alt Hacker NewsNo. You can rent and you can take the bus. Or rent and buy a crazy cheap old used car.
A house and a decent car are not primarily about making money. They're about your quality of life.
> And all recommend not using credit cards and instead an emergency fund if you lose your job.
And if you already used your emergency fund on, say, a medical emergency...?
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8 years ago I bought a house. My monthly rent was 1300 and mortgage/escrow/repair savings were instead 2000. Rent went up $100-$200 a year.
My son is looking for rentals in our same community and the equivalent rental to what I had is now around $3000.
Even ignoring appreciation, in the long term there was a cash flow savings.
The odds of two emergencies are low enough that you can ignore this. Not that it doesn't happen, but it isn't that common. If you expect two emergencies you should have more in the fund to cover it.
Yes because American public transit is so great and now you have to get up hours earlier and come home later - not great if you have kids or you actually want to spend time with your significant other.
Also what happens when that cheap old car doesn’t start in the morning when you need to get to work or pick your kids up from day care/school or need to be home when they get off the bus?
Where are you going to get the money to fix that old car?
Yep, I have never taken a loan out to buy a vehicle — even though I have always needed one to make money.
When I was working a pizza place, going to JuCo, I had a 10-speed bike for transportation. (Yeah, even in the shit Kansas winters, I was riding to JuCo along the just-plowed roads. Now get off my lawn!)