Home debt has traditionally been seen as "good debt" for a bunch of reasons, but the big ones were that
(a) Home loans meant you were accumulating equity in an appreciating asset; and
(b) Mortgage interest was enough to allow most people to take a larger-than-standard deduction on income taxes; and
(c) The relationship between home prices and the equivalent rental market meant you could probably have a nicer place for a lower monthly payment in many markets.
These were generally slam-dunk truths for decades, but in the last 20 or so years they've stopped being true.
Home ownership isn't the guaranteed rocket-ship to wealth it once was. Appreciation is spotty, and varies wildly by market. My own view of this is that a lot of the gains are now baked in, and we're unlikely to see the kind of rise in value (in real dollars) that characterized, say, 1990 to 2015. Last year I sold a townhouse in Houston that I'd owned since 2000; I made money, but not the kind of upside that you wanna write home about.
Second, the tax law changes in Trump's first term dramatically raised the standard deduction -- enough so that we stopped itemizing. Part of this was that we were deep into the mortgage, so we were paying less in interest every year, but it's still a factor.
Third, rents may be high now, but home prices and interest rates are higher. When I bought in 2000, I went from renting a place for $1200 a month to OWNING a place at a bit under $2k (including taxes and insurance). This was with 20% down.
In my old neighborhood now, a nice rental is gonna be $2500-$3000, and housing is just unattainable. First, 20% now means probably $90K. Second, servicing the loan is going to be more than the rent, plus you've got another $450 a month in property taxes AND probably another $450 in insurance. And you've got to accumulate the $90K somehow while paying $2500 in rent. It's crazy. I have no idea how a young person who isn't making top-5% income can afford to buy without family help.
> Last year I sold a townhouse in Houston that I'd owned since 2000; I made money, but not the kind of upside that you wanna write home about
Sure but you made money. If you had rented you would have lost that money. Renting only makes sense if the opportunity cost is higher, e.g. if you think the time value of the money that would be put into the down payment is higher in the markets than it would have been on a home. The other thing is mortgages are risk uncorrelated with major equities, usually at least. If there's a major recession your equities may be underwater for a few years. Your fixed rate mortgage will stay the same.
I'm saying it made sense for ME in 2000. I'm saying it's less obviously a good move for a 30 year old in 2026.
I have a strong suspicion that housing is due for a correction. Appreciation requires demand, and housing is now so expensive that Gen Z can't get on the ladder. That plus the looming Boomer die-off seems to point to a reversal of some housing gains.
I think housing in the US is just such a complicated space (Fannie/Freddie backstopped loans, ridiculous zoning and building requirements (FAR, setbacks, etc), environmental laws, varying property tax regimes, prevailing wage requirements for building in places, etc that it's just really difficult to understand. It's like a ridiculously complicated layered system of public and private regs and incentives that lead to very inscrutable results.
For me, owning your own home is partly about (mostly) paying it off before retirement, that way most people won't need a large retirement income to pay the rent. Also in my country, aged care asks for a large refundable deposit, for example 600k, if it comes to that.
It doesn't pay for the increased medical expenses near the end. But it can pay them off if sold after death.
In california I've noticed lots of other things. prop 13 might make apartments pay less taxes than comparable condos, and condos also have HOA fees that can easily be $2k. I've even seen HOA fees on single family homes.
HOA fees on freestanding homes are VERY common, but they're generally not as high as places with shared walls.
It's only in condos and whatnot that they get crazy, though. My sister has $2500 in monthly fees associated with her fully owned condo in Philly, for example.
I find that I am AMAZED at how few customer-facing sites have failed to even consider the basic idea of "why is someone on our site?"
A great example is a restaurant site. If a user has to scroll and click around to find an address, a phone number, and hours of operation, the site has FAILED.
Literal pages of hyper-zoomed pictures of food, followed by pictures of groups laughing while eating, followed by mentions of catering and merch... and vital info at the very bottom, with dinner menus hidden in web menus, or only available from the "Order Online" link.
What I see all the time. I hate it so much. "Oh, honey, this restaurant has a picture of pepperoni on cheese. Let's eat there... wherever it is!"
They cannot, because they are wrong. And I say this as a person who has owned no small number of fancy cars (but I got better).
A new base-model Prius is absurdly luxurious compared to a base model car of 1975 or 1985 or even 1995. If you have lived long enough to see this change, then dropping 2x or 3x or 10x the cost of the Prius self-evidently puts you wildly beyond the point of diminishing returns.
The Prius is going to have excellent climate control, and a phenomenal stereo. It's going to have adaptive cruise control, and will warn you when you drift out of your lane, or if you're about to run into an obstacle.
