So 3 years later, did I reduce my housing cost? And other financial musings

 It's another glorious Saturday and as I'm wont to do, I'm perusing my finances.

I'm excited about tax time, so I found some motivation and downloaded statements from 2 of my brokers. I just realized I forgot to do the third one! I got distracted! 

And I aimed to get statements from my banks but alas, the train stopped.

I did however make some notes that I really need to get out of these target date funds. The brief look I took at my statements, showed the date funds hover around 9% in bonds. Given my 2 year FIRE Cash Stash, that just seems a bit unnecessary. 

In mild haste, I went ahead and moved my robo advisor allocation to 100% stocks (was 93% and was 80% before that). The broker showed less than $150 tax implication. I can manage that!

I'm still waiting for my oldest 401k to bounce back before moving everything to simpler index funds. I'm going to try my best to set it and forget it. 

Honestly one reason I've been wanting to leave my robo advisor is the mountain of tax forms I get. They make too many trades that I have to upload. In these early retirement twilight years, I am leaning toward simpler everything. 

So I did that and just made a mental note to move to index funds as soon as the time is right. 

But as I was about to shut my laptop, I asked myself did I ever calculate if I reduced my housing cost.

It feels cheaper because my mortgage is cheaper than my rent, but there are also higher other housing costs.

When I look at the trend year over year, numerically the number is going down. But by how much? 

Housing Costs in the Apartment (2017-2020, 3.25 yrs)

2017: $11,927

2018: $13,521

2019: $11,289

2020 (3 months): $3046

Average: $12,225/yr

Housing Costs in the house (2020 - 2022, 2.75 years)

2020 (9 months): $12,104 (incl transactional ownership costs)

2021: $6,030 (COVID forbearance)

2022: $10,702

Average: $10,485/yr

Difference: $1770/yr

Percentage: 14% decrease

So yes, it costs less on average to live in the house, but not the 30% one might hope for. A 14% decrease in housing costs is nothing to sneeze at, but it does provide some perspective. Is the headache of owning a home worth 1.7k a year? 

So what would it take to bring my housing costs down by 30% from the apartment? It would be a yearly cost of about $8500/yr and monthly about $715/mon.

That's not achievable in my current house given my basic monthly housing expenses with nothing going wrong is $842/mon.

My mortgage is the cheapest I could find for something I would want to live in. And when I looked, I was hard pressed to find an apartment plus utilities for $715/mon. And my area is a pretty LCOL area. 

So although my housing costs didn't decrease that much, it still decreased, and I still get a lot for the money.

And I think, if I wanted to move back to my studio, at least I know, it wouldn't be that much of a strain on my budget. 

I also looked to see if I my studio had increased much since 2020, and it only looks to be maybe 50-60 bucks a month in total cost. 

Well, I will say, if the internet is to be believed, and I needed to sell my house, there is some profit that would be made even more than the $6k over the last 3 years. So, there's that. Let's just say I make out with a modest 20k in profit from selling the house... that would fund the difference in renting for 10 years.

Not bad, just something to consider.