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ctlmdjb
ParticipantChris – what’s the URL of your blog?
ParticipantChris – what’s the URL of your blog?
ParticipantChris – what’s the URL of your blog?
ParticipantUS housing market will collapse:
– Inventory will grow steadily over the summer
– Mortgage mess will get worse
– More and more fraud will be discovered
– Consumer confidence will decline
– US dollar will slumpOf course those things will happen if he DOESN’T get killed as well.
Believe me they’ll keep him out of harms way.
ParticipantIf you are comparing rent to mortgage, it’s appropriate to compare the rent to just the interest portion of the mortgage (you are not using your rent to buy the property, nor are you using the interest payment to buy the property).
The tax thing – agreed, but you ignore the tax break for a mortgage, I claim they cancel each other out. (You can never know for sure – I get a tax break anyway because I have a home office…maybe I’d run into AMT, maybe not).
Then there’s possible depreciation. Yes, if you know for sure that house prices are dropping this is a huge swinger, but you don’t – nobody does. They SHOULD, but we don’t know for sure they will.
I think 3 years is the clincher for me – I know the cost of moving in only too well, I don’t want to pay the cost of buying a house over only 3 years.
ParticipantI’m a little ways out from doing this yet, I pay $3150 / month at the moment for a farmhouse in Del Mar (1 acre lot so good for the dog). The dog is a $80lb mutt, but doesn’t chew or anything – she’s 6, but the size puts some people off.
I don’t need to move until later this year, but job changes have made this too small for both of us and my daughter is about to become a teenager and thus need a full time bathroom just for herself. So I need something bigger – $3000 for 2800 sq ft would be great. School district doesn’t matter so much, my kids are in private schools.
I guess I’m half tempted to buy, but knowing I will move in 3 years puts me off. Also MAYBE house prices will come down 20% (and MAYBE not). sdrealtor, if you are in the business perhaps I can contact you closer to the time?
ParticipantSomeone told me it’s actually a conservation project to return the flood valley to its original condition. Seems a huge mess at the moment, but it doesn’t look like a construction project…
ParticipantI rent a place and use the room overthe garage as an office. As this is a seperate space that COULD be used as living quarters that is acceptable for a tax deduction. Once you itemize tax deductions you should make sure that you claim everything possible:
– Percentage of rent
– Percentage of gas and electricity
– Percentage of waste removal
– Percentage of water
– Also keep a record of mileage in your car used for business purposes (trips to airport, clients) – that is deductable at $0.45 / mile or so.
Finally expenditure you make for the business (I bought a portable air conditioner this summer for example for the office).
I have also heard that the chances of audit are high, so keep it all clean and use CPA!ParticipantLet me know the time and place I’m in.
The American puritan thing is really weird. I work with a bunch of great guys, but most of them go to Church every Sunday. In the UK that would be seen as odd to put it mildly (Church attendance rate there is something like 6%). Then in the corporate world these same guys like nothing better than a night out ending in a strip club…watching 22 year olds take their clothes off for money. Sorry – I find that disturbing (and damn boring as well).
Politics – I agree, don’t even go there. One of my colleagues the other day started telling me how ‘measured’ he thought Israel’s response had been in Lebanon….yeah I thought, they’ve only killed a couple of thousand innocent civilians so far, but I didn’t say anything.
But the weird thing is, these are genuinely good people. They love their kids, generous – I blame the American media, which it seems to me is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.
America is an amazing place – I just drove through Southern Colorado back to San Diego. Scenery is just stunning through monument valley, 4 corners. There are a wide variety of great people here – I practice Yoga a lot and get to meet some hippies and alternative people there, so I know the corporate world isn’t the beginning and end of this country. But there’s that puritanical streak just under the surface that is hard to deal with for a liberal European. I guess that’s why we kicked the Puirtans out in the first place (joke – sit back and wait for the blasting).
ParticipantHow many REAL friends does the average person have? 4 or 5 is my guess. Everyone else is really an aquaintance.
I’m in my early 40’s, I’ve moved a lot and I find there’s 4 or 5 people I stay in touch with. I’ve changed a very great deal and I find the people I was frends with in my teens and early twenties I very often dislike today.
I’m from the UK and I agree somewhat about the California flakiness thing. Part of the problem is that Americans APPEAR very friendly on the surface. In England or Germany people are much more standoffish until they get to know you.
