I liked the visualization and data, but I don't think it makes sense to compare home prices to wages w/o considering alternatives to home ownership. Home prices don't exit in a vacuum. That is, if a home is 10x the median salary, you can't really say "well, if I didn't buy a home I could work 10 years less." That's because the alternative to buying is renting, which is also expensive. So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k/mo. But rent might be $6k/mo as well -- and you don't earn any equity or tax write-offs while renting.
I think what the alternative title to this blog post could be is: "How many years of life does that city cost?" What it's really comparing is the relative cost of having a roof over your head in different areas. Would you rather work 40 years and live in SF or work 30 years and live in rural Wisconsin? (I don't have an opinion on those two options. I'm sure there are many people in both of those places that are happy with their choices.)
You also have to factor in the opportunity cost of what you could've done with that down payment (e.g. What would a $100k downpayment invested for 30 years in the stock market be worth vs how much is that worth in your home in 30 years?)
The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make some of these decisions:
I think he was pointing out how out of reach buying is. I'm sure a lot of people would like to own that are renting in SF right now but that's just not possible. "Having a roof of your head" and home ownership is very different, offering different benefits. For someone with kids, who probably does not want to be moving, renting is a bad option but the only one in a lot of markets.
Often missing from discussions of lower CoL areas is risk from different job markets. This is harder to factor in, but since not everyone can work remotely, you need to consider job market liquidity.
If there is a recession can you easily find another job? Do you have a decent selection of local employers to ensure sufficient competition in terms of wages and benefits? Etc.
Living in a high CoL area seems to correlate with a healthier job market.
He mentions a county in Texas as the most affordable — and yet Texas has relatively high property taxes (higher than California). So there's that.
And the more expensive homes will also be an income tap when you retire and sell the house (hint: anyone in the magenta can retire, sell and live out their lives anywhere in the green).
A lot of these calculators seem to miss changing costs to.
Ten years ago, I rented a small apartment for $350 per week. Now a literally identical apartment, 20km further from the CBD is going for $600 per week of rent.
(I'm not in the US).
Mortgages don't consistently go up in a way that meets these sorts of increases.
You can sublet and pay people in cash for a lot less than the official renting price. This is particularly true in places with high real estate prices like LA, NY, NJ and SF where there is rent control. Thus it incentivizes long-term tenants to sublet for a sub-market price.
You can't really buy a house in such a fashion though.
> So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k/mo. But rent might be $6k/mo as well -- and you don't earn any equity or tax write-offs while renting.
When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later. There's barely any economic comparison between renting and ownership. The tax write offs is the one of the least of your concerns.
People go completely and absolutely nuts when they end up "underwater" with mortgages, which means the sale price of the house at some point becomes less than what you bought it for, or worse, less than the remainder of what you owe. It's an utter and total disaster if you can only get back 80% of what you paid. And yet nobody blinks an eye about sending 100% of their money down the rental drain.
With ownership, you add to the value/legacy that you can pass to your family when you die. As a renter, you add nothing.
When renting, people often get priced out of their apartments, or evicted for circumstances beyond their control. With ownership, the sale price is once, and generally only rare major disasters can push you out. The risks to renting are greater than the risks for home ownership.
These things are why it's so incredibly important that home ownership is affordable across the country. If it goes out of reach, we will have a huge economic problem with large consequences.
The visualizations were great and I think his point was to drive home how long it would take to own a home in the optimal case. In reality you should take his metric and multiply it times 6 or 7 minimally. You're still going to have to pay at least the sale price of the house if you intend to own it free and clear. Also, since banks in the US don't create mortgages for longer than a 40-year term (I believe that's the max), if your value in his metric is greater than 5, and using my 6-7 multiplier, then you're never going to own a home in that location.
That being said, a better metric might be the time to save up for a down payment that brings the mortgage and fees into a reasonable range for your salary. However, that calculation is much more complicated.
Edit: I live in SF and I accept that I will never own a home free and clear here, unless I get exceptionally lucky. My plan is to get a mortgage in SF and eventually sell the place and use the equity to buy in a more affordable market.
