Just need to vent...

There are pros and cons.

Rent keeps increasing. Right now, I have the cheapest rent in town. That's good because I am able to save a little, a little for emergencies and a little for retirement. And yes, I am within biking distance from work, so that's good. But our little trailer is too small for the 4 of us. And that's not just us feeling the squeeze, but also according to state law. Yet we stay all stuffed in this place because there is no other option.

If rent continues to increase we'll be forced to move. And not as in move to the next town, but more like as in move out of state, thousands of miles from where we are now. All new jobs, all new schools, completely different lifestyle, far from family, far from our current circle of friends, etc.

As a family that lives near more family, we'd rather have stability than freedom. And renting isn't entirely 100% freedom either. Landlords like making binding contracts that make it nearly impossible to move during mid-year of the contract. The last landlord I had took me to court because she wanted me to keep paying for rent another 11 months, and yeah, she got money out of me. It makes moving hard because both your rental agreement, and the rental agreement of the current tenant where you want to move to, both need to expire around the same date in order for it to happen.

There's also the question of what will happen when the wife and I are old enough to retire. Will our rent continue to get more expensive while we live off of a fixed income? It seems like we're going to have to work until we die to pay for someone else's mortgage.

 

All very weighty stuff.

I have the advantage of living both on free soil and in a very affordable state.
I also leveraged a paid gov'mint education (USN) into a job that pays union wages.
Note: By 'education' I'm talking about a TRADE (Electronics) instead of some 8-year degree in underwater basket weaving or Bavarian dance appreciation.
Most of my clan still resides in my beloved home state of Indiana, but my family is here in the deep South so I take lots of road trips to the home sod.

Far be it from me to give someone else life advice, because I've nearly wrecked mine more than once but it seems to me that your primary gig NOW is getting the kids successfully launched.
If staying where you are is core and key to that?
Well.....there you go.

@rent/leases.
I don't live in the least expensive state (Arkansassass) and you don't live in the most expensive one (Hawaii.)
HOWEVER (comma!!)
You're pretty close to the top ten by most metrics and I'm in the bottom five by all of them.
This gives me options that I have exercised in the past.
For example, I no longer live within a few hundred feet of the beach.

There are very expensive places to live in my state, and relatively cheap places to live in yours.


Anyway....
Good luck!

 

Perhaps you mean in your current area? Having just finished over 4,000 miles of travel through the south & back, seeing many very old single wide trailers, yeah it doesn't take much to own your very own abode, although it might not meet one's own particular preferences.

 

The problem is that the only reason to move somewhere else is simply to be able to try to afford a home. I don't see any other perks, benefits, advantages for the family by moving somewhere else, mostly just less perks, benefits, advantages.

"Hey kids and wifey! Daddy says we should move somewhere far from grandma, who really needs our care, but we will be far from her. And all our projects, friends and activities here, we're leaving them. And all because Daddy wants to say he owns a house. A house he won't actually own until he's 77 years old, but that's the plan."

Technically we own our trailer home, on leased property. But for starters, the value of the trailer has been going down, because it's an old trailer.

And, ironically, to get one right now with at least two normal sized bedrooms would be about what I could afford for a home with property (including selling this one). Adding lot rent on there kind of makes it more than what I should be affording.

Not to mention that right now a local lady still owns these, for which reason the lease is reasonable. But it is all too common for large investment firms to buy these properties up and jack up the rent. That's what is happening to another trailer park here, and the investment firm has made it clear that they want to jack up the lot rent sky high so that everyone there is forced to leave so they can instead build luxury housing on it, inspite of the fact that many are still paying for their trailer homes.

 

^ That's a very common problem (trailer parks) in Florida except in some cases many of the trailers are not very mobile, so the owners are forced to sell THEIR homes to the entity that owns not-their property. This means that the new owners get to collect rent on a turn-key home that they "purchased" (some would say STOLE) on the cheap.
Some trailer-park tenants are banding together to buy out their aging park owners before this happens to them.

Sometimes there aren't many advantages.

Think very carefully about the "pride of ownership."
EVEN IF you only pay $1 a year in property taxes, YOU don't actually own the property, real or otherwise

Next time you get a minute?
Read up on a Supreme Court Case:
Kelo v. City of New London - Wikipedia

Family is more important than a pile of bricks.....

 

Ironically one of the 2 top lowest property tax states, if not THE lowest - is Hawaii. It's just everything else is astronomically expensive - not just interstate travel.

 

^ Not sure about why that would be.
Usually, crazy lib states never met a tax that they didn't love!

It's probably a combination of the fact that leasehold ownership used to be more common, and either the gov'mint and/or ultra wealthy people own a disproportionate amount of the land - and we all KNOW how the ultra-wealthy love to pay their taxes!!!