As I sit here at my desk looking for a new house to rent for me and my two dogs (again), I always come back to the same thought of, "I should just buy a house and be done with this s#!%." Ever since I joined the Navy right after high-school, I have moved on average once a year. During the first couple of years in the Navy I enjoyed the "luxury" of living on base. Being crammed in a tiny hotel-like room with another guy or three gets a little old after a while, and as soon as I could live off base I did. It was a small house that some of the other guys and myself got with a portion of our monthly housing allowance from the military so we could pocket the rest of the money (Thanks Navy!) for booze and other conduct becoming of our fine fighting men and women.
Throughout the Navy and my years afterwards I have always rented. When I decided to give college the old "college try" I stayed in a house off campus in Savannah, GA. Then when I first got the job I'm at now, I stayed in apartments in Atlanta and Franklin, Tennessee. During my time in the apartments I got two giant mutts so I decided to get a house when I moved to Knoxville. Throughout all that time I have paid anywhere from $850-$1,000 a month on rent, and I have nothing to show for it. Sure, renting is easy. If you have a problem you call someone, and if your landlords aren't turd buckets it gets fixed. I never have to worry about taxes, and sometimes I didn't even have to mow my lawn. Yet, here I stand with nothing to show for living on my own for ten years.
Here's what's screwed up, I'm paying for whatever house I live in already. Even though I don't have to write a check for property taxes, I paid them throughout the year. Even though I didn't have to mow my yard sometimes, my rent paid the lawn care professionals. As a matter of fact I looked at what the house I own would have cost if I got a 30 year mortgage and I would be paying less per month if I had just bought it. (Which I get because why would you rent a house if you were going to lose money on it?) So why don't I?
Well for one I haven't had what you might call a stable adult life. I have always been on the move ever since I got out of the Navy. Spend a year in Savannah, six months in Atlanta, A year and a half in Nashville, and now a year in Knoxville. This after spending six years in the Navy never really sure where I was going to wake up next. I think I am finally ready to settle down though. I'm tired of moving from place to place, and I HATE the actual act of moving. I have to be out of my current house by the end of the month and I still haven't packed!!!
The second reason is that over the course of a single year there's not a lot of difference in owning a house and renting. The big differences comes with multiple years of ownership, and the granddaddy of the it all when you finally pay the sucker off! Then everything you put towards the house every month goes to other investments. But that can be 15, 20, even 30 years from now if you don't pay it off early.
The main reason though is that you're stuck with the house through thick and thin. The worst thing the coke heads of wall street have ever done was screw with peoples homes. They took something that had emotional and sentimental value and treated it like any other asset. That created a whole generation of people like me that are scared shitless about actually owning a home. So what does that do? It created a rental market where rents keep going up because the demand is still there, but we would rather pay $1,000 a month for rent than be stuck with something that someone can knock the property value out from under our feet in their Manhattan office.
If you'd like to read an interesting article related to this chart you can see it here:
http://www.areavibes.com/library/rent-vs-ownership/
The crazy thing is they don't even have to mess with our house directly. Let's say that I do buy a house and I pay it off in 15 years. I tend and care for the place like it's a newborn lamb the entire time I live there. Then let's say that there's another housing bubble and there's another crash because the big banks have figured out a new way to screw everything up. I own my house, so I'm good right? Wrong. I may keep my house, and I'm not getting foreclosed or evicted. But, if there's a large number of empty houses in my neighborhood, or people stop taking care of their house then the value of my property is going to go down all the same. So I do everything right, and still get hurt by someone that will be getting a bonus this year for being an idiot.
That being said I am still going to buy a house in a year or so. I'm tired of paying other peoples mortgages, and having nothing to show for it. As you can see from the chart the prices aren't going to get any cheaper any time soon.
All that said, If you have, or know of, a place that accepts large dogs around Knoxville, Tennessee let me know. I need a new place to live!
-nuclearsilver