{"id":1038,"date":"2011-09-22T01:03:14","date_gmt":"2011-09-22T06:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2015-04-19T22:03:33","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T03:03:33","slug":"ratesupermarket-first-time-buyer-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1038","title":{"rendered":"Ratesupermarket First Time Buyer Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

As soon as I heard that the mortgage brokers behind ratesupermarket were pushing a first time house buyer’s guide<\/a>, I thought “I’m gonna hate <\/em>that. Tearing it apart should make for a fun blog post.” <\/p>\n

A novel idea was that you’d sign up for a 2-week guide that would send you one part of the lesson by email each day. Kind of gimmicky, why spread out 14 already-short pages over a full two weeks? Anyway, it’s short, there are cartoony graphics, and there are quizzes so it’s apparently aimed at getting the school-age crowd to buy homes.<\/p>\n

Much to its credit, it does start the series off with the question of whether one should rent or buy. But of course, I have to take issue with the nonsense in the rent vs. buy comparison. They create a simple pro\/con list for buying and renting. Unsurprisingly, they dig up the tired old half-truth “Money paid towards rent disappears forever” and stick it under the con column for renting. Yet under the pro column for buying is the flip side of that half-truth “Mortgage payments go towards your home\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s equity” with no mention that interest also disappears forever. <\/p>\n

“Restricting rules regarding guests, noise, pets, yard space, etc.” also appears as a con for renting, though most of that is not true (or applies equally to owners in condos or other situations with rules regarding noise, pets, etc.). <\/p>\n

Even more strange though is this one: “Cosmetic renovations typically come out of your own pocket” as a con for renting. Huh<\/em>? Whose pocket do they come out of for owners? For that matter, aside from Wayfare and I, who does <\/em>renovations as a renter? <\/p>\n

Considering the site is owned by mortgage brokers, who only make money when someone buys and takes out a mortgage, I was expecting it to be much more strongly biased towards rushing in to buy (e.g., to not even have a section on rent, and to focus more on stretching to get the maximum mortgage possible). The budgeting section didn’t stress that their calculations would give the upper end<\/em> of affordability, but that was to be expected.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, they have another rent vs buy table on their site<\/a>. I’m not sure how I stumbled on it, but it’s not part of the cartoony first time buyer’s guide. It also looks to perhaps be a rough draft, since they get away with saying things like “Affordable: in some cities renting is the only option for people because of high housing prices; Low Risk: If house prices start to drop (as some people are predicting), you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be glad you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t buy” under renting pros, it’s not as nicely formatted, and has the common loose\/lose mistake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As soon as I heard that the mortgage brokers behind ratesupermarket were pushing a first time house buyer’s guide, I thought “I’m gonna hate that. Tearing it apart should make for a fun blog post.” A novel idea was that you’d sign up for a 2-week guide that would send you one part of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}