Home Ownership Checklist

We had one of those great talks during Ward Conference that made us feel guilty - the speaker strongly recommended buying a home over renting an apartment. This surprised us, since pricing in our area means that renting usually makes more sense financially. There are certainly other benefits to owning a home though, and I think it's a good goal for any family. At the blog "The Simple Dollar", there's an article up talking about four things to DO while preparing to buy a home.

Four Atypical Things to do Before You Consider Buying a House

The suggestions are great - and ought to help anyone to make sure they are prepared to buy a house, and know that they can afford the house they will buy.

Prosperity Preaching

The New York Times had an article I'd been meaning to post about one of the groups that does "Prosperity Preaching" - teaching that righteousness leads inevitably to financial success. In this case, righteousness means donating to the prosperity preachers themselves.

Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich

It's easy to believe this sort of fallacy - that righteousness in one area will make up for laziness in another area, or will make the rest of our life easy. Paying tithing doesn't mean that your credit card debts will magically fix themselves, and serving well in your calling doesn't mean you'll be able to afford that subprime mortgage.

I thought of this because of a post at Mormon Finance Deceitful Theology: The Theology of Prosperity. It reminded me I hadn't posted these two interesting articles.

Edit: Here's a neat post that refers to this: Not All Deviance is Quixotism

House Math 2.0

I found a great website about buying a house:

http://www.housemath.us/

We're currently renting, so I figured I'd look into whether or not it would make sense for us to buy a condo. Even in the current recession, house prices in the San Francisco Bay Area are rather astronomical.

I input the price of a condo about the size of our apartment in our area (I found it using zillow.com), the length of time we would likely stay in the house (5 years), the expected bank interest rate, expected appreciation etc. The web site then computed what price we could rent at instead to be in the same financial situation in 5 years after selling the condo. Based on that, it was pretty clear that we shouldn't buy right now - in fact, that we shouldn't buy unless we were planning on being in the area for 10 years. My life hasn't been that predictable so far, so I figure it's not worth the risk.

If you're trying to decide whether to rent or buy, this site is a pretty good resource. Check it out!