No one knows.

But, if rates suddenly drop you can always refinance.

The Trump administration had a few ideas on how to fix the market, which boiled down to removing regulations. The Harris administration had a more complete plan that addressed housing costs at different angles including regs but we no ont be getting that plan anytime soon.

I made the decision to buy at a bad time, and it turns out the mortgage rates went much higher than what I bought at. I have no idea if that will happen again, but my mental health absolutely benefited from owning my house over the stress of renting and waiting to find out if I need to move every year again.

There’s a saying that goes along the lines of: “The best time to buy a house was 10 years ago. The second best time is now”. Rates are bad but you can refinance down the road. I was also on the fence because I wasn’t 100% sure yet if we’ll still be in our city in 5 years, but our lease was ending and I was getting tired of moving with ever increasing rent. Back in my home country, you typically buy a house and live there forever, so it was also a culture shock for me to learn that the average homebuyer in the US lives in their house for only 7 years before moving on. So I had to change my mindset, and we bought a house earlier this year.

It's always a good time to buy if you are confident that you will live there for 3-5 years. Even pre 2008 crash, homes recovered in about 5 years.

The important part is avoiding becoming house poor. The payment you can qualify for and the payment you can afford are very different. There's plenty of online calculators that can show you what a payment would look like. In many states taxes can increase dramatically after the first year, so be prepared to pay more in the future. For a down payment, 20% is ideal but often unrealistic for a first time buyer. More is better, but don't clean out your entire account. You can put as little as 3% down, but that's a good sign you can't afford it if anything goes wrong

You're gonna have to specify an area, and you'd be better off asking people from that area

Not answering your question. But if you do buy, don't listen to the realtor or loan officer about how big a loan you can afford. Both are incentivized to sell you the biggest house/loan. Neither will care when you're struggling to pay for it.

You're monthly payment plus insurance plus taxes should be something you could safely pay for six months while unemployed. If that's impossible, get a small house. The worst possible situation is being house poor.

No but its only gonna get more expensive so do it if you can swing it.

How long will you live there? Generally 7 years is a good rule of thumb for rent vs buy. Selling is more hasstle and expense. 7 years of no rent increases (read inflation, and your raises) and some principal paydown mean typically your have done better. However that is a guess. Sometimes even one year is better to buy, sometimes 15 years is needed (new roof and other major evpenses) just to break even.

You’re not gonna see a huge drop in prices. You might see better rates, but you can refinance. Presuming you’re not trying to sell the house in the next few years, now is as good a time as any to buy. Housing will continue to be more expensive, except in the case of market crash, but even then the prices will continue to go up after leveling out.

Depends...

Got a path to immigrate to a country thats better than the US? Well just save the money and bring it with you when you exit.

No paths towards a country better than the US? Just buy a house like you normally would if the election didnt happen yet.

Whatever bad luck you're having with rentals is nothing compared to how badly home ownership can go, renting isn't all that bad even if it is more expensive. What's really expensive and financially distressing is a sudden and expensive furnace / roof replacement, flooding, fire, the list goes on

Mortgages aren't going away anytime soon, start off with renting and see where that takes you before jumping into a $400,000+ loan

Wish I could help but economic things have not made sense to me since 2016

Tough to call. Prices are high right now, who knows when they'll come down. I look at it like this: my sister just bought a house for $120k and her mortgage payment is less than what she was paying for renting half a house. If the real estate market bottoms out tomorrow, her house value may drop and her mortgage payment stays the same. If she had stayed in the rental her rent would have stayed the same. After the lease expired the rent might have increased but the mortgage stays the same.

rates are 7%, will likely drop a little more over the next 2 years. The sub 3% from 2020 was once in a lifetime. 40 years ago it was 10-15%. 5-7% seems like a decently fair mortgage rate. If I were going to loan out $250k, I'd want a 7%+ return on it..

