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(first new thread ever, plz no bully)
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Like the claustrophobia of RVs, but hate that annoying convenience of portability? Want to take minimalism to the next level? Or are you just a pretentious granola twat down to the very space you live in? Then tiny houses are for you.
Tiny houses are pretty much what they sound like; a very small house maxing out at maybe 400 square feet. They're often pre-fabricated and start out on trailers for easy transportation, and are sometimes placed in tidy rows in parks, but they're not RVs, okay? They're tiny houses. The difference should be clearly apparent by the photo below.
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Some people have embraced tiny houses because of their cost. Pre-fabs can go for $40,000 to $80,000 (about the same as RVs, but they're not RVs, okay?), or you could build your own for under $30,000 in materials. Cost seems to be the main motivator of this guy giving a TEDx talk about his tiny home. (A douchebag topic at a conference for douchebags… Does that mean the douchiness is doubled, or squared?)
But here's the thing; tiny houses do not appreciate like real ones do, and, in fact, it's more likely it will depreciate just like a car or RV. And if you're in a "park" and don't even own the land you've put your tiny house on…
Let's do some math. Let's say you want to buy a normal house for $150,000, but like most normal people, you can't afford to pay in cash. You took care of your credit rating growing up, so you're able to get a mortgage with a 15% down payment and a 4.25% rate, and you make $900 payments every month. (I'm kind of winging these numbers based on the actual mortgage my wife and I had, but they should be mostly realistic).
After five years, you will have paid ($150,000 x .15) + (60 x $900) = ($22,500) + ($54,000) = $76,500 for your normal house and the land it's on; you still owe the bank ($150,000 - $76,500) + interest but who the fuck knows how to calculate that, but it's mostly front-loaded on a mortgage… let's say $100,000. Oh, but in those five years, your house and land appreciated by, let's say, 20%, so it now has a sale value of $180,000. Sell it today, give the bank back their cut, and you'll still have a free $3500, just for continuing to pay "rent" you would pay anyway, and that number will continue to grow the longer you hold the place before selling. (ProTip: If you're currently renting a place somewhere, save up a down payment and buy a damn house. You might end up with lower monthly payments anyway, and if you move into a good neighborhood (or a bad neighborhood which is starting to gentrify), you start making free money from day one.)
Now let's say instead you paid $50,000, cash, for a tiny house, plus $500 monthly lot fee for theRV park tiny house community for five years. That's $80,000 total - so $3500 more than I paid for my normal house. Let's say you get incredibly lucky and sell your tiny house for the same value you paid for it, $50,000. Okay, cool, but that $30,000 you paid in lot fees just went down your incredibly tiny toilet. Good job! You saved a lot of money on your tiny house, I guess.
Another argument people give for liking tiny houses is the minimalism aspect, and this can come from just wanting to live a simpler life with less material goods, or it can come from an environmentalist direction, as tiny houses take fewer resources to build and less energy to heat or cool. I'm sympathetic to these arguments somewhat since I agree that we as humans in Western society have vestigial hoarding instincts we'd be better off to stifle a bit more often than we do, and being able to afford something is a far cry from actually needing it. But when it comes to housing, I have two counter-arguments. One, the finances as explained above; so long as your place appreciates in value faster than the interest rate (the 20% I used in the example above is actually far below what our place appreciated by in five years, but I'm willing to accept we got lucky), you are losing money by getting a tiny house rather than a normal one. Secondly, while living in a tiny place might be fine for a single person or a couple, once kids get involved… sometimes you just want to be more than five feet away from them, right? Like this one… if the parents wanna get freaky, they're going to be doing it practically on top of their kids (as the first commenter even mentions).
Given the low ceiling, they will also be limited when it comes to comfortable positions…
But, hey, living in a tiny house means that you're different, and being different means you're better than everyone else, and sometimes that matters more than anything else, I guess.
