It’s good to rent a home to live in. It means you have your own place, you can move out of your parents’ home, you might even be able to move in with a partner or new spouse. You can choose wherever you want to live, and make life easier for yourself, being closer to good schools, to work, to facilities like stores and restaurants, and in a lot of cases you can stay there relatively long term. If renting is what you want or need to do, there is really not a lot bad that can be said about it.
However, many people would prefer to own a property, and have the idea that buying is a better thing to do than renting. Although there are pros and cons to each path, buying does have a lot of positives, and here are some of them.
It’s Yours
Of course, the biggest difference between renting and buying is that when you buy, the property is all yours. You can make it exactly how you want it, and that includes the interior décor as well as the exterior in terms of the doors and windows, the yard (front and back) and the choice as to whether you want to add more rooms by extending, for example. When you rent, you don’t have this freedom; the property belongs to someone else and they have the final say. Even if you are able to make changes, you will actually potentially be making the property worth more, allowing the landlord to charge more, or to sell for a profit, and that’s not a good position to be in.
If you like the idea of being able to make your property exactly how you want it to be, buying will be your preferred option.
It’s Long Term
Even if you sign up for a long lease, there will come a day when you have to move out of your rented home. The landlord might choose to sell, they might want to put the rent up to something you don’t want to pay, or you might reach retirement age and find that you can no longer afford where you are living. Trying to put down real roots when you rent isn’t easy, as you never really know how long you are going to be able to stay in one place before you have to move on again. This also means you need to have a certain amount of money on hand to move when you need to, and that’s not easy either.
When you own a home, it’s a long term thing. You can stay there for as long as you want to, and the choice to move is always going to be yours, not someone else’s. If you want to stay forever, you can, paying off the mortgage and then living there after retirement with nothing more to pay except utility bills. Or you can move to a smaller place and make money on the deal, also enabling you to retire easily.
It’s an Investment
When you buy a property you are investing your money. If you can get good mortgage broker advice about rates and deals, you will make even more money through your purchase of a property. Every month you are paying off a little more of your mortgage, and every month, house prices will be rising a little (although they may also fall, which is why you should be thinking long term rather than short term – over the term of your mortgage, the price is going to have gone up overall). In essence, this means you should be able to make money on your property.
The more work you do on it, the more improvements you make, and the longer you stay there, the more money you will make. When you rent, you are just paying the landlord, and you aren’t making any money at all.