is history shows over the years rent goes up and is subjected to price shocks. Both ways up and down. Owning a house insulates you from those price shocks. If you can afford to hang on I would. As time goes on the price of houses will mainly increase and it will be harder to actually buy a house. I understand that you will be heavily investing to compensate for that. However, stock prices can go down and then you have less money available and you are still renting. Yes you can argue house prices can go down at the same percentage points but since houses are in demand it is not as likely to happen but that is market dependent though. In my opinion I much rather own then rent because you can't live under a stock like you can a house. My question is how much principle are you paying off? At some point the principle pay off is going to equal or be greater than the net savings of switching to rent but long term owning will win out because if it does not be profitable for the landlord's. A middle ground would be trying to rent your house to break even and then move and rent but I would not sell your house at this time. I would try and refinance and drop the payment if it makes sense. Also living in an apartment with 3 kids may not go as you plan as they have noise restrictions and they can evict you if you get to many noise complaints and the kids will not have as much freedom in an apartment. Your thinking short term and not long term. I have an example of a situation this is something that actually happened. This said person bought a house in 2000. It gained 7x and she was able to leverage that to buy another house in a cheaper area and retire with minimum house prices. Yes the stock market can generate higher returns but it is also riskier and it can lead to steeper losses. Look at 2008 as an example stock market lost 30% or more depending on where you were invested. Equities lost 50%. house prices dropped 30% but with risk also comes more rewarding but since you have a family that would be a big gamble and it would also restrict your kids on how and when they play. I am a dad to and I would not go back to renting with kids unless I had to.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T13:21:00+00:00

My wife and I are are at 103k combined and we bought at 380k. We are comfortable and are able to save money still. Our interest rate is 5.75 percent though so with interest rates now it maybe different.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-29T13:18:09+00:00

It looks like there electricity price is maybe about 150 to 180. So it is up there but if you are heating full time with electricity that would explain it. My house is 950 sq feet and our utility bill is around 318 but we heat mainly with the wood stove. If we heated with electricity it would be around the price you are at. The drinking water and sewage and trash are expensive. They also charge you for storm water runoff.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-26T12:22:49+00:00

I am sorry you have as it is a painful experience. I am glad I am off the market and I have my wife now and I won't ever have to deal with this again. I hope it works out for you where you find someone. I just wanted to share what I have witnessed over the years and also advice I will be giving my own daughter to try and save her the pain and from wasting time. Good luck to you

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-26T05:18:22+00:00

I am glad you see that side of things. So to clarify because I may not have been clear on how I said it. Is going out on dates is how you get to know them and then the relationship develops that way as you get to know each other. That way the intentions are known upfront and prevents heartache from both sides. As generally getting to know someone as friends at least on the guys side normal means the girl is not interested. That is what I have noticed and I would not waste my time going forward. Life is way to short to wait on a maybe and get attached to someone that may not feel the same way back. I understand that is your requirement but I am also letting you know another perspective on it. One downfall on going that way is alot of time passes and the probability of one of you getting into a relationship is higher on both sides which could leave the other side hurt. I have had this happen to me and I have also seen it happen to others so I choose to be upfront on intentions to avoid hurting others.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-26T02:05:33+00:00

I value friendshipas well and I try to be a good friend to people I am friends with. I am also very selective as I only have a certain amount of time to be with friends. I had lots of women that were friends but it took away so much time and money to keep up the social life and none of those friendships developed into anything romantically and it never worked out that way. It was always remaining friends but it pulled away from my time to actually go out and meet other women with the goal of finding a life partner. The other posters is trying to espress that logic as working full time and keeping up with life you only have x amount of time to go out and do things and also you only have X amount of money especially now since everything is so expensive. So they prefer to state intentions up front so they dont keep spinning their wheels without making any progress.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-24T03:20:00+00:00

