Re: Renting vs Buying a house
I have always been contranian on this, but that is due to my DH and how he convinced us to buy our house.
When we were saving for our house, we decided that we would save until we had the entire amount to buy a house in cash. On paper it looked like owning a house made more sense because rent in our area was actually higher than what a mortgage payment would have been. But when we DH calculated all the extra expenses that you need to pay for on a house that you don't on an apartment, we figured that the house would actually cost us about $500 a month more than renting...now that we own and realize all the extras that have to be paid for, our estimate was probably conservative.
We took that money and and invested it and we able to pay for our house in cash after 10 years.
The downside is that we missed out on any equity increases over that time. The upside is that our house is completely paid for and we never had to worry about a mortgage payment.
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