Buying a house requires careful consideration but timing things to get that ‘just right’ moment is fairly rar – The Irish Sun

The sad truth is it’s impossible to know. It can be a decent time at almost any time depending on what you are trying to do — or it can be a horrible time for the same reason.

The Irish Sun's Karl Deeter's advice on the right time to buy a house — The Irish Sun’s Karl Deeter’s advice on the right time to buy a house

Here’s an example of that: Say a person buys a house to ‘get on the ladder’ (not a great strategy in my view but a common one) then the market crashes and they are stuck with a place that wasn’t ideal. Not a great outcome is it?

The same person may have bought at the peak of the market but got a tracker on a home they did like and they had years of negative equity.

So that would be a bad thing but now they are fine. They have cheap finance and good equity in their home.

A difficult thing to articulate is that when it comes to housing it’s you against you . . . not you against the market.

The market is like a referee, but it’s not ‘on the pitch’ because if you make a good or bad choice the market doesn’t care. So in that respect it’s not like a referee either — a bad analogy!

Some people regret their decision. I have heard people say ‘I never wanted to buy a house, my parents pressured me into it and I regret it!’ Those people are victims of their own stupidity.

Buying a house is not something you just fall into doing.

Would they equally be leaving the priesthood today if their parents had pressurised them into joining the seminary?

No, because they wouldn’t have joined in the first place. They regret the advice they took, but the action was all theirs.

If you don’t want to ever own a house — don’t buy one! It’s like a person saying they never wanted to get married proposing to another person.

It’s a mistake, don’t do things you are dead against.

A good advisor can help you do some sums. Imagine you bought a house for €200,000 and put down a 15 per cent deposit, then two years later the market falls 15 per cent.

Are you doomed? Hardly. Some value has evaporated but you still have the asset and you can live in it.

Unlike a paper asset, a house is an asset you can actually use. You can live in it. Everybody has to live somewhere so the sums can help you figure out if you would have been better or worse off.

Say you did wait two years and paid €1,200 a month in rent during that time (the mortgage would have been cheaper on a cashflow basis). Now you go into the market which is at €170,000 for the same house.

You pay your €30,000 deposit as you did in the first example but you paid nearly €29,000 in rent during that time — so you have a loan balance of €140,000 instead of something in the region of €160,000.

Not only that, the fictional person in the first example will be debt free in 23 years — whereas you are just starting off with a 25-year loan.

The cost of rent plus the total cost of credit means you aren’t really far better off as a renter who timed the market really well.

This might happen, but timing things to get that ‘just right’ moment which I refer to as the ‘goldilocks moment’ based on her getting to the bowl of porridge which was exactly as she liked it, is fairly rare.

If everybody knew when prices would rise or fall they’d all time things exquisitely but they don’t, because you can’t know.

What you can know is that in about 25 years you’ll be debt free so think about that and if you think the place would be suitable for you far in the future.

Homeownership is one of the three routes to wealth (along with a good education and getting married and staying married).

On that basis I like the idea of it but think that it requires careful consideration — along with the things you choose to learn and who you settle down with!

CNN Putin their place by Trump

DONALD Trump is not high on my list of admirable people. But I do respect him getting American troops out of the Middle East in an effort to get the US out of the longest-running war that the nation has been involved in for its entire history.
This week, Mueller found Trump and his team didn’t conspire with Russia in the 2016 Presidental election. His team had the most aggressive and highly skilled investigators available and looked into this specifically for 20 months.
Trump is wrong in so many ways. What he is doing to US institutions is damaging. But the Russian angle was a total farce and people in the media who were cheering it along saying it was certainly true when it was baseless are a shower of jokers. CNN and MSNBC gave three per cent of their time in 2018 to the Mueller investigation.
This is like in 2003 when Republican neo-cons wouldn’t come clean about the weapons of mass destruction they said justified the Iraq war but didn’t exist. I guess history really does repeat itself.

H-appy with calorie counting

A CALORIE counting app on your phone, when used correctly, is one of the best tools for weight-loss that I know of. It’s even better than the gym.

I had this discussion last week with my trainer Mark Sheeran who is not only qualified in physical training, but he’s also a qualified nutritionist recently.

Karl Deeter's trainer Mark Sheeran — Karl Deeter’s trainer Mark Sheeran

He made the point that you can’t outrun a bad diet, which means you can run and exercise all day but you won’t change your body if you eat more calories than that will get rid of.

Think about it, a hard session of weights might burn about 250 calories? A good cardio session will do twice that but you don’t get the same effect.

And loads of cardio isn’t good if you hope to retain muscle (that’s the reason sprinters are a different shape than long distance runners).

I am taking hope in this because it’s how I plan to reverse recent setbacks in my weight loss plan.

I still have until June to get down to about 81kg and I’m just under 85kg now. That is utterly manageable with some determination.

MyNetDiary gives you a weekly report and mine was bad but showed that I didn’t do as bad a job as I thought I had — so that’s a positive.

Now I can stop with the self-guilt and get back on track!

Q&A

Q. I GOT a restructure with the bank, it’s at 4.5 per cent rate. I recently got my statement that said I could fix for one to five years at 3.7 per cent. Should I contact the bank to see if the lower rate is a an option for me?
A. OF course you should! If they wrote saying that rate was possible then definitely follow up on it. Just because you got a restructure at one price doesn’t mean they won’t give you the better one now too.

Q. I HEAR on one hand that we need loads of emigration in order to get jobs done that need to be done in the future but then I also hear that machines and computers are going to put everybody out of work. Which view is correct?
A. IT’S kind of both, they don’t happen at the same time. We do need emigration right now today. The robots doing all the work thing isn’t a view I entirely prescribe to because people will still want to do things — they just won’t be the same jobs they do today.

Q. DO you think Apple or Android phones are better and which is better value for money?
A. I THINK Android phones are better, they have less restrictions in terms of putting music on them (you don’t have to use iTunes) and they are cheaper generally as well as highly usable — in particular with Google services. So I’m a former Apple user who converted totally to Android.

Stormy Brief’s busted

LOADS of people lauded Michael Avanatti — ex lawyer to porn star Stormy Daniels and one of the lead attorneys on the Brett Kavanaugh trail — as being so great that he might even be a hopeful for a presidential run in 2020!

What’s so lovely about the recent news that he has been arrested on a charge of extortion against sportswear company Nike for $20 million dollars is that anybody who listened to him for a minute would have known that he was always a guy who would do anything to get ahead, and now it seems to have caught up with him.

Attorney Michael Avenatti former lawyer of porn star Stormy Daniels

Somebody like a politician usually wants the problem to go away. This teaches some litigious people to think the ability to sue others is magical. Well, it wasn’t and it isn’t.

What Nike did was look at what amounted to a shake-down and called him out.

Now Avanatti has been arrested — all this after he was already arrested in Los Angeles for wire and bank fraud where it is alleged he embezzled from a client.

It seems there is a God.

Landlords buying load of houses isn’t real issue

PEOPLE regularly complain about some institutional landlord buying a load of houses. People act like this is robbing from those who’d have lined up to buy them.

During a housing shortage this is partially true. But in general terms it’s untrue because the real issue is that we need to build tens of thousands of homes.

The fact that we keep housing scarce by objecting to new homes and making the process slow is reflective of what we secretly want, high house prices.