I don't think the point of this was to compare rent vs buy. It was to give information for people who want to own a home where the cheapest place to do so is.
This is an awesome site, visually depicting how unaffordable housing has become in so many parts of the US.
It's truly amazing how much the Fed (with perpetually low interest rates) and local restrictions on building (making it more expensive or impossible to build) have increased the cost of home ownership over the past 60 years.
Anyone who's seriously considering purchasing a home should read The Housing Trap by Patrick Killelea, it's a short, amazing overview of how we arrived in the situation we're in as well as a practical guide for when to buy vs rent housing.
I cant help but notice in the OP visualization, the houston area is cheap - a year of work, and reputed to have little regulation - like zoning regs for flood watersheds, or regulatory oversight over chemicals stored in warehouses...
You guys may have this or that problem in the US, but the fact that you have people like this author who put so much effort into communicating the problems and who care this much, that makes me envious of you all. You'd be really hard pressed to find a good number of people in my country who cared as much about the welfare of the rest of the people.
Cool visualization, but kind of a useless statistic. The question that matters is: How many years will it take me to pay off my mortgage after my expenses (food, transportation, housing maintenance, utilities, taxes) are taken into account?
It doesn't matter how cheap a house is if you can't save any money.
Mortgages tend to have fixed durations, and the amount you'd want to overpay to pay it off earlier depends on so many personal factors that you can't really generalize it in a map like this.
A better metric I like to use: how many extra years of work before retiring will this large expense cost me? (Admittedly: this does not work the same for housing for lots of obvious reasons).
An example: a friend of mine is renovating the exterior of his house for $100,000. He plans to live there until he dies (it's a lovely house), so he'll never see that money again. He'll just have a nicer house. My alternative option for him: retire 4 years early instead.
If you invest $1 now, you can expect it to double in about 14 years, give or take. So since he has more than 14 years left until retirement, that $100,000 would be $200,000. If he plans to live off $50,000/year, then he's giving up 4 years of retirement for the sake of his house looking nicer. If he plans on living off $30,000, then it's nearly 7 years early retirement.
It's not exact math, but it's a good metric to put things in perspective.
It goes to show that it's not construction costs that account for variances in home prices, but rather something location based: land values.
Policies that will work to drive down land values (and utilize land values to fund public infrastructure instead of private land speculation) would be very useful in many overheated land markets.
> Policies that will work to drive down land values (and utilize land values to fund public infrastructure instead of private land speculation) would be very useful in many overheated land markets
Supply and demand. Allowing builders to build higher, thereby increasing density, amortizes the land's value across more living space. Turning land into parks is nice, for people and property values, but does nothing to reducing housing prices nor rents. (If anything, by yanking land supply off the market such policies could actually exacerbate the problem if carried out in a vacuum.)
As I understand it, this type of scrolling map visualization is something designed and implemented by Esri specifically for arcgis.com. See https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/ for more examples and details.
It may be that the author of this article on housing developed the analysis, maps, and text but not the actual web UI. That might be something provided by Esri that is common to all of these "story maps".
That was a really nice overview. One thing to consider though, when you gain more expertise through experience, you typically gain more income. Of course, most of the time, homes tend to appreciate as well.
But to the point, it's best not to burden yourself too much with a home. I bought mine in my late 20s. My criteria was that I didn't ever want to move again (and could fit a pool table), so I bought a house big enough for a family to live comfortably that I could reasonably afford in my late 20s. It's worked out so far.
I always wonder why it is an unknown fact for many that in Texas houses are still very affordable, even in metropolitan areas. I follow the market there closely, and you can get quality homes for the cheap. Is it that the high property taxes work their magic in that they hold the upfront purchase price low? It would have pros and cons - while keeping your house when retired gets more difficult, buying one when still young gets a lot easier.
I'm not sure. I know a guy in the Dallas area that works in finance, who keeps dragging his heels because he thinks a $300k place is so unaffordable. I don't get the dynamic -- it seems cheap to anyone in the Bay Area (Or San Diego, or Portland, or Seattle, or LA, or New York City, or.. most cities on the eastern seaboard). My understanding is that pay is fairly decent in Dallas. I don't get how $300k is anywhere near burdensome.
