this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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It definitely is a better deal though, if you can scrape up the sum.
You rent for 20 years, all the money you've spent over those 240 months is gone forever. That wealth has been transferred from you to another entity. It's not yours anymore in any way shape or form.
You buy a house, your wealth just changes shape. Money in your bank account becomes real estate with your name on the papers. You still have your wealth, for the most part. Sure you'll lose some on the maintenance and the mortgage and whatnot, but long term it's not even in the same ballpark of 240 months of rent.
Not a difficult decision to make, if, again, you are in a position to make it in the first place.
Have you read my other comments? I don't really need an explanation of how home ownership works. I owned a home for a decade. I lost money. I'm not saying that always happens, just that there are several factors not considered by many people who want to be a homeowner. Yes, it's practically always less expensive, but it's also often stressful.
... we pay for things we'd rather not deal with all the time. No, it's not money pissed into the wind, I got something for it. Peace of mind for those 20 years. Sleeping in instead of mowing the grass or taking the mower to a mechanic so I can do that.
I have enough stress to deal with without maintaining a property. I may decide to make that trade off again some day, but it's absolutely not this cut and dried thing where renting is stupid if you can own. There are a lot of tradeoffs involved in owning vs renting.
In the short term, renting isn't always stupid if you can own, but most of the time it is. In the long term, renting is, with very rare exceptions, much worse than buying. For context, even those who bought in 2005 at the peak of the last housing bubble on a fixed 30y are saving a fuckton by owning rather than renting. They would be paying 3-4x more renting than owning today.