544
Trump declares himself president of Venezuela — and sends 'wake-up call' to world
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Check your homeowners insurance cost and property taxes before you start talking about how cheap houses are in Texas. It can run $18k/year in insurance and another 10k in property taxes for a $400k house... If you put 80k down on a $400k house, the mortgage is roughly $2100/month in principle and interest, plus another $933ish per month for Property taxes($5000/year), insurance($5000/year), and hoa fees($1200/year). Your housing cost is ~$3k/month. Property taxes go up every year on top of that. They are limited to a 10%/year increase but historically, that translates to basically a guaranteed 10%/year increase, especially in the last 10 years. Insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last 10 years as well.
That's also not covering the god awful electricity stability so you want some sort of generator or battery backup so you don't literally freeze to death in the middle of winter. Basic starter generators are what, $10k right? And then $2k in gas a year? Minimum.
To run a heater or ac, you need a significant generator. I have been looking at battery systems and to run an existing residential ac, its like 10k and you need two inverters. Where I am, the power failures have been minimal and manageable (30 minute intervals every couple months) The exception was Hurricane Beryl and we were out of power for 3 days. I intermittently ran a generator for our fridge and the neighbors to charge stuff but even running a window unit was not an option on our 5000w generator. It burned maybe 2 gallons of gas?
Running an electric central air heater is also essentially out of the question. With a gas heater, you just need to run the fan and not heat the elements.
Despite the health risks, that is why we still use. Gas water heaters, gas furnaces, gas dryers, and a gas stove in our house. I want the fallback of running stuff without power. The grid is also shitty to the point (in some areas) that it fried my uncles induction stove, fridge, and ovens even living in a major city.
That also wouldn't have helped during the winter storm in Austin because the gas supply basically froze and lost pressure so those folks were really hurting.
I think the big built in generators run 15k plus and run off natural gas. I did learn that they also require a maintenance subscription (because of course they do) and thats like 2k a year iirc.
Gotcha, so I was in a very beginner ballpark. That sounds like a lot of no thank you hassle.
Not to rub it in but I'm going to go make hot chocolate on my induction stove and bump the heat up one for my wife.
Yeah if my wife's family wasn't here and unwilling to move, I would be somewhere less hostile and more functional too.