And yet, here I am in one of the most expensive markets in the world, and I can swing housing, but he cannot bring himself to do it. That's not to say it's less affordable there; it could be a matter of personal psychology, but regardless, I don't get it.
All I know is that I've noticed over the past decade or so, everyone who argues that they can buy property far cheaper in XYZ location far away from the bay area, and live like kings... somehow... don't.
Oh it's quite known as the population growth rate (especially from interstate migrants) shows over the past several years. Granted life affordability is only one of many reasons.
High-cost cities get their high property values via network effects -- it's the proximity of other people that makes the land valuable. I wonder if a good way to circumvent high home prices is to create new cities deliberately in rural land.
For instance, get a few thousand people to agree to buy a large plot of land in a sparsely populated area. All the early-adopters get a cheap plot of land to build a house on, with most of the lots left unclaimed and managed by a non-profit. As people move in, the value of the land rises and the non-profit generates revenue and pays for infrastructure by selling the remaining lots. In the end, the citizens and town are better off financially because collectively they only paid rural-land prices for high value urban real estate.
This would be more practical if it's near an existing town (for basic necessity, schooling, proximity to hospitals, etc..), and could perhaps be helped along by partnering with a university or large employer wishing to establish a new campus.
There's a lot of ways this could fail, but it seems at least plausible that it could work. There's a lot of mostly-empty land, especially in those west-coast purple areas shown on the map on the linked page.
The article looks at the cost to buy which is
high in places like SF but not total cost of ownership including change in value over the time of ownership. I bought a place in London and the initial cost was >10 wages but then it's gone up by 1 or 2 wages per year so the TCO is negative - it pays me to own it. It can be a mistake not to take that stuff in to account.
I've mentioned the median house price to median income ratio many times before, usually in the context of "how close are we to the bubble collapsing". Around 4:1 is about as high as it gets before something gives. It would be nice to see that map over time.
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long?
I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
Can you even find anywhere to rent? Not everywhere has a liquid rental market.
Moving only once every 10 years sounds great. Renting means maybe having to move on notice as short as one month. Back when I was renting I moved about every 3 years, although that was also house-sharing with other young professionals.
Rent is usually more expensive than mortgage payments, and house price appreciation is your only chance to make a leveraged investment that pays roughly 7% annually.
Edit: also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments. Frees up a whole lot of cashflow. Would you really want to go into retirement on a fixed income with a variable rent payment?
Note that a "20 year mortgage" just sets the amortisation rate of the payments; you can accelerate it, and usually will end up re-mortgaging every 3-5 years to get better rates.
Rent is NOT throwing money away, it is HIGHLY dependent on where you're living. There are MANY sunk one-time costs you have to pay when buying a home, including:
--realtor commission (averages 6% of home price, or approximately 1.5 years of 30 year mortgage payments)
--title fees (frequently 1% of purchase price)
--other legal and bank fees
The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make decisions like these:
Rent gets unbearable way faster than every 10 years. My first place in the Bay Area had rent jump from $1800 (uncomfortable but doable), to $2300 per month. This was after just one year of being there, and since then I've noticed that 4 years later rents in that neighborhood are now at $3300 a month for a one bedroom.
I think you have a bit of a skewed view of reality there - people in the US are far less likely to move for work than in past generations. You may be surrounded by a bubble of digital nomads, but it’s far from common.
I guess it depends on where you live and what you're looking for. When we where looking for a house there simply wasn't anything to rent long term that matched our requirements. So the option simply wasn't there. It was buy or nothing.
I recall per bob shiller (of case shiller index) on an average it has taken 30 years of work to own a house throughout ages. Now try to figure out how many years of that life were spent working for real estate agent? at 6.5% commision if you go through 4 houses that's 25% of cost. so effectively 25% of your life you have worked for realtors!
If you are in a professional career, then it's not the median salary that matters but the median salary for your particular profession (and indeed whether there are any jobs in your profession in that area). You also want to be looking at home prices for a particular class/size of home as the nature of housing stock varies considerably from place to place.
