KingOfTheDipshits

You've talked a lot about the creation of the web as something that was originally intended to serve as a deep-linking tool for scientific research - papers, data, and other research resources.

How are we doing at that? What still needs to happen to make that vision a reality?

Hi Rob. Big fan of your work and a regular reader.

My wife and I (36 & 38) are wrestling with the home ownership question and coming up uncertain. We have an annual household income of about 225k, we live in Downtown Toronto, we're currently renting, and our total housing costs (rent+utilities) are less than 3k/month for a detached home.

We eventually want to own, but by my math, anything approaching the equivalent of where we live now will put us in a position of about $5k/month in mortgage, plus taxes, utilities, insurance and everything else. It would roughly double our housing costs to own rather than rent. We've got savings and investments and we're socking away lots of money - given especially that our housing costs are half of what most of our friends with mortgages face.

We face this conundrum: we eventually want to own a house. Houses increase in value by 10-15% per year for what now seems like forever. Nothing will put us in a position to earn that kind of return on our investment portfolio.

What do we do? When do we buy? Do we ever buy?

Thanks again for all your advice!

It's a funny thing, I know. I understand the math on renting and it's not so much the "owning your own house" thing. Truth is I like working on houses, renovating and fixing things. I like not having to wait for someone else to fix stuff. And I like the idea of being able to stay somewhere for awhile and not have to move every five years when my landlord decides to flip the house.

The landlords we've got are basically losing money on us at this point: They could get a much better return if they either sold, or tore down, built a bigger house and then sold. Sooner or later they'll realize that and sell the house. I want to avoid having that happen repeatedly over the next decade or two.