[Coleroo]

Around here (mid south carolina) renting would have been more expensive than owning.... and I agree with the other post above - my home is more like "insurance" against personal fears.

My husband and I are now 24 and purchased our first home a year and a half ago. Its a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1150 sq foot ranch style on a halfacre of land in one of the only secluded private streets in this town. We're in a safe area too. We're only 2 miles from our state's booming capital city (columbia), with immediate access to everything we can think of we might need. Our mortgage is a 30 year fixed and payments are only $675 a month. Around here right now you can't rent ANYTHING safe for less than $800 a month (and thats usually a 2 bedroom price). We have a large yard, large patio house in the back, freedom to do whatever we want with the place, and assurance that our base mortgage price will not rise over the years. Taxes and home ownership are a drop it the bucket too (sc has a great low cost of living). We also have no home ownership fees.

We did research on all of our options for months - renting, apartments, trailers, everything and purchasing made the most sense. The way I see it, we could have "paid cheap rent" (interest) to the mortgage holder or we could have paid expensive rent to a landlord. (We HAD to live somewhere, right? Its not like I had the choice to invest the money in stocks instead.) The former will give us a paid for home by the time we're 53 (thats maximum - if we never pay anything else on principle) and equity... while the latter would take MORE money out of our pockets, rates would constantly rise, and in the end we will have nothing to show for it. Makes perfect financial sense to me. Not a dream, not an "investment".... just good financial sense for us. We plan on staying here for the long haul, so we could care less if the value rises to a million or falls to zero.

I see this article as a way to discourage people from getting in "over their heads" though and offer alternative ways of thinking for those who buy above their means or live in high price areas.