I'm in the UK, 50 minutes by train from one of the mainline London train stations, but prices here are a fraction of what they would be next to that train station. Median salaries here would also be much lower, but if you moved out here and commuted into London, your salary would effectively only decrease by your commuting cost, not lower to the media salary in this area (although you of course then need to commute which has its own set of disadvantages). Other costs such as childcare are significantly cheaper here too than in central London.
This isn't the right way to look at a home purchase. Seems like it was written by someone who hasn't bought a house.
Homes go up in value, so in the long-run you tend to make money or at least break even. A lot of this depends on how into "keeping up with the Jones" you are. If you remodel your house a lot, need the latest and greatest garage door opener and bathroom sinks... yeah, you're sinking money into the property that you won't ever recover through sales. BUT... that's OK! Because it means you have the house you always wanted, and y'know... we only go around once.
Buying vs. renting. Guess what, you're going to spend money putting a roof over your head. That's life. Does it cost more to buy or rent? Over 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? In the long run it's almost always better to buy. But short term, if you know you're only in a city for 5 years... maybe just rent. That's fine. No harm no foul, you're advancing your career... or just living. Don't fret it too much. If you're happy, you're happy.
What do you need? Do you need a house with lots of bedrooms for your kids / family? Do you need a year for your dogs? Do you need quick walking access to the coffee shop near the train station? There's no right answer, buying vs. renting... for people who move every 2-5 years, pretty much works out even. (Having done both I can say from experience that buying just ties up a lot of your savings and keeps you from being able to spend it.)
Anyway a house is not "years of life" -- it's something you live in for years of your life. You can buy as an investment... and you'll make money. You can trade up ever 2 years... and it's probably better to just rent. Roots are great as long as the local economy is doing well, but if it's not... hey, you've gotta move to keep ahead. Plenty of ways to get ahead in life, a house can be one, or moving city to city as a consultant is one. There's no wrong answer.
@sndean I also have to wonder how many years home ownership is taking off my life expectancy, due to the stress of trying to maintain the house and associated payments!?!
[+] [-] lpolovets|8 years ago|reply
I think what the alternative title to this blog post could be is: "How many years of life does that city cost?" What it's really comparing is the relative cost of having a roof over your head in different areas. Would you rather work 40 years and live in SF or work 30 years and live in rural Wisconsin? (I don't have an opinion on those two options. I'm sure there are many people in both of those places that are happy with their choices.)
[+] [-] sbenitoj|8 years ago|reply
The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make some of these decisions:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
[+] [-] cassieramen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|8 years ago|reply
If there is a recession can you easily find another job? Do you have a decent selection of local employers to ensure sufficient competition in terms of wages and benefits? Etc.
Living in a high CoL area seems to correlate with a healthier job market.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|8 years ago|reply
And the more expensive homes will also be an income tap when you retire and sell the house (hint: anyone in the magenta can retire, sell and live out their lives anywhere in the green).
[+] [-] technion|8 years ago|reply
Ten years ago, I rented a small apartment for $350 per week. Now a literally identical apartment, 20km further from the CBD is going for $600 per week of rent. (I'm not in the US).
Mortgages don't consistently go up in a way that meets these sorts of increases.
[+] [-] throwaway688|8 years ago|reply
You can't really buy a house in such a fashion though.
[+] [-] gozur88|8 years ago|reply
Yes, but what you can say is "If I move to this other place I can work ten fewer years for my house even if I make less money."
[+] [-] jankotek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later. There's barely any economic comparison between renting and ownership. The tax write offs is the one of the least of your concerns.
People go completely and absolutely nuts when they end up "underwater" with mortgages, which means the sale price of the house at some point becomes less than what you bought it for, or worse, less than the remainder of what you owe. It's an utter and total disaster if you can only get back 80% of what you paid. And yet nobody blinks an eye about sending 100% of their money down the rental drain.
With ownership, you add to the value/legacy that you can pass to your family when you die. As a renter, you add nothing.
When renting, people often get priced out of their apartments, or evicted for circumstances beyond their control. With ownership, the sale price is once, and generally only rare major disasters can push you out. The risks to renting are greater than the risks for home ownership.