No clue but my brother and sister-in-law are hoping for a housing market crash so they can get one. I hope it crashes so not only can they get one, but hopefully my parents (and by extension my other brother and I) would have a house to live in instead of an apartment. Though I feel as though my they would have an easier time getting one than my parents since, even though it's only a smaller business, he has a good job (not doxxing what he does, though).

How safe do you feel in your area?

I know your pain. I had the same problem in 2013.

Everyone said it was a horrible time to buy a house, "The rates/prices are too high, wait a bit" but I also couldn't afford to get an apartment that wasn't a roach motel for less than $1k per month, so I bought a house anyways. Now I'm laughing with my $750 USD mortgage while the idiots who kept telling me it was a horrid time to buy a house are bitching about their apartment leases that keep going up each year and paying out 1.5k to 2k per month in rent.

Renting really only makes sense if you know you are going to be moving a good distance frequently over the next several years. If you have a steady job you are planning on staying at for a while, better to buy. You can always rent it out if life changes your plans for you.

Set a time frame by which you want to move in, and a budget roughly 2 times but not more than 4 times your annual gross income and see what you can find for that in that time frame.

When my wife and I bought our house I was making roughly $50k a year, so we were looking at the $100k-$150k price point but wound up finding our home at $90K. Not a palace by any stretch and it needed a new roof, but it's been a great house. Basing our budget off just my income and aiming for the lower side of 2-4x income has allowed us to stay in our home even when me or my wife was out of work for a bit.

Look and see if there are any programs for first time home buyers in your area also. I forget exactly what program we qualified for but we were able to get our mortgage for $0 down at the added expense of mortgage insurance. It cost me more per month (and over all) than it would have if I had had the traditional 20% down but TANSTAFL.

Make sure you get a fixed rate mortgage though and not an adjustable rate one. I've a sneaking suspicion that rates may wind up going back up in a few years and such a roller coaster has cost more than one person I know their home.

Things are only seemingly getting worse. I’d say buy while you can still afford to and there is inventory, who knows what kind of crazinesss is coming to the economy after January.

If things get too wild, sellers will remove inventory, only making both rent and existing inventory prices increase.

Feel free to crosspost to !AskUSA@discuss.online

Imo, yeah, probably. Home prices are fucking divorced from reality, but anyone telling you that we're in a housing bubble is selling you a bridge. We basically stopped building housing in 2008- that's almost twenty years now you ancient millennial* fucks- and what housing has been built has been small batches of single family homes where they don't build more until that small batch sells. On top of that, you've got housing having been transformed into an investment (read that in a tone of disgust, please) with vacation rentals, REITs, and the landlord hustle further restricting supply. All that to say that the big fundamental difference between 2008 and now is that we're massively short on supply. For there to be a price crash, we'd either need people to just stop needing a place to live on a massive scale or we'd need to start plunking down a commie block in every small or larger city a week for years (spoiler alert, not gonna happen)

I'm working with Strong Towns and some other groups trying to push the city to build a lot more housing and make our city more affordable to live in by breaking car dependency. With any luck, we'll be able to unwind the absurd price of housing over years. I'd plunk down commie blocks of I could, but I can't, so slowly deflating home prices over decades is the most realistic thing I can probably hope for. In other words, if you do buy, you're unlikely to end up underwater by much.

* Am a millennial, am old fuck

I used zillow. I heard all about the controversies. But it worked perfectly for me.

I have no idea about the situation in the US but normally prices will always go up because inflation. Sometimes the price will flatline or go down for a bit because of lower interest rate on a loan but the also more people want to buy. More buyers == higher prices.

Some time ago I heard a story about a couple buying a house in the 80s in a big city for an extreme high price. Now that house is worth 20x more than it used to be.

But then again, I have no idea about the situation in your country. In my country even the cheapest houses are made to last at least 80 years.

There is rarely a "good" time to buy a house. You need to do what makes financial sense for you. If it makes sense financially to buy a house right now, then I'd say do it.