Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
To Rent or Buy? The Financial Issues
By James E. McWhinney – Investopedia.com
When making the decision either to rent or buy a place to live, there are two broad categories of factors that must be considered. The first and most obvious category represents the financial aspects of your decision. The second category is a set of personal and emotional factors, which are more intangible but play an important role in the decision to rent or buy. Here, we look at the financial factors, including the initial and ongoing costs as well as the long-term pros and cons of owning your home.
Examining Your Finances
The first step in the decision-making process is to determine whether or not you can afford to purchase a home. Issues to consider include your ability to make a down payment (generally between 5% and 20% of the home’s purchase price) and pay closing costs (which may be an additional 5%). These costs are likely to exceed substantially the initial payment and security deposit that would be required if you were renting instead of buying. Of course, having enough money to cover the initial purchase of a new home is only half of the battle.
Before moving into your new home, you’ll need to put some thought into how much it’s going to cost you to stay there after you take up residence. Many financial experts suggest that your monthly mortgage payment not exceed 28% of your gross monthly income and that your total monthly debt payments not exceed 36% of your gross monthly income. If you go beyond these limits, you may run into trouble because, in addition to paying the mortgage each month, you have to factor in home maintenance. From carpet to window coverings, new appliances to a new roof, everything costs money and nothing lasts forever.
Renting may be a little easier on the pocketbook because it provides a fixed-dollar cost for monthly expenditures, which are paid simply with the rent. Besides perhaps increasing from year to year, the rent remains steady. And, if maintenance issues arise, the landlord pays for the repairs. Instead of spending your money on a new roof, you can invest it or spend it as you like.
If you’ve done the math and can afford to make the initial purchase and service the ongoing debt, the next factor you have to decide is whether this purchase benefits you financially. A rent-controlled apartment in New York City, or a place in a suburban location outside of a major city, quite possibly charges a month’s rent that is significantly less than a monthly mortgage payment for properties within the city. Of course, even if the monthly cost of renting is less than the cost of buying, there are long-term financial considerations that must be taken into account.
Long-Term Cost/Benefit Analysis
Proponents of buying often cite the ability to build equity, the tax breaks and the investment value of a home as solid reasons to buy instead of rent. While these arguments have merit, there are downsides to all of them. This chart outlines the positive and negative long-term realities of the equity, tax breaks and investment value associated with buying a home.
Equity
Some of the money that you give to pay a mortgage goes directly toward building equity in your home. You will never again see any of the rent money that you pay. Home equity can serve as collateral for a loan, enabling you to convert the equity into cash.
Equity takes time to build, and payments made during the first few years of a mortgage go primarily toward interest on the loan. Should you move after living in a home for only a few years, you may have little or no equity in the property. And after the costs of selling the home, you could end up losing money.
Investment
Real estate in the form of your primary residence is likely the single largest asset in your portfolio. Over the long term, price appreciation can be significant. Many homeowners downsize their primary residence when they retire; they sell at profit, purchase a less expensive home and use the profits to supplement their income.
While history shows it is likely that your home will appreciate over time, there are no guarantees. There are always areas of the country where homes have lost value, and owners are unable to sell them at a price equal to or greater than the purchase price.
Do the Calculations
A variety of online calculators are available to help you evaluate the financial aspects of the rent versus buy decision, but keep in mind that you need to estimate a range of variables that includes the number of years you will stay in the home.
And to estimate the investment profit the home will provide for you, you must assume the yearly rate of appreciation on the home’s value. The results provided by a calculator and the investment evaluations you make are only as good as the assumptions used to calculate them, and don’t forget to consider the cost of ongoing maintenance. After you have carefully considered the financial issues, it’s time to explore the non-financial issues.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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To Rent or Buy? There’s More To It Than Money
By James E. McWhinney – Investopedia.com
After you have thoroughly researched the financial issues of the rent-versus-buy decision, let’s look at the issue from a different perspective, one involving emotional factors and personal preferences that collectively determine the impact of your decision on your quality of life. These “non-financial” issues are based on your personality, abilities and values. They require careful consideration, beginning with this question: what attributes about the place you live in are most important to you?
