I'm still in college...got at least another year to go, and then possibly law school. There are cheap houses available in my hometown. I'm talking around $10,000. I'm going to school 3 hours away, so I don't live there now...but I'm thinking after I graduate, I'd likely go to a law school that is not too far from my hometown, so I could live in the house then. The kind of house I'm talking about needs some cosmetic work if one were to sell it, but I could personally live in it fine as long as it was structurally sound. I think it'd be kind of cool to have some big ass 2,000 square foot old colonial style house in the semi-ghetto as a young person. My mortgage would be so cheap and I'd be able to pay it off pretty quickly even with student loans to worry about too. I could probably have a friend of mine from high school move in there to help with bills. I dunno, I just think of it as a great shelter and place to relax in my youthful, temporary poverty.

Or would this be just a complete waste of money, given that I don't need a house right now at all? I mean, at college, I'm living in a dorm, maybe a rented apartment next year...at home, I can live for free with my parents. But ze houses are so cheap and big and tempting!

take that ten grand and invest it

I don't have ten grand.

Read: mortgage.

I would. But obviously its not as easy as it sounds, sounds like the house needs alot of work? amiright?

A good idea would be to buy the house, live in it for however long you plan to before college and then rent the house out, that would pay the mortgage payments most likely. And i'm pretty sure you can legally rent it out if the bank still owns it.. If you go with this plan, it might be hard to find a decent tennant(since I think you said it's in a semi-ghetto) but just do backround/credit checks or even rent to a friend..Make them pay the water/trash pick up bill and your straight.

And you can even use some of your own money to fix the place up, and maybe down the road you can make a nice little profit off the house.

Only you can answer that as we can't estimate the intrinsic value of the house over the internet.

$10,000 does sound cheap though. Even if you don't want to live in it you could rent it out. At $10,000 I'd imagine it would give real returns. To receive 10% per year you only need to charge $20 per week for rent!

Are you actually in Cape Town?

Where exactly do you live?

I live in Ohio. Since making this thread, I'm actually thinking about transferring to a school close enough to my potential crack house to be able to commute there. But yeah, renting it out would be a nice idea too.

What are the houses like? Pictures/details/nhood?

So you don't live in Cape Town.

You didn't tell us it was going to be a crack house.

If you have 10k you should either invest it in mutual funds or crude oil futures in the 9month range. Oil is at an incredible low right now, but by next summer it should be wel above what it was a few months ago