Study: More 18- to 34-year-olds live with parents than anywhere else

Take care of your strawman and I'll play. I suspect you don't even realize where your error is. Again.

 

"Government fails most 18-to-34 year olds."

 

Actually, it's not my strawman. It's your's. I just used the same logic that you used.

 

I'm always impressed at people who can own a home by age 26. Have a few friends who managed to do that, too, and because most were single, they were able to rent out a room or two to friends to offset mortgage costs.

I moved back in with my parents for a few months after college until my buddies and I found a year-round rental the following September. In hindsight, had I stayed with my parents for four years and paid myself that rent money, I would have had enough for a downpayment at age 26.

I was, however, not planning to stay in the area very long. Wound up in the same job until age 30 before I moved to Hawaii. Not sure I would have gone to Hawaii if I owned a home, though, so it all worked out for the best, but I didn't become a homeowner until two years ago.

 

I have a housebuying problem. Actually, because it used to be easy (even encouraged) to job hop among newspapers, I ended up "buying" four houses in just over four years. I'm on house six right now, and I have house 5 as a rental for the time being.. I plan to stay put in the current one for a while.

 

I've actually never bought a home, but I'd really like to get into property investment. My wife owned our home before we began dating, for which I'm eternally grateful, since we have a wonderful home with amazing ocean views. We renovated it last year, which was a fun process, enough so that I think I'd enjoy flipping houses.

 

We bought (well, actually, put a down payment and got a mortgage from a bank, to be accurate), when I was 28. The apartment building we were in was bought by another guy, who tried to raise the rent on us while we still had a lease. We were like, nuh-uh, so he told us to get out when the lease was up. We managed to stay in an extra month while the closing process was underway.

Stressful as fucking hell, because our lawyer sucked and didn't explain anything to us. We figured it'd be, we'd need the downpayment, and part of the closing costs, with the other part of the closing costs put in the mortgage. Not quite. Nobody told us until three days before that we needed money to pay the seller for taxes that had been paid for the rest of the year (we thought they had pro-rated it each month), and the appraisal by the bank ended up $5K under what the agreed-upon price was. So suddenly, we had to come up with an extra $8K.

Looking back now, I wish we hadn't been in as much of a rush. Part of that was my wife's fault, because she thought our goon/landlord would just come in and throw our stuff out on the street, even though he legally couldn't. I would have liked to have done some more research on government grants (Hi DocBot!) for low-income first-time buyers, which could have helped us financially. But, what's done is done, and we've been in our place nearly 15 years.

 

I've thought about that too, and it always sounds promising.

But then I look at the time one landlord who owned property across from me was spending days cleaning out her place full of hypodermic needles after her druggie tenants had left and telling me she wished she never bought the place.

And I look at the owner of the place, next to me, whose real estate company had bought it at a tax sale after my previous neighbor went tin-foil nuts and stopped paying her property taxes. His first tenant was really nice, but on a short-term lease. Second tenant was a family that, on paper, seemed OK. All of them worked, and volunteered at the fire department. To us, we had a couple of minor issues that were resolved, and they were actually pretty quiet. But for the owner, they sucked. They smoked, even though their lease prohibited them from doing so and now the house smells. They had a dog that pissed and pooped all over their renovated floors. And he found sewage in the basement. He's now looking to sell the place again, after only owning it a couple of years and putting a major renovation into it. And this is a guy, and wife, who own a whole bunch of other rentals, so it must be a real pain in the ass for them.

 

You should have received a good faith estimate of closing costs three days after the mortgage company received your loan application.

Which serves as a comparison to the document you receive three days before closing. Numbers often change a little, but that tax nugget should have been in both documents.

 

That was a huge argument between me and our shitty lawyer. It ended up turning into a shouting match over the phone. With our own lawyer.

Our estimate said something like $4,500. He kept saying, "Do you have it? It should say how much." I kept pointing out that we did and kept reading off the numbers. The estimate, as it turned out, didn't include the taxes that we had to reimburse the seller. It turned our closing costs from $4,500 to $7,500, plus an additional $5K that we had to come up with because of the low appraisal. All in the last week before closing.

Everyone told me I should have just bitched out the lawyer after the papers were signed right in front of everyone, but by then, I was too damn exhausted to muster anything.

 

The different stories here prove that this trend is not necessarily a big deal for the people in it, parents and children both. I am conflicted. On Monday, Alice and I leave for Bordeaux to do some tourism but mostly to see our 27-year old daughter. It's where she lives now. In her first year at a business school for wine there, the company she was interning at offered her a real job, which she starts in July. Her ambition since she was in junior high was to live in France. Kind of a blue sky deal, but she made it happen. Part of me is proud to bursting (not to mention how handy it might prove to have a relative working in a top end French wine exporting firm). But another part of me now knows I'll be seeing her twice a year probably tops for the foreseeable future, and misses when she was clerking in a wine/liquor store in our town for peanuts and living with us.
If there's one thing I've always hated since I was young, it was thumb-sucking big think pieces and social science research on da youts. And the older I get, the more bogus those seem to me. Life's a series of complicated problems most people deal with as best they can, and their solutions are too varied to be summed up in a scholarly paper, graph, chart or article.

 

Why do buyers not insert mortgage contingency clauses in the contract, or something to protect the buyer in case an appraisal comes in too low?