Tag: Real Estate

My best investment ever: Homeownership?!

Sometimes folks ask me what has been my best investment ever. I normally answer that this is not the right question to ask. We didn’t have one lucky break that made us rich overnight. We never owned the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google/Alphabet) outright, only through index funds. No lottery winnings, neither literally nor figuratively (tech company stock options, IPOs, etc.). Building our Net Worth is mostly the result of many years of small and large contributions to brokerage accounts, never losing our nerves and staying the course through volatile periods.

But the other day, I ran the numbers on how well we did with the apartment we just sold in January (not pictured above!!!). Over a period of just under 10 years, the IRR was almost 16% and beat stocks pretty handily! Again, this did not single-handedly catapult us into Financial Independence, but in the ranking of good investments, it’s clearly way up there, probably even at the top!

Of course, all this assumes that we do the math right. And that’s what today’s post is all about…

Continue reading “My best investment ever: Homeownership?!” →

Our Net Worth as of 12/31/2017

Happy New Year! Another quarter-end, I can’t believe how fast time flies! And we all know what that means, right? Net Worth updates across the Financial Independence blogosphere! For us, this is a special NW update because it’s the last one before we both give notice at work in two months! And the last NW update before our apartment goes on the market! In other words, this better looks good, otherwise, we might get cold feet, also known as One More Year Syndrome. Soooo, where do we stand financially? Here are the numbers…

Continue reading “Our Net Worth as of 12/31/2017” →

See that house over there? It’s an investment!

Few topics in personal finance and in the early retirement community stir up emotions as nicely as the pros and cons of homeownership. Some folks in the FIRE community are renters and swear by it and others are very happy homeowners and/or real estate investors. Neither side is wrong. Those with more nomadic lifestyles probably prefer renting and the those with kids in school and strong ties to the local community are apparently happy homeowners. Normally, the two sides just coexist peacefully but discussions normally get heated and sparks fly when one side accuses the other of doing something wrong. If I had to distill the arguments of the two sides into bumper stickers it would be:

  • Homeowners: Renting is just throwing away money!
  • Renters: A house is not an investment at all. Or it’s a terrible investment!

But of course, both claims are just that: bumper stickers. And both claims are demonstrably false and/or crude generalizations! Let’s look more into the math of the rent vs. own tradeoff… Continue reading “See that house over there? It’s an investment!” →

Guest Post: Why geographic arbitrage is so important to retire early and what you can do to about it

Today we feature a Guest Post from my blogging buddy Benjamin Davis. A very exciting and important topic: Geographic arbitrage! Benjamin holds a Ph.D. and decided to become a landlord to retire early. He writes on From cents to Retirement, a blog about early retirement and real estate investing. He also wrote the book My strategy to retire early and runs a real estate and investment consulting business in Portugal. His goal is to build a real estate portfolio with 100 units before he turns 35 and turn From Cents To Retirement into a reference blog for early retirement through Real Estate investments, while he inspires others with his own story. Take it away, Ben!

I was born in Portugal and divided my childhood between Portugal and Italy. I lived in Canada and Germany after that. My family is Canadian and Italian so you can imagine how much I have been exposed to different cultures.

When I decided I was going to retire early, I needed to select the country I was going to live in. I decided to move to a country that would allow me to take advantage of geographic arbitrage, which is defined as the practice of taking advantage of different prices and tax rates in different markets.

There are multiple reasons why I selected Portugal. It would be very easy to talk about the food, the weather, the overall quality of life, etc. But this post is to talk about the financial aspects of this decision. Continue reading “Guest Post: Why geographic arbitrage is so important to retire early and what you can do to about it” →

Housing Choices in Early Retirement: Rent vs. Own 

One of the idiosyncrasies of the ERN family early retirement plan is that it involves a relocation. It’s not that we don’t like our current location. But even with our nest egg solidly in the seven figures we likely couldn’t afford to retire here comfortably because of the insanely high housing costs. The state income tax rates are also unpleasantly high. So, if everything goes well we will relocate to another state with low or no income tax and lower housing costs.

The options we consider:

  1. Own a house, mortgage-free
  2. Own a house, plus mortgage. But what term: 30-years or 15-years?
  3. Rent a house or apartment, long-term
  4. Nomadic lifestyle: have no fixed residence, move from place to place with light luggage

Ok, I have to admit, I threw in that last option just for fun. Some people can pull it off (GoCurryCracker), but I doubt that the nomadic lifestyle is for us. I like to have a home base! The way I can tell is that as much as we love to travel, it’s always nice to come back home to sleep in our own bed. Even if I know I have to head back to the office the next day. Seriously!

Quantifying the tradeoffs

We can write as much as we want about the pros and cons of renting vs. owning, but in the end, it all boils down to the numerical assumptions, especially the rental yield (annual rent divided by purchase price):

  • If we can rent a house for only 5% p.a. of the purchase price or less it’s likely a no-brainer to rent. The opportunity cost of our money tied up in a house plus the depreciation and taxes would be too large. Unless, of course, we factor in huge property appreciation. But our baseline assumption is that property values appreciate with the rate of inflation. The last time folks were budgeting outsized returns in housing it didn’t end so well, remember 2008/9? So, renting can be much smarter than owning, see some examples at 10!Rocks and Millenial Revolution.
  • If the annual rent is 10% or more of the purchase price, it’s almost a slam dunk to buy.

Somewhere in between has to be the sweet spot. Let’s check where’s that crossover point in the rental yield! Continue reading “Housing Choices in Early Retirement: Rent vs. Own “ →

Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?

We are homeowners with a pretty sizeable mortgage but we also accumulated a nice retirement nest egg, which is actually many times larger than our mortgage. Even our taxable investments are several times larger than the mortgage. Still, we don’t pay off the mortgage because we like the benefit of leverage. We have a liability with a low-interest rate and assets with a much higher expected rate of return, so our overall expected rate of return is higher than without a mortgage. Our friend FinanciaLibre (now a defunct site) did some nice number crunching on this topic recently and we agree wholeheartedly.

Moreover, if you follow our blog you’ll also remember that we take a pretty dim view on bonds:

So, personally, we skip the bond allocation altogether. Others have written about this, too, check Physician on Fire’s 2-part guest post here and here. In light of all of this, here’s one question that occurred to us:

Why would anybody have a 30-year mortgage at about 3.50% and a bond portfolio currently paying around 1.8 to maybe 2.5% interest for safe government bonds?

Leverage works only when the asset has a higher expected return than the liability!
Continue reading “Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?” →