r/Money • u/ImCoyyWR • May 03 '24

Is it worth buying a house in 2024, or renting?

25 years old, using my VA home loan. Just curious if it makes sense to buy a home, or wait for the market to subside and just rent?

I’m making 70k yearly, and pre approved up to 240k

Just wondering lol.

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u/Engineered_Muffin May 03 '24

Timing any market is really hard and kind of an effort in futility. If you know you're going to be in one place for a long time, find a good house, and have your emergency and retirement funds on point it might be worth it.

Depending on where you live going rates for renting a 2 bedroom may in fact be cheaper than buying something comparable. But if you do buy you are gaining equity. I don't think there is a one size fits all answer here.

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u/eat_sleep_shitpost May 03 '24

"Gaining equity" is kinda irrelevant if you can invest the difference in cost and come out ahead.

3

u/MicrowaveDonuts May 03 '24

there's a lot of leverage in home value gains. In the market you might be investing 20%...or $50 grand, and in your house you are "investing" $250k.

You only need 1/5th the return to come out ahead.

There are also an insane number of tax incentives to get regular people to own their house.

If you can afford it, and are relatively confident you can be there for 5 years or so, you should usually buy. If you're going to move around a lot, then paying the commission will eat all the gains and you should probably rent.

1

u/gimmetendies930 May 03 '24

I basically just redid your comment above before I saw this. So many reasons why real estate *CAN be just as good if not far better vehicle for wealth building that just stocks/index funds.