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As someone who has had to move often for work and school, renting has been pretty good for me and my partner. What would the alternative be?

by mb7733 6y ago

filleduchaos 6y ago
Someone who travels even more often (and I know several that do, due to business/a semi-nomadic lifestyle) would consider hotels and hostels to be pretty good for them, and yet I'd hope they'd still be able to understand that - the hotel model is a poor one for general, large-scale provision of shelter, and - the arrangement is heavily biased in favour of the hotel owner. I always ask people who rent to take some time - whether now, or in the next ten or twenty years - to calculate how much they have spent on rent so far and how much they are still projected to spend for the rest of their lives. And then consider that they get no tangible asset for the often mind-boggling amounts the total comes to; that, in fact, they may have actually paid for other people's houses several times over with nothing to show for it. The situation is somewhat tenable when the landlords actually own their properties outright, but in the modern real estate world they are more often just middlemen that shuffle money between the renter and the bank. I wish more people would question why the provision of shelter has become such a runaway profit-making machine, but I'm not holding my breath.
- stdbrouw 6y ago
  You might need a subscription, but the NYT has a rent or buy calculator and it really depends a lot on the market and on your specific situation: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal... We recently bought the house we used to rent. If we would have continued to rent for 25 years, then, adjusting for inflation, that would cost us maybe 300K. That's a lot of money and you have nada at the end, you're absolutely right. But our loan plus interest plus insurance plus the leaky roof that is now up to us to fix plus 1% of your house's value for maintenance every year plus property taxes... napkin math puts it at 600K after 25 years. At that point it's ours, but meanwhile it will be harder for us to move if we have to, our monthly payment is twice what our rent was, and all of our savings are in the house so we have no money to invest in stock, less to save for retirement (tax-free) and less money if we decide we want to do something crazy like start a business. Psychologically it's a mixed bag as well: it's really nice to know something is yours, but you also start noticing a lot of things you don't like that previously you just didn't care about, and we're on the hook whenever something breaks down. We're happy with our choice, but surely you see that it's not a slam dunk in favor of one option or the other?

As someone who has had to move often for work and school, renting has been pretty good for me and my partner. What would the alternative be?

by mb7733 6y ago

As someone who has had to move often for work and school, renting has been pretty good for me and my partner. What would the alternative be?

filleduchaos 6y ago

Someone who travels even more often (and I know several that do, due to business/a semi-nomadic lifestyle) would consider hotels and hostels to be pretty good for them, and yet I'd hope they'd still be able to understand that - the hotel model is a poor one for general, large-scale provision of shelter, and - the arrangement is heavily biased in favour of the hotel owner. I always ask people who rent to take some time - whether now, or in the next ten or twenty years - to calculate how much they have spent on rent so far and how much they are still projected to spend for the rest of their lives. And then consider that they get no tangible asset for the often mind-boggling amounts the total comes to; that, in fact, they may have actually paid for other people's houses several times over with nothing to show for it. The situation is somewhat tenable when the landlords actually own their properties outright, but in the modern real estate world they are more often just middlemen that shuffle money between the renter and the bank. I wish more people would question why the provision of shelter has become such a runaway profit-making machine, but I'm not holding my breath.

stdbrouw 6y ago
You might need a subscription, but the NYT has a rent or buy calculator and it really depends a lot on the market and on your specific situation: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal... We recently bought the house we used to rent. If we would have continued to rent for 25 years, then, adjusting for inflation, that would cost us maybe 300K. That's a lot of money and you have nada at the end, you're absolutely right. But our loan plus interest plus insurance plus the leaky roof that is now up to us to fix plus 1% of your house's value for maintenance every year plus property taxes... napkin math puts it at 600K after 25 years. At that point it's ours, but meanwhile it will be harder for us to move if we have to, our monthly payment is twice what our rent was, and all of our savings are in the house so we have no money to invest in stock, less to save for retirement (tax-free) and less money if we decide we want to do something crazy like start a business. Psychologically it's a mixed bag as well: it's really nice to know something is yours, but you also start noticing a lot of things you don't like that previously you just didn't care about, and we're on the hook whenever something breaks down. We're happy with our choice, but surely you see that it's not a slam dunk in favor of one option or the other?