Rent, would prefer owning
Same here. Having doubts whether I’ll ever own a home, though. Real estate prices are insane.
Same.
Owning gives you freedom to do whatever you want with it, provides a more stable expense and in the long run is probably more financially responsible.
My partner and I are in the process of selling our first house right now. We barely were able to buy a fixer standing on our tiptoes, but we were really motivated to get a house. ‘Fixer’ ended up being a bit of an understatement, and we blew all of our leftover money almost immediately on major systems (heat, electrical panel, sewer line, full replumb, etc). Tens of thousands of dollars in debt later, we were left with the same ugly interior that we resented.
I totally agree with the people advocating home ownership in this thread. It’s super rad to be able to do whatever to your house. Need a hole? Make one. Want to run speaker cables behind the wall for some cool floating speakers? Go buck wild.
On the other hand, I’d caution first time homebuyers in this thread that, unless you’re independently wealthy and can truly afford to buy a home and still have a lump of cash, be careful with fixers. We’re lucky enough to probably squeak out from under this house and pay all the debts back, but if we would have waited even a couple years more it probably would have been a net loss in exchange for 3 years of living in a shitty house that was a source of constant stress and pressure.
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I live with my parents so I don’t actually have my own home, but my parents bought our current house and an apartment for my grandparents.
I’d prefer to rent when I first move out simply because I don’t know where life will take me, and I’d probably want to buy a home when I get older and settle down.
I also live at home (again), but after many years of living for rent all over the country. So I kinda own the house I live in. Having a nice garden is the single best thing you can have. I can always go outside and feel the wind and listen to the sound the trees make. Also, a little bit of garden here and there is also nice. I will live here as long as I can see ahead, and I will take care of my parents when they can’t do that themselves anymore.
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As far as I understand whether renting or buying a house is better depends a lot on what you expect to happen in the long term. (In terms of money)
But if we put that aside I’d say owning a home is better if you can afford one.
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I live in a shared flat, because it is very cost effective. But I have been living here for a couple of years and theoretically the people that live here could have bought the flat together and just paid the bank so we would own it in a couple of years…
I don’t like how housing is used as an investment, to wait for prices to rise and sell or even worse - rent out very expensive and earn multiple times the money it would cost over decades. Do I have a better system? Yes and no. I like cooperative housing and it would be better if most housing was from a cooperative system, which is non-profit in nature, but we’d probably need some speculative houses for some purposes. Idk
Rent, because I don’t stay in one country for very long, though would prefer owning otherwise — it’s just cheaper.
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Done both and prefer owning. But we only chose owning when the total cost was lower than renting. One other big benefit is choice when you have pets - what drove us to buy initially was the extremely limited (and expensive) selection once we had one dog and needed to move for work. Did the paperwork and turned to buying.
I rent and I’m quite happy with it. If anything goes wrong I shoot an email to my property manager and they fix it. Eventually I might look into buying if I ever move out of the greater LA area.
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