I once sold my house and started renting a house instead. This raised quite a few eyebrows and led to questions about renting vs buying from nearly everyone.
I even had several people tell me that I was making a stupid mistake.
I wasn’t surprised, though. Many people believe the myth that if you are renting a home you don’t know how to manage your money and that buying is always better, no matter what.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sometimes buying can be the better decision, but there are times when renting can fit a person’s situation better.
While we loved owning our last home and there were many positives, buying a house last year would have been a huge hassle and a mistake for us.
Below are the many reasons why I’m happy we decided to rent our last home, but I’ve also included the reasons why we’re happy to eventually own our next one. Hopefully my opinion of renting vs buying below will help you decide what you should do. Everyone’s situation is different, so there is no right or wrong answer.
We moved to a new area where we didn’t know anyone.
One of the main reasons for why we decided to rent our last home is because we did not know if we would love our new location. We picked a random place in the United States that we had only visited for a few days, and we had no friends or family there.
So, we really had no idea what we would think of it.
Buying a house in an area you don’t know well, especially if you aren’t forced to move there, doesn’t make much sense to me. This could have been a disaster for us, because we could have actually ended up hating where we were living, and had we bought we would have felt stuck.
That is not a situation I wanted to be in, especially since we did not have to. This is one big positive of being location independent since we can choose exactly where we want to live, and now we have the ability to take our time and make sure we’re making the right decision.
We knew we were going to move again.
When we decided to move to Colorado, we kind of knew that we would move at least one more time before we settled down.
Well, I’m glad we didn’t buy, because we were right.
We LOVED Fruita, Colorado, but our situation changed and now we are traveling full-time for at least the next few years. Had we bought we would have wasted a lot of money and time.
We didn’t want to deal with the hassle of homeownership for such a short amount of time.
Since we knew we weren’t going to stay put for more than a year, we did not want to go through the hassle of buying a home and dealing with all of the time that goes into that.
One great thing about renting is that if something happens that is out of your control, such as crazy weather or something needing to be replaced/repaired, all you have to do is call your landlord.
Of course, you still want to take good care of everything. And, as everyone knows, homeownership can be stressful, because you never know what expenses may arise.
There are many other possible costs that go into homeownership, such as closing costs, a down payment, monthly mortgage payments, property taxes, lawn care, insurance, HOA fees, maintenance costs, and more.
As a renter, all you have to do is pay the rent each month. You don’t need to have an extra padded emergency fund for home repairs, because that is not your responsibility (unless you break something on your own, of course).
And, this is another reason for why renting for the past year was such a great decision for us. We didn’t want any homeownership stress in our lives.
Eventually, we do want to buy a home again.
In the future, we 100% see ourselves owning again. We’re not sure where it will be located or when we will start looking, but we know it will happen eventually.
There are many reasons why we want to own again.
- We want a forever place.
- We don’t want to deal with leases or finding rentals.
- We want to pay off a home and have no mortgage (yes, I know we will still have other costs).
- We want a place to call “home.”
- We don’t want a landlord (don’t get me wrong, our last landlord was great).
What do you think of the renting vs buying debate?
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