What’s a reasonable range to spend on purchasing a home for a single ERE person?

[tonyedgecombe]

Friends, family, culture, a feeling of belonging, inertia, jobs, these are all valid reasons you might feel anchored in one place.

[jacob]

So....if one can buy a 3 bedroom house for 30-80K in some nice parts of the country, what exactly is the point of purchasing the same home for 300K-500K in a more expensive area?

Location, location, location... IOW the neighborhood and the people, services, and institutions within it. For a lot of people it boils down to "school district" because they want a higher rated one because they have children. If they don't they might want access to other things. That's the reason people pay $1000+/month to sleep in a tent in Silicon Valley. It might even be as crude as keeping out/in the riff raff (like ERE cheapskates) where a high cost is simply creates a positional good in the sense that you're assured to live next to other people who can afford it. Any and all of these are essentially the reason and the price of that is often much higher than the cost of the construction.

[Jean]

What is the point of school district when the money could hire a private tutor?

[TopHatFox]

Yeah, or home schooling/CLEP tests can get you a free BA at 18.

[Bankai]

Novelty and Personal Learning Curves: It's not about "soap-making" in particular, it's about the almost infinite range of novelty, fresh perspectives, renewed interest and learning curves that can result from "doing it from scratch" and/or "doing it with beginner's eyes."

We are talking about 2 different things. You're talking about trying and learning different things & growing as a person. I'm talking about avoiding doing the same boring things all over. No disagreement here, since you can use your new free time to pursue all those fresh perspectives. However, I don't see how soap making or hoovering (whole life, not just trying it or learning how to do it) can be novel, fresh or help you grow. I also don't see why you should do boring stuff for the sake of doing it yourself.

If you had a choice between 1) hoovering for 30 minutes per week for the rest of your life, or 2) not hoovering at all for the rest of your life, and instead using this time as you please, what would you choose and why? (the assumption being money is not a problem so you can outsource hoovering without a noticeable difference in NW/cashflow).

Self-sufficiency: I absolutely agree that one is unlikely to benefit from absolutely maximizing this quality, but heading in this direction will likely prove very helpful in improving Resilience.

Shops are not going to run out of soap anytime soon, and if they will (chance of this happening in our lifetime is probably <1%), this will be our least worry. You're becoming only slightly more resilient in case of a very unlikely event (civilisation collapse to a level where shops no longer sell cheap soap). What about, instead of keeping your soap-making skills up to date for the rest of your life, just learn how to do it once - will this not increase your resilience by almost as much? Or better yet, rather than learning all those outdated skills for a very slim chance of ever actually needing them, just collect a bunch of books/manuals with instructions and forget about them until they're actually needed?

Thrift: Time is not a resource, although its manipulation in equations sometimes offers that illusion. Human vigor/attention is the resource most often incorrectly short-handed as "time."

Eh, time is very much a resource. Vigor and attention are both quite useless once you're out of time.

[Peanut]

Yeah, or home schooling/CLEP tests can get you a free BA at 18.

I looked at the first listings from the links EK posted yesterday to confirm my suspicion and I was correct: the first house for tens of Ks was in an area with schools rated 2,2,3 whereas the second for hundreds of Ks with schools rated 8,8,7. As Jacob pointed out, the significance of the school district to real estate value can be large.

Well, home schooling requires a tremendous amount of effort and I am personally not convinced of its superiority to good public/private schools in any respect. Ymmv

[C40]

Yeah, good soap is very cheap. I get some kind of Bastille soap at Walmart and it is spectacular. (Kirk's)

When it comes to doing things yourself, there are different kinds of satisfaction that can come. Fixing a problem that was stressing you. Not having to spend money. Things that go inside you (food), things you wear, etc. Now, soap is a very intimate thing and I imagine there is a special kind of satisfaction when you're naked and slathering yourself up - all warm, bubbly, and smooth - with your own personal creation.

[7Wannabe5]

If you had a choice between 1) hoovering for 30 minutes per week for the rest of your life, or 2) not hoovering at all for the rest of your life, and instead using this time as you please, what would you choose and why? (the assumption being money is not a problem so you can outsource hoovering without a noticeable difference in NW/cashflow).

Hoovering is not a mundane event from the perspective of a dust mite I hate hoovering, so I ripped all of the wall-to-wall carpeting out of the last home I owned. I don't mind sweeping or damp mopping.

It's really no different than asking why wouldn't I pay somebody else to comb the tangles out of my hair or balance my financial accounts. I like taking care of myself, and if I have created my environment to reflect my preferences, then taking care of it should be an aspect of taking care of myself. In the pioneer memoir, "The Bark Covered House", the author describes how his mother would scrub the rough-hewn dinner table extremely clean every day, and then place something pretty she picked from the garden in the center. It doesn't feel the same when you pick up a bouquet somebody else shrink-wrapped at the gourmet store and then place it on the table the cleaning service dusted in your absence.

Also, making your own soap would almost certainly fall in the category of something you would do once a year in the season most appropriate. So, it wouldn't necessarily be any more boring than building a new kite to fly the first sunny weekend in April.

Shops are not going to run out of soap anytime soon, and if they will (chance of this happening in our lifetime is probably <1%), this will be our least worry. You're becoming only slightly more resilient in case of a very unlikely event (civilisation collapse to a level where shops no longer sell cheap soap).