These things are why it's so incredibly important that home ownership is affordable across the country. If it goes out of reach, we will have a huge economic problem with large consequences.
[+] [-] jaranha|8 years ago|reply
That being said, a better metric might be the time to save up for a down payment that brings the mortgage and fees into a reasonable range for your salary. However, that calculation is much more complicated.
Edit: I live in SF and I accept that I will never own a home free and clear here, unless I get exceptionally lucky. My plan is to get a mortgage in SF and eventually sell the place and use the equity to buy in a more affordable market.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
My taxes are 75% of my mortgage, but it's still worth 1/3 the salary to pay 1/7 the cost vs living in The Bay Area.
[+] [-] pmorici|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbenitoj|8 years ago|reply
It's truly amazing how much the Fed (with perpetually low interest rates) and local restrictions on building (making it more expensive or impossible to build) have increased the cost of home ownership over the past 60 years.
Anyone who's seriously considering purchasing a home should read The Housing Trap by Patrick Killelea, it's a short, amazing overview of how we arrived in the situation we're in as well as a practical guide for when to buy vs rent housing.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479156213/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_Ki...
[+] [-] zaroth|8 years ago|reply
But I suppose if your call center employees simply must be living in downtown S.F. the answer must be that we just need lax zoning and higher density!
[+] [-] dv_dt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eanzenberg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw1010|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfrey|8 years ago|reply
It doesn't matter how cheap a house is if you can't save any money.
[+] [-] autokad|8 years ago|reply
how does other factors like food/transportation/taxes factor in? though not always, but they tend to go hand in hand no?
the cost of real estate is factored into much of what we buy / spend money.
[+] [-] kelnos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markvdb|8 years ago|reply
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
[+] [-] mabbo|8 years ago|reply
An example: a friend of mine is renovating the exterior of his house for $100,000. He plans to live there until he dies (it's a lovely house), so he'll never see that money again. He'll just have a nicer house. My alternative option for him: retire 4 years early instead.
If you invest $1 now, you can expect it to double in about 14 years, give or take. So since he has more than 14 years left until retirement, that $100,000 would be $200,000. If he plans to live off $50,000/year, then he's giving up 4 years of retirement for the sake of his house looking nicer. If he plans on living off $30,000, then it's nearly 7 years early retirement.
It's not exact math, but it's a good metric to put things in perspective.
[+] [-] bufordsharkley|8 years ago|reply
Policies that will work to drive down land values (and utilize land values to fund public infrastructure instead of private land speculation) would be very useful in many overheated land markets.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
Supply and demand. Allowing builders to build higher, thereby increasing density, amortizes the land's value across more living space. Turning land into parks is nice, for people and property values, but does nothing to reducing housing prices nor rents. (If anything, by yanking land supply off the market such policies could actually exacerbate the problem if carried out in a vacuum.)
[+] [-] setr|8 years ago|reply
Still can't be assed to read it fully though with my scroll being screwed by intermediate textboxes though.
[+] [-] jjr8|8 years ago|reply
It may be that the author of this article on housing developed the analysis, maps, and text but not the actual web UI. That might be something provided by Esri that is common to all of these "story maps".
[+] [-] Clubber|8 years ago|reply
But to the point, it's best not to burden yourself too much with a home. I bought mine in my late 20s. My criteria was that I didn't ever want to move again (and could fit a pool table), so I bought a house big enough for a family to live comfortably that I could reasonably afford in my late 20s. It's worked out so far.
[+] [-] geff82|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|8 years ago|reply
And yet, here I am in one of the most expensive markets in the world, and I can swing housing, but he cannot bring himself to do it. That's not to say it's less affordable there; it could be a matter of personal psychology, but regardless, I don't get it.
All I know is that I've noticed over the past decade or so, everyone who argues that they can buy property far cheaper in XYZ location far away from the bay area, and live like kings... somehow... don't.
[+] [-] branchless|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodablah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|8 years ago|reply
For instance, get a few thousand people to agree to buy a large plot of land in a sparsely populated area. All the early-adopters get a cheap plot of land to build a house on, with most of the lots left unclaimed and managed by a non-profit. As people move in, the value of the land rises and the non-profit generates revenue and pays for infrastructure by selling the remaining lots. In the end, the citizens and town are better off financially because collectively they only paid rural-land prices for high value urban real estate.
