Quote from dumb_mother:
let me show you the math of why buying real estate (in chicago at least) is a terrible investment right now. let's see how things would have treated you over the past 12 months. i'll look specifically at the unit i'm currently renting.
example:
home (or most likely condo) value 500k
100k down payment + 400k loan (now if you do FHA loan you have even more in loan which will prove to make the math even worse, so this is a safe assumption.)
property tax between 1-2% = 1.5% as an estimate
PMI = .5%
leaves you with a mortgage payment of $2,486.55 or $29,838.6 for the year.
after one year you will have built up approximately $11,000 in equity
homes in chicago fell by 6.9% last year, so in the process of building $11,000 in equity your home will have gone down in value by approx $34,000.
all-in-all you will have spent $30,000 to lose $23,000 leaving an effective loss of $53,000 for the past year and likely had to dump at least 1k into further maintenance (huge lowball there)
now let's see what happened if you rented that same house:
rent per month of $2800 = $33,600
got your landlord to pay 1k to fix things that broke for you
total expense for the year of -$32,600
so if you bought the house you were about -$54k (after factoring the "equity" you built), and if you rented you were about -$33k....
this is why i'm laughing at the people who bought last (this/next/year after next) year. until housing stops going down in value (and there is no reason to expect it will not continue to go down in value anywhere except for the places it has already catastrophically dropped... ie NOT chicago) you definitely should not be buying anything.