Rent Forever, Don’t Buy a Home!

By Jim Wang
This post will tackle one of the cornerstones of well-accepted advice: rent as little as possible and buy a home as soon as you can, renting is just like throwing your money away. I think that, like all one-size fits all advice, is completely wrong and here’s why.

Renting Keeps You Flexible

When you rent, you can pick up and move almost whenever you want, with very little penalty (perhaps an early termination fee of some kind); when you own, selling a home can take a very very long time. You lose a lot of flexibility when you “put down your roots” and this is one the biggest reasons why you shouldn’t buy. When you want to look for a new job, you’re restricted to looking in the geographic area around your home. If you ever get a job offer in another area, you have to go through the headache of selling your home before you can take advantage of it. If you rented, you could just end your lease, rent a moving truck (avoid U-Hauls!), and just go.

Someone Else Does The Repairs

When you own your own home, every time something breaks, you have to fix it. Every time something breaks and can’t be repaired, you have to fork over the cash to buy a new one. A new refridgerator costs thousands, a new washer and dryer is on the hot side of a thousand bucks, a new dishwasher can set you back a couple hundred bucks, and that’s just the cheap stuff. When you rent, hopefully your landlord will take care of all of your problems, fixing things that need fixing, replacing things that need replacing, and if you pick your landlord correctly, it’ll be a corporation with deep pockets.

Owning A Home Is More Expensive Than It Looks

With renting, you do throw your money on rent because you never gain ownership of the place you’re renting. However, when you own a home, you also throw your money away on other fees and taxes that never go towards your home ownership. For example, you’ll pay property taxes, homeowners association dues, condominium fees, and any number of other fees associated to the area your home is in – none of which go towards the equity in your home. For example, on my home, I pay about $3,000 in property taxes each year plus $30/month for HOA fees, and $500/yr for a parks and recreation fee.

Renters Insurance Is Much Cheaper

When it comes to home related insurances, renter’s insurance is ridiculously cheaper than homeowners insurance – oftentimes ten times cheaper. I was able to get renter’s insurance when I was renting for as little as $7 each month but now I’m paying for homeowners insurance at $55 each month – a difference of $576 each year.

Home Prices Can Go Down Short-Term

One of the cornerstones of the argument to buy a home is that home prices always go up. I’m not one of those haters who sees the current housing market and is ready to throw falling prices into the faces of all those people who bought a home (I bought one last May, arguable near the peak of the housing prices nationally), but if you treat the housing market like any other market, you’ll recognize that in the long run every market will go up (yay inflation). The problem with that theory is the fact that while you can invest in the long term, reality forces you to live in the short term and in the short term the market can go down. Is this a strong enough argument to rent? Likely not, hence being placed last in the set, but it is a consideration.

Summary

Owning a home is something seriously significant, it’s a life changing decision, unlike investing in a 401K, which would likely not change much in your life right now; and so it’s not one that should be entered into lightly. My honest opinion is that the general rule of “buy a house, stop renting” is probably the most strongly believed but most weakly defensible of the common sense personal finance advice concepts out there.