You are still missing the point. It's not the fact of the soap that increases resilience. It's the practice at thinking outside of the box and even more critically the practice of mapping of the territory
that increases resilience.

Eh, time is very much a resource. Vigor and attention are both quite useless once you're out of time.

No. When you are out of attention and vigor, you will be dead, and no longer able to create or maintain order in opposition to the thermodynamic arrow of time. Life is home-making AKA cognition with the environment.

[jennypenny]

It's interesting to me that the younger forum members are the most eager to pay for products or services as long as they are available at ERE prices whereas the older forum members -- who I assume are aware they have much less time left, so none to waste -- are more willing to indulge in home-making and simple skill-building. I've noticed this pattern several times over the years. Not sure what that's about.

[classical_Liberal]

@JP
I'd venture to guess this has a lot to do with generational differences. Specifically look at Gen X tendencies vs Millennial in the Strauss–Howe generational theory model. Under-protected as children and wary of the system vs Team-player optimists.

[Jin+Guice]

So....if one can buy a 3 bedroom house for 30-80K in some nice parts of the country, what exactly is the point of purchasing the same home for 300K-500K in a more expensive area? Memphis is probably nicer to live in than NYC to boot. I don't get it. Is it because people haven't travelled enough, or they've always lived in XYZ expensive city/town? Cities are starting to look and feel similar anyway.

Sometimes it's better to buy uncut 3 days a month than put 80% baby laxative up your nose for 30. Your other options are moving to Pittsburgh and buying a house for 50k in a neighborhood where you definitely develop a pierogi addiction and work for Duolingo or ending up in the suburbs with 2.5 kids who hate you and a wife you hate because that's what reasonable guys do.

[classical_Liberal]

Or just don't buy! How many places have you lived in the last 10 years? Do you think somewhere you want to live now is the same as 35 year old you, or 65 year old you? Transactional costs in real estate are so prohibitive you end up feeling trapped.

The only transactional cost in renting is the $70 you pay the landlords carpet cleaner to get out a stain from the time you bent your lover over the couch and she climaxed so hard it caused a TV tray to tip over across the room and spill your coffee.

[thegreatvoid]

It's interesting to me that the younger forum members are the most eager to pay for products or services as long as they are available at ERE prices whereas the older forum members -- who I assume are aware they have much less time left, so none to waste -- are more willing to indulge in home-making and simple skill-building. I've noticed this pattern several times over the years. Not sure what that's about.

I haven´t been a member of this community for very long, but I feel there has been a shift in the ERE community. Hardly anybody is actually retiring these days . some do semi-retirement or coasting to FI, but at times it feels like more of a self help group to become rich and advance in ones career.

I would rather live in the same house as my parents, than have to accumulate the amount necessary to afford my own place.

[tonyedgecombe]

It's interesting to me that the younger forum members are the most eager to pay for products or services as long as they are available at ERE prices whereas the older forum members -- who I assume are aware they have much less time left, so none to waste -- are more willing to indulge in home-making and simple skill-building. I've noticed this pattern several times over the years. Not sure what that's about.

Perhaps we change as we age. I know the attraction to shiny things wore off on me as I got older. I'm quite happy to wash the dishes manually even though I could easily afford an appliance to do it for me. It has almost become a meditation to do it by hand.

[wolf]

...younger forum members...

Just curious: What age do you mean by "younger"?

[wolf]

Transactional costs in real estate are so prohibitive you end up feeling trapped.

How high are the transactional costs (on top of the original price) in the States?
In Germany the additional transactional costs are around 6-10%, depending...

[classical_Liberal]

Usually about 3-4% on the buy side (cash deals less), 8-10% on the sell side if using a realtor (realtors are 5-7% themselves). That doesn't count bringing the property to "saleable" condition, ie updates you wouldn't otherwise complete. So depending on the person, that can be quite a bit more.

[7Wannabe5]

The only transactional cost in renting is the $70 you pay the landlords carpet cleaner to get out a stain from the time you bent your lover over the couch and she climaxed so hard it caused a TV tray to tip over across the room and spill your coffee.

Nice! but...

There are also transactional costs in choosing to frequently move. One of which is "getting your bearings." This is easy enough to do if your practices are either quite limited in scope and/or very strongly established, but it does tend towards limiting your core activities to the realm of "can do anywhere" or in more recent history "can do anywhere there is an internet connection."

I recently read a description of a tribe that obtains most of its calories from tree nut gathering activities of the females. The trees are clustered around watering holes in an otherwise arid environment. The tribe will stay camped in one spot until it takes more than half a day's walk to get to the nearest not-yet-exploited cluster of nut trees, and then they will break camp and move.

So, what is the nut being sought through the freedom to move frequently in a highly affluent culture such as ours?

[classical_Liberal]

@7WB5
Good point, I actually just made an alteration to my plans for that exact reason. I would, however, argue that "getting you bearings" is a skill like any other and can be quickly improved upon. Also, I would argue that moving every few years is not really that frequent once the skill is honed. The nut price is very situational.

[tonyedgecombe]

Usually about 3-4% on the buy side (cash deals less), 8-10% on the sell side if using a realtor (realtors are 5-7% themselves). That doesn't count bringing the property to "saleable" condition, ie updates you wouldn't otherwise complete. So depending on the person, that can be quite a bit more.

I never understood why it is so expensive in the US, the last time I sold in the UK I paid the estate agent 1.5%. There were some additional legal fees and taxes but it's still well below those figures.