Mostly the interest and upkeep that are keeping me away from purchasing.
If I bought a 200k house, in 5 years I would have paid 43k in interest and still owe 180k on the mortgage (according to some amortization table I found), and probably many thousand more fixing stuff that breaks.
After 30 years I will have paid $164,813 in interest, so even if the house doubles in value it doesn't seem like a great investment.
Am I missing something? Maybe I'm not understanding it correctly but it doesn't seem like that great of a deal.
I'm definitely in the "rent over purchase" group, even though I could get a mortgage with good terms. I think people are a bit nervous to purchase a home after seeing what happened in 2008.
They could if they wanted to, but I don't know if I'd want to be known as the guy that sued his employer.
Normally the plaintiffs see very little of the cash if they were to win, it's normally the lawyers that make out like bandits in those cases so it wouldn't be worth it.
Most likely anyone at Disney that was facing layoffs and has marketable skills will leave.
So then what's the point? Since I deleted my account my relationships with my real friends and family has definitely improved. When I see them in person we actually have things to catch up on and talk about and those in person interactions have much more value for me.
One nice thing would be hosting wordpress on multiple EC2 servers. All local copies of your wordpress directory would be kept in sync automatically with no other configuration.
Did you have to forward ports on your router to get it to work "from anywhere in the world"? If so, you've already gone beyond the capabilities of 99% of the userbase.