This would be more practical if it's near an existing town (for basic necessity, schooling, proximity to hospitals, etc..), and could perhaps be helped along by partnering with a university or large employer wishing to establish a new campus.
There's a lot of ways this could fail, but it seems at least plausible that it could work. There's a lot of mostly-empty land, especially in those west-coast purple areas shown on the map on the linked page.
[+] [-] tim333|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
I've mentioned the median house price to median income ratio many times before, usually in the context of "how close are we to the bubble collapsing". Around 4:1 is about as high as it gets before something gives. It would be nice to see that map over time.
[+] [-] magic_beans|8 years ago|reply
I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
Do you want to redecorate to your own taste?
Can you even find anywhere to rent? Not everywhere has a liquid rental market.
Moving only once every 10 years sounds great. Renting means maybe having to move on notice as short as one month. Back when I was renting I moved about every 3 years, although that was also house-sharing with other young professionals.
Rent is usually more expensive than mortgage payments, and house price appreciation is your only chance to make a leveraged investment that pays roughly 7% annually.
Edit: also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments. Frees up a whole lot of cashflow. Would you really want to go into retirement on a fixed income with a variable rent payment?
Note that a "20 year mortgage" just sets the amortisation rate of the payments; you can accelerate it, and usually will end up re-mortgaging every 3-5 years to get better rates.
[+] [-] sbenitoj|8 years ago|reply
--realtor commission (averages 6% of home price, or approximately 1.5 years of 30 year mortgage payments)
--title fees (frequently 1% of purchase price)
--other legal and bank fees
The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make decisions like these:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdavis703|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
I think you have a bit of a skewed view of reality there - people in the US are far less likely to move for work than in past generations. You may be surrounded by a bubble of digital nomads, but it’s far from common.
[+] [-] dagw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anorphirith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DesiLurker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvvw|8 years ago|reply
I'm in the UK, 50 minutes by train from one of the mainline London train stations, but prices here are a fraction of what they would be next to that train station. Median salaries here would also be much lower, but if you moved out here and commuted into London, your salary would effectively only decrease by your commuting cost, not lower to the media salary in this area (although you of course then need to commute which has its own set of disadvantages). Other costs such as childcare are significantly cheaper here too than in central London.
[+] [-] dbg31415|8 years ago|reply
Homes go up in value, so in the long-run you tend to make money or at least break even. A lot of this depends on how into "keeping up with the Jones" you are. If you remodel your house a lot, need the latest and greatest garage door opener and bathroom sinks... yeah, you're sinking money into the property that you won't ever recover through sales. BUT... that's OK! Because it means you have the house you always wanted, and y'know... we only go around once.
Buying vs. renting. Guess what, you're going to spend money putting a roof over your head. That's life. Does it cost more to buy or rent? Over 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? In the long run it's almost always better to buy. But short term, if you know you're only in a city for 5 years... maybe just rent. That's fine. No harm no foul, you're advancing your career... or just living. Don't fret it too much. If you're happy, you're happy.
What do you need? Do you need a house with lots of bedrooms for your kids / family? Do you need a year for your dogs? Do you need quick walking access to the coffee shop near the train station? There's no right answer, buying vs. renting... for people who move every 2-5 years, pretty much works out even. (Having done both I can say from experience that buying just ties up a lot of your savings and keeps you from being able to spend it.)
Anyway a house is not "years of life" -- it's something you live in for years of your life. You can buy as an investment... and you'll make money. You can trade up ever 2 years... and it's probably better to just rent. Roots are great as long as the local economy is doing well, but if it's not... hey, you've gotta move to keep ahead. Plenty of ways to get ahead in life, a house can be one, or moving city to city as a consultant is one. There's no wrong answer.
[+] [-] panic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guesto|8 years ago|reply
@sndean I also have to wonder how many years home ownership is taking off my life expectancy, due to the stress of trying to maintain the house and associated payments!?!