Environment: City versus Suburbs
The environment you choose to reside in plays a major role in your quality of life. Consider your personality. Do you like the character of the city, with its nightlife, quaint cafés and diverse cultures, or do you prefer the safety, conformity, green space and free parking in suburbia? Do you prefer to walk to work, take the subway or ride the train? How important is privacy, and how far do you like to live from your neighbors? If you can afford only those properties in environments that do not fit your preferences, you need to think about whether you are willing to forgo these preferences for the sake of owning a place.
Amenities versus Customization
Dollar for dollar, renting generally offers a substantially greater number and variety of amenities than buying. Consider, for example, the number of homes that come with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, clubhouse, tennis courts, basketball court and on-site gym. If you’re looking to have these amenities in your private residence, get ready to spend a lot of money. Upscale apartment buildings, found in nearly every city, offer such options at a comparatively lower monthly rent than a mortgage for a property with the same attributes. On the other side of coin, there are affordable homes with private outdoor spaces that you can customize to your liking. There aren’t many apartment buildings that come with acres of property in the country that will let you do your own landscaping, keep horses or grow a garden.
Flexibility versus Stability
Renting a place to live gives you significantly more freedom to get up and go at a moment’s notice. The financial consequences of breaking a lease are minimal and can be addressed by simply writing a check. Homeowners wanting to leave their current residence face the much more complicated process of selling their property. The mortgage still needs to be paid and the grass still needs to get cut while you are waiting to find a buyer. Unless money is no object, the transition to a new place of residence is likely to take months, not days. On the other hand, with the flexibility of renting comes also some instability. The landlord can always raise the rent or ask you to move before you are ready to do so. If you own a house and make the payments, you can stay as long as you desire.
Personalized Aesthetics versus Less Work
Buying a house gives you the opportunity to choose a unique and distinct architectural style and to personalize it. But this freedom comes with the responsibility of keeping up with maintenance and repairs. Homeowners simply can’t avoid the need to cut the grass and fix leaky faucets. If you prefer to spend your weekends relaxing in the park instead of wandering the aisles at the local hardware store, you might want to think twice about buying a home – unless of course you can budget a substantial amount of money to hire some help.
Although renting gives you no control over exterior aesthetics, you don’t have to worry about dealing with wear and tear on your residence or problems resulting from bad construction. Renting still gives you plenty of opportunity to choose furnishings and decorate your interior environment in a manner that suits your style. And, as a renter, all you have to do when something goes wrong is notify your landlord.
Emotional Satisfaction versus Less Worry
Homeownership is often called “the American dream”. There’s just something emotionally appealing about putting down roots, getting involved in the community and having a place to call your own. Of course, homeowners also need to worry about the long-term character of the neighborhood and keep up with maintenance in order to sustain property values. If you’re simply looking for a place to rest between days at work and nights hitting the town, renting may be the perfect answer. Just keep paying the rent and let somebody else do all the worrying.
A Personal Decision
Unlike the financial aspects of homeownership, the aspects that have a bearing on your lifestyle and values cannot be calculated online with some mathematical formula. If you can make the rent payments or qualify for the mortgage, you can live anywhere that you want to live. But buying a home is a decision you should take some time to consider, determining how its location, amenities and need for repairs will affect your lifestyle and general emotional satisfaction.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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6 Months To A Better Budget
By Andrew Beattie – Investopedia.com
Can you have perfect abs in just six minutes a day? It’s hard to say for sure, but you can have a solid budget in six months. One of the challenges with proper budgeting is that it has to become habitual in order to be effective. You can survive without knowing how to budget if you manage to keep more money coming in rather than flowing out or have credit cards to cover the gap, but this won’t last forever. People often resort to budgeting after they’ve already been dealing with expenses and income in a back-of-the-envelope kind of way.
