The spare room costs more than the mortgage math says
By Hollis Treadway, Contributing editor, research review · · 2 min read
Four hundred and ten dollars a month. That is what one reader, a widow of seventy-three in a three-bedroom house in Missouri, worked out that her two spare rooms cost her once she stopped counting only the mortgage, which was paid off, and started counting the rest.
Her list: the share of property tax attributable to the square footage, the share of heating and cooling for rooms she keeps closed but cannot keep cold, insurance, the roof replacement amortized over the years she expects to stay, and a cleaning service she would not need for a two-bedroom apartment. She did not count her own labor. She also did not count the stairs, which she said she would start counting the first time she fell on them.
Against that she set what a two-bedroom apartment in her town rents for, which is about eleven hundred, and concluded that the house still wins, by a little, as long as nothing breaks.
I am not going to argue with her arithmetic, which is better than most I have seen. I will only note what the two spare rooms are for, by her own account: one is where her son sleeps at Christmas, and the other is where she keeps his things, and the son is forty-six and lives in Denver and comes for three nights a year.
Three nights. At four hundred and ten a month, that is roughly sixteen hundred dollars a night, before the stairs.
She knows this. She has done the division. She said that the number is not the kind of number that decides anything, and that she expects to stay until the stairs decide, and I think that is the honest answer and that most of the arithmetic people do about houses is done in order to avoid arriving at it.