(Snark aside, the tiny house community tends to have a strong DIY element, with many tiny housers having built their own places or modified existing vehicles, sheds, shipping containers, and what have you to make them livable, and that's cool. You're still better off just building your own full-size home or buying a fixer-upper, though.)
source
Like the claustrophobia of RVs, but hate that annoying convenience of portability? Want to take minimalism to the next level? Or are you just a pretentious granola twat down to the very space you live in? Then tiny houses are for you.
Tiny houses are pretty much what they sound like; a very small house maxing out at maybe 400 square feet. They're often pre-fabricated and start out on trailers for easy transportation, and are sometimes placed in tidy rows in parks, but they're not RVs, okay? They're tiny houses. The difference should be clearly apparent by the photo below.
source
Some people have embraced tiny houses because of their cost. Pre-fabs can go for $40,000 to $80,000 (about the same as RVs, but they're not RVs, okay?), or you could build your own for under $30,000 in materials. Cost seems to be the main motivator of this guy giving a TEDx talk about his tiny home. (A douchebag topic at a conference for douchebags… Does that mean the douchiness is doubled, or squared?)
But here's the thing; tiny houses do not appreciate like real ones do, and, in fact, it's more likely it will depreciate just like a car or RV. And if you're in a "park" and don't even own the land you've put your tiny house on…
Let's do some math. Let's say you want to buy a normal house for $150,000, but like most normal people, you can't afford to pay in cash. You took care of your credit rating growing up, so you're able to get a mortgage with a 15% down payment and a 4.25% rate, and you make $900 payments every month. (I'm kind of winging these numbers based on the actual mortgage my wife and I had, but they should be mostly realistic).
After five years, you will have paid ($150,000 x .15) + (60 x $900) = ($22,500) + ($54,000) = $76,500 for your normal house and the land it's on; you still owe the bank ($150,000 - $76,500) + interest but who the fuck knows how to calculate that, but it's mostly front-loaded on a mortgage… let's say $100,000. Oh, but in those five years, your house and land appreciated by, let's say, 20%, so it now has a sale value of $180,000. Sell it today, give the bank back their cut, and you'll still have a free $3500, just for continuing to pay "rent" you would pay anyway, and that number will continue to grow the longer you hold the place before selling. (ProTip: If you're currently renting a place somewhere, save up a down payment and buy a damn house. You might end up with lower monthly payments anyway, and if you move into a good neighborhood (or a bad neighborhood which is starting to gentrify), you start making free money from day one.)
Now let's say instead you paid $50,000, cash, for a tiny house, plus $500 monthly lot fee for the
Another argument people give for liking tiny houses is the minimalism aspect, and this can come from just wanting to live a simpler life with less material goods, or it can come from an environmentalist direction, as tiny houses take fewer resources to build and less energy to heat or cool. I'm sympathetic to these arguments somewhat since I agree that we as humans in Western society have vestigial hoarding instincts we'd be better off to stifle a bit more often than we do, and being able to afford something is a far cry from actually needing it. But when it comes to housing, I have two counter-arguments. One, the finances as explained above; so long as your place appreciates in value faster than the interest rate (the 20% I used in the example above is actually far below what our place appreciated by in five years, but I'm willing to accept we got lucky), you are losing money by getting a tiny house rather than a normal one. Secondly, while living in a tiny place might be fine for a single person or a couple, once kids get involved… sometimes you just want to be more than five feet away from them, right? Like this one… if the parents wanna get freaky, they're going to be doing it practically on top of their kids (as the first commenter even mentions).
Given the low ceiling, they will also be limited when it comes to comfortable positions…
But, hey, living in a tiny house means that you're different, and being different means you're better than everyone else, and sometimes that matters more than anything else, I guess.
(Snark aside, the tiny house community tends to have a strong DIY element, with many tiny housers having built their own places or modified existing vehicles, sheds, shipping containers, and what have you to make them livable, and that's cool. You're still better off just building your own full-size home or buying a fixer-upper, though.)
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