Emergency Fund
The crux of this six-month plan is the emergency fund. In general, traditional budgeting starts with tracking expenses, eliminating debt and, once the budget is balanced, building an emergency fund. To speed up the process, we are going to start by building a partial emergency fund. Ideally, everyone should have at least one or two months’ wages sitting in a money market account for any unpleasant surprises. This emergency fund acts as a buffer as the rest of the budget is put in place, and should replace the use of credit cards for emergency situations.
You will want to build your emergency fund as quickly as possible. For someone who lives in a rented home and has only a modest amount of debt, an emergency fund of $600 may work fine. If you own a house, a car and other things that can unexpectedly require cash infusions, then your emergency fund will need to be bigger. The key is to build the fund at regular intervals, consistently devoting a certain percentage of each paycheck toward it and, if possible, putting in whatever you can spare on top. This will speed up the process and get you to think about your spending.
What’s an Emergency?
Here’s where it can get a little trickier. You should only use the emergency money for true emergencies: like when you drive to work but your muffler stays at home, or your water heater starts to hiss and spit green bile like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Covering regular purchases like clothes and food do not count, even if you used your credit card to buy them. It may help to keep the account at another bank or, better yet, a credit union, where you can’t access the money as easily and where it will get higher interest than a normal savings account.
While it’s true that you would save money if you used your emergency fund to eliminate credit card debt, the purpose of the fund is to prevent you from having to use your credit card for paying for the ugly things that life throws at you. With a proper emergency fund, you will not need your credit card to float you when something goes wrong.
Downsize and Substitute
Now that you have a buffer between you and more high-interest debt, it is time to start the process of downsizing. It is odd that the natural solution to “not enough money” seems to be increasing income rather than decreasing spending, but this backwards approach is very familiar to debt counselors. The more space you can create between your expenses and your income, the more income you will have to pay down debt and invest.
This can be a process of substitution as much as elimination. For example, if you have a $60 per month gym membership, cancel it and use half of the money you save to invest or pay down debt and save the other half to begin building a home gym in your basement. If you buy coffee from a fancy coffee shop every morning, you could just as easily purchase a coffee maker with a grinder and make your own, saving more money over the long term. Although eliminating expenses entirely is the fastest way to a solid budget, substitution tends to have more lasting effects. People often cut too deep and end up making a budget that they can’t keep because it feels like they are giving up everything. Substitution, in contrast, keeps the basics while cutting down the costs.
Focus on Rewards
Another trick that will help your budget come together faster is to focus on the rewards. If you are constantly looking at what you have to cut and give up, the very act of budgeting will become distasteful. A mixture of long- and short-term goals will help keep you motivated. This can be as simple as saving for a small luxury, or even something bigger like buying a car with cash. Some of your long-term rewards may just be benchmarks on the way to your overall goals. For example, you may want to sock away $10,000 in a retirement account before you are 30 or be debt-free in five years. Watching these goals slowly but surely become a reality can be very satisfying and provide further motivation to work harder at your budget.
Find New Sources of Income
Why isn’t this the first step? If you simply increase your income without a budget to handle the extra cash properly, the gains tend to slip through the cracks and vanish. Once you have your budget in place and have more money coming in than going out (along with the buffer of an emergency fund), you can start investing to create more income. It is better to have no debt before you begin investing. If you are young, however, the rewards of investing in higher-risk, high-return vehicles like stocks can outweigh most low-interest debt over time.
Conclusion
Much like the disclaimers that come with exercise tapes promising to make you look like a body builder in just six minutes a day, it is possible that it will take you more than six months to get your budget balanced out. This all depends on your situation, including how much or what kind of debt you have. On the upside, just like people who begin exercising for the first time tend to see results sooner than regulars, you may find that your improved budget has immediate benefits for you. Even if it does take you longer than six months to get your budget turned around, it is time well spent.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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