Monday, March 23, 2009

Why buy when you can squat?

I live in Arizona where we had a housing boom and then a fallout. We see houses double in value over the course of just a couple of years and now they are back down, just below what they were before the explosion. One of the reasons that housing is so cheap is because supply is so much higher than demand (look at those college economic courses I took finally paying off). The inability to pay mortgages has left the housing market full of homes, both new and old, owned by banks and void of anyone living in them. I went to go look at houses with a realtor a couple of weeks ago and while he told us that he would only show us a couple of foreclosures mixed in between regular sale homes, he overestimated the strength of his own market and ended up showing us nothing but foreclosures (10 in all).
Only one of the homes was totally trashed, apparently when you are mad at yourself for not being able to pay your mortgage, you take it out on the house that you purchased with the money you couldn't pay back.
The rest of the homes were in wonderful condition and it made me think, why am I thinking about buying when I could just squat. Who knows when this market is going to get better? and how hard is it to change locks anyway? The only way for a realtors to get in is through the key in the lockbox, so if I simply change the lock on the front door I could squat undetected. No realtor is going to say, "well, the key doesn't work, so let me just break this window and you and your wife and crawl in." I figure I have a week to two weeks from the first time that someone can't get in to move before someone comes to figure out what the problem is (probably more, I mean, who has that job anyway?)
Let's figure this out together. I pay $620. (and some change) for rent. I rent a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom half of a duplex. If I squat, I need to pay for a new deadbolt lock on 2 doors and I could install them myself, but for arguments sake let's even have someone else install them. At http://www.homedepot.com/ I can buy a deadbolt lock for 35.00 with free shipping and let's say I have to buy one for each of the two doors with this kind of lock, I can use a broom stick for the sliding glass door, let's add 10.00 there and let's also say that I will be squatting in two houses per month. That's a total of 160.00 which is a monthly saving of 460.
If I told you, you could save 460.00 a month by moving out of your crappy rental unit and choosing a home from thousands of available to be your very own (sort of), would you do it? Of course. Ever dreamed of having multiple homes? Squatting is the perfect way to feel like your rich on a hobo's budget. Even if you're not living on a hobo's budget, squatting is the perfect way to save money during these tough economic times.

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