Outside of motorsports-sorts of things, what you get out of more expensive vehicles is of limited utility. Mostly, it's just showing off.
Now, if you want a track weapon, then yeah, you DO get more by spending. But for a regular person who wants to get from point A to point B comfortably and safely? The Prius is fantastic, and it's hard to justify spending more unless you're willing to admit that it's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of thing.
Even in motorsports, presumably it’s still
mostly showing off? Unless you are a pro, you’d still lose any seriously comepetitivr race and have plenty to learn and enjoy driving a not-quite-top of the line sports car?
I don’t know motorsports, but in all the sports I do know it’s that way. Tennis, cycling… there are serious diminishing returns in all of those and most kit spending isn’t justified by performance as much as status or stamp collecting.
So much of our lives are taken up by worrying about tiny performance differences that really don’t matter. It makes me sad for the waste of life sometimes.
>Even in motorsports, presumably it’s still mostly showing off? Unless you are a pro, you’d still lose any seriously comepetitivr race and have plenty to learn and enjoy driving a not-quite-top of the line sports car?
I was at a track day once, and you'd see guys rolling up with very expensive cars, and they were often clocked as noobs before anyone even spoke to them. The guy rolling up with a beat up 1st gen miata pulling a trailer with two sets of spare tires? Yeah, that guy got respect. Dude was scary quick in the turns.
That's definitely true, and I have a whole other rant how my cycling pals and I love to poke fun at dudes who show up to the group ride on a brand new $10,000 bike and get dropped before the midpoint.
BUT! It's easier than you think to get a point in participatory motorsports where the difference between, say, a Cayman and a Miata is something you can actively use.
>That's definitely true, and I have a whole other rant how my cycling pals and I love to poke fun at dudes who show up to the group ride on a brand new $10,000 bike and get dropped before the midpoint.
This has nothing to do with higher end cars or bikes being "signaling" this is just an anecdote between your skill and the next level.
You could say the same thing about a tour de france winner with any bike vs you and your pals.
If you are competitive, you get to a point where the differences do matter.
>This has nothing to do with higher end cars or bikes being "signaling" this is just an anecdote between your skill and the next level.
No, that's precisely what it's about.
>You could say the same thing about a tour de france winner with any bike vs you and your pals
In cycling, a TdF rider's bike isn't significantly more expensive or fancy than the highest-end bike available from any given maker. A novice rider rolling up on something one or two ticks away from the absolute top of the line is being a silly person. Novices in any discipline who opt for the high end of equipment are making foolish choices, and are frequently teased about it.
>If you are competitive, you get to a point where the differences do matter.
My guess is that you don't know very much about cycling. Pogi would be as very nearly as fast on my $5000 road bike as he is on his TdF bike. His comp bike is a little bit lighter, and it has components that are one tick higher up and thus lighter, but the differences at this level are tiny.
Nobody who isn't being paid to ride needs to go higher than $5k on a road bike. Going higher is just showing off, which is of course a totally reasonable thing to do, but don't pretend it makes a real difference.
The groupset would drive it for me. If I was buying a new bike, and I knew I wanted to be a rider, I wouldn't mess about with anything less than Shimano 105. At Specialized, the lowest end bike with the 105 groupset on it is $2100. That's the Allez Comp, which has an aluminum frame and wheels.
The next step up the ladder would be their "endurance" frame, which is carbon. It's called the Roubaix, and equipped with 105 it's $2800.
Either of those would be a good first "serious" bike.
If the question is more about diminishing returns, I'd offer my own bike, which is a Giant TCR Advanced. It's a couple years old. I have about $5500 in it, all in, but that includes the middle-grade SRAM electronic shifting group, carbon wheels, and a power meter. The meter is skippable if you're not doing serious training, but I did and do use power data for training. Subtract $800 if you don't want that.
I honestly think spending more is just showing off. If that's your jam, knock yourself out, but it's probably not making a big difference UNLESS you need a custom frame to be comfortable.
Super predictable for HN to trot out the "tablets and phones aren't computers" line.
It's still wrong. Countless people use them for all their computing needs. Overwhelmingly, though, these people are not the sort to comment on HN. They are Regular People, not Professional Computer Touchers, and their needs are absolutely met.
Apple's ecosystem allows a user to buy a phone and restore their last backup to a new phone via iCloud. This would include application installation and even sign-in.
I wonder if it's tied to something hinky with your Apple account and not Headspace specifically.
I have tried many times to migrate to Obsidian and DataView from OrgMode, but I just can't get there.
Obsidian is appealing because it's available on iOS, but the whole approach ended up (for me) being more fiddly and less effective (again for me) than orgmode.
OTOH & to be fair, I've been using Org for a really long time.
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