Originally Posted by Roody
Any investment with a payoff means you must assume risks. The riskier the investment the greater the payoff. Period.
Actually that's not quite accurate - riskier investments have greater
potential returns, at the same time they have a greater potential for loss - that's why they're risky. (I was a securities-licensed financial advisor in a previous life.)
Originally Posted by FXjohn
By the way, paying rent is simply flushing money down the toilet.
If you think of the way a house appreciates, vs flushing the money in rent, it is a sizeable sum.
If I flush money down the toilet, all I have is a freshly flushed (and probably clogged) toilet. When I pay my rent each month, I am securing another 30 days of four walls and a roof, plus 24-hour maintenance service, and (in my case) heat, lights, running water, and furniture. Some of the rent must necessarily go towards the landlord's overhead like property taxes, maintenance, etc - but I don't have to deal with any of that, and what I pay is much less than if it were my personal responsibility to pay those things on a property I own.
The anti-renting home owners posting here are
still ignoring the fact that a house is not a viable investment unless and until you receive a return on the money you put into it. (Arguably, if you get peace of mind from owning, if you take pride in maintaining a nice yard, etc, that could be called a return, but certainly not a monetary one.) Equity is an often-misunderstood concept. "Renting is a waste of money, owning is an investment" is the line used by lenders, realtors, home builders - all the people who stand to profit from home sales - and it is far too widely and blindly accepted. Not enough people question this logic, think it through to try to discover how buying a home could be an investment. So your house is now "worth" X times as much as when you bought it? Great, can you buy groceries with that worth? Can you pay a doctor's bill? Can you go out for dinner and a movie on your house's value? (Yes, but you have to take out a loan against your house.) No matter how much "value" your house has gained or lost, none of it is realized until you sell the house. Then you are starting over - buy another house, or rent?
If you prefer to own rather than rent, that's great - I hope it works for you. But don't condem renting outright, especially not by using specious arguments that you've been fed by those who have profited from your ownership. This harks back to the discussion in the thread regarding car-free living being a threat to some people - you seem overly defensive of your home ownership. Could it be because you are insecure as to whether you've made the right choice after all, or because the arguments for it that you have been supplied with don't ring true when you stop to think about them?