Europeans mistake the ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’ for genuine friendship and get offended when they are then treated casually.
But in my time in San Diego I’ve made 2 or 3 close American friends. Idon’t hang out with fellow Brits too much (except my next door neighbour). I find Americans generous to a fault usually – but it takes a while to be able to read them…I’ve assumed friendship several times that hasn’t really existed.
The corporate world here is tough as well. I used to get into trouble all the time for being too blunt. Now I’ve learned to agree most of the time regardless of what I think…my girlfriend is from Colorado – she finds the same thing. We come accross as agressive when all we are doing is expressing our honest opinion.
‘Two cultures divided by a common language’ – Oscar Wilde?ParticipantNice to see there are some other Brits on the site!
The point I was trying to make is that less desirable properties get wacked hardest. Mine was in a poor location (BR station but no tube, BR station only ran to the city – 3 miles down the road in Brixton you are on the Victoria line), it was an appartment (bad) it was one bedroom (bad), it was on a busy road (bad), it had no garden (in England very bad), it faced North (bad). As the market goes down buyers still have about the same amount of money to spend – they just buy nicer places. When I did list it we were into the next upswing and I had 2 buyers in a week – ’cause it was all they could afford. It also had some really toxic legal issues to do with the building being owned by one party and the appartments being actually on a 99 year lease. Meant all the common areas needed maintenance but all 5 leasees had to agree and pay for them….which never happened. The buyers didn’t care all of a sudden – we were into the next upturn.
So condo conversions in Lemon Grove WILL sell. Sometime in 2012.ParticipantStill, I think 60-80% is something that we would only see in a very extreme situation related to — you name it — a true depression, national catastrophe, nuclear calamity
There was no nuclear war that I remember in London in the early ’90s. There was a mild recession ’90/91 related to high interest rates. My property still lost 60%+ of its value. The market essentially froze – no one was buying or selling unless desperate. The phrase ‘negative equity’ was commonplace (you owed more than the house was worth). There was talk of a government bailout – it never happened. Problem was any buyers that existed headed for affordable property close to their jobs. Maybe Temecula is different and there’s huge industry up there I don’t know about…but if a lot of people live there and work in San Diego, good luck.
Why is it people can accept a 60% RISE in value as normal, but a FALL back to the original value takes a nuclear winter? We ended up at 1979 pricing in London as things overshot the other way and then recovered.
The train wreck took maybe 5 years to unfold. We’re in year 0.5 and I’ve already seen 10%+ price drops.
ParticipantNot really – by that point I owned 3 properties, this one, another I bought later in Oxford (also rented out to students) and one I built in Ireland. I had just moved back to the UK from Ireland and I was renting. So I liquated all the other properties and bought something where I worked in the UK. THEN I moved to San Diego. At one point I had about 400K pounds in mortgage on 3 properties and my ability to pay was completely tied to my ability to rent them all out. The only moral I think is applicable is the collapse in value can be horredous and my experience in London was that it was far, far worse in outlying areas. The pattern was prices rose in the center of town until people coud not afford them. Then outlying areas started to rise, with gentrification following (Brixton for example). Prices in the center stagnated whilst the outer areas continued to rise. Whnen the crash hit, people could suddenly start to afford the more fashionable neighbourhoods again and you couldn’t give away property where I lived.
I’d be very suprised if the same thing doesn’t happen here…there will be a bloodbath in Temecula for example because most people only live there because they have to and endure the commute. A drop in pricing in Carmel Valley, Del Mar, Cardiff, Carlsbad will KILL the Temecula market. I bet it’s already happening. And the drop can be far, far steeper than I think most on this site even realise. Forget 20 or 30%. Try 60, 70, 80% in these areas.
ParticipantWell don’t forget I paid 50K for it, not 17K. So with carrying costs over 12 years, the extra 20K didn’t come close to even paying interest on my original investment. I also spent significant money on upkeep, rates (equivalent of property tax), repairs. I didn’t sell it purely because I pretty much couldn’t. But it affected my ability to buy elsewhere as I already had a mortgage. All in all I remember it as an ongoing nightmare.
Today – hard to estimate, probably 150-200K pounds. Which is completely ridiculous for a crapy 900 sq. ft. one bedroom appartment in a poor part of London. It’ll crash again.
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