patrick.net

180,000 still being DICKED around by the Bank.

Count them that makes 180,000 gullible suckers, that only were successful of showing banks and realtors, that people want to buy a house.

That's a 180,000 people that signed a "CONTRACT" that "BANKS" and "REALTORS" just wipe their arses with, they have no plans honoring "SHORT SALES" they are only trolling and phishing for better offers.

Tax Credit be DAMNED!

your sitation might be a little more complicated based on exemption phase-out (minor impact)), possible AMT (minor impact), possible SEP IRA contribution (big impact due to being on cusp of 33% bracket). I don't think there is a calculator that can run all the nooks and specific you are looking for, the best way to tell is to run another set of federal and state income tax returns (electronically) and layer in with for example another 25K in interest and 8K in property tax and see how that changes your tax. That really should be easy to do.

I suspect your incremental tax benefit (from property tax and morgage interest), net of state income tax credit (remember state tax has to be added back as income) is around 35%. So in the example above, federal and state tax goes down by about 11,550.

Thank you for your response... Initially I tried this method, but I have to redo many times while making edits. If there would be any calculator, that would have been easy.

I don't know of any such calculator, but there is no possible way that buying a house will save you money in or near San Jose, compared to renting the same thing -- for the market segment above $1M.

Rents around here these days usually cover only the cost of property tax (1.75%) and maintenance (1%), meaning the use of the housing capital itself is free to the renter. This means that paying any mortgage at all puts the owner in a losing position relative to renting.

On the other hand, for cheaper houses, the return rates get higher, meaning it's a better deal to buy for houses under $300K or so.

Looking at more than 600,000 actual asking prices with nearby comparable rents from my Landlord's Bargain Finder service shows the difference:

mysql> select 12 * avg(est_rent / price) from forsale where price > 1000000;
+----------------------------+
| 12 * avg(est_rent / price) |
+----------------------------+
|                 0.02456621 |
+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select 12 * avg(est_rent / price) from forsale where price < 300000;
+----------------------------+
| 12 * avg(est_rent / price) |
+----------------------------+
|                 0.09156990 |
+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

"there is no possible way that buying a house will save you money in or near San Jose, compared to renting the same thing — for the market segment above $1M."

The table above seem to imply that a 1M house rents for around 2,042 a month while a 300K house rents for 2,287 a month (misleading alert - am aware that data can interpret that way)

let's test the theory. I am not implying anything other than the quote noted above.

when I think of million dollar home in San Jose, I think of either West San Jose in the Cupertino schools or Silver Creek/Willow in the east. Rents are anywhere from 3K to 4K depending on size. For sake of argument, let's say it is 3,500 or annual rent = 42,000 or 4.2% of $1M.

15 years fixed rate morgage is currently 4.125%,
Property tax = 1.25%
Insurance/maintennce (5K) 0.5% (insurance 1,500, maintenance 3,500)
Tax Deduction -1.88%

ITI buy = 3.99%
rent = 4.2%

Sure, there's a lot of assumptions, but it just shows it is possible, that's all.