renting

What is the True Cost of Owning a Home?

 

Cost of owning a home

 

In the prior post of this series, Should You Rent or Buy a Home?, I wrote about the pros and cons of home ownership vs renting. It is important to start here when you are considering whether to rent or buy a home. The decision of where to live should not be solely made on emotional attachment or financial considerations. It should be made up of both if you are planning on living in a home for many years. You