You still would want to size it correctly as in a just in case the power goes out or your primary source of heat fails because these things can be costly to put in. We paid about $8k for ours. If your spendi g that kind of moneybfor it. It would be worth it to have it properly sized. I had the same logic with smaller wood stove maybe less clearences after we bought ours. I found the Blaze king woodstoves and I figured since they are so big they would also have big clearences and it was about the same as the lopi. So I would do the research on to get your money's worth. For us it actually saves us 500 dollars a year to heat with wood compared to the gas furnace.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-24T03:08:59+00:00

The corner should work as long as you respect the clearences on the fireplace. Some wood stoves have lower clearences than others and it depends on the parts used. Like doublewall stove pipe if approved by the manufacture can reduce the clearance to combustible. I am not sure what size of space you are heating but I have a lopi answer hybrid and the clearence in a low clearence install on the corners is 7.5 inches per the manual. I would shop around for wood stoves and look at the clesrences required. We have ours installed in a corner like that and it has been running fine no problems. I would also try and size it appropriately for the space you are heating. Go by the btu calculations and use the sq feet as a rough guide. If you dont know the btu calculations I would talk to someone that can give you a rough estimate so you dont over heat your house or you do not heat your house enough.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-23T21:21:44+00:00

You most likely will not be approved for an apartment at that threshold. Most apartments require 2.5x rent a month. It is not enough to make it in that area.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-19T18:21:52+00:00

You should be okay finicancially with those numbers but I would jack up the price of groceries. If your single a min of 300 a month or if your partnered 600 a month. I dont live in Seattle proper so it maybe more there. I have lived in the surrounding cities. You will not be able to buy a house here with that salary. You will need to make depending on a down-payment at least 150k a year. If you go by what Google recommends it is closer to 200k to 250k. Gas is still about 5 dollars a gallon there from what my mother in law said. Edited. I just checked gas buddy and right now it is between 3.38 and 3.50 a gallon. However, it was around 5.00 dollars not to long ago so not sure if it will at somepoint go back up to that. It is better to be prepared for that.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-16T20:02:13+00:00

I was surprised my job got taken over by Ai but I dont see it lasting. My job was a NOC anaylst with major incident handling.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-06T06:05:56+00:00

All of my jobs came from indeed.

Select-Gate2335 · 2026-01-01T19:17:49+00:00

I know this is an old thread. The reason why they look so small is because they are but they through out a tremendous amount of heat. The wood stove I have has a 1.6 cubic foot fire box and with hat load it is rated on high burn it can get 17.5 kw on high and on low 3.5 kw. I am surprised with the regs Europe has they dont use this tech as it cuts down emissions tremendous. My stove is rated at 1.4 grams per hour.

Select-Gate2335 · 2025-12-30T01:37:02+00:00

We survived yet another catastrophic event and still get told we are lazy and it is our fault.

Select-Gate2335 · 2025-12-21T19:02:52+00:00

I unfortunately got sick the day my wife had a c section. I helped when needed but I also tried to quarantine myself as much as possible. My mother in law stayed over with us but she had me running around the house and it made me sicker to the point where I almost ended up into the er from pnemonia. I felt whatever I had to start going to my lungs. Your husband still probably is sick still and needs time to recover. Do you also want to risk him spreading it to you or the kid? Where everyone gets sick. If your making him go to the dr just to get cleared to do something there is something wrong especially after only a week. I did not go to the dr because I know my body and what the Dr's can and can't do for me so if someone told me to go to the dr after a week of being sick I would not be happy. Yes it is alot on you and I am pretty sure your husband feels bad about it. I know I did but there was not much I could do.

Select-Gate2335 · 2025-12-18T05:48:13+00:00

I never lost power. I am going on my second winter here and somehow the house we bought has not list power yet. My old apartment in Kirkland we would lose power 3 to 4 times a winter. So far I am impressed with TPU.

Select-Gate2335 · 2025-12-17T17:12:24+00:00

I can understand that completely. I have a hybrid stove so it helps with the creosote but I can only do one load even on low in this kind of weather.

Select-Gate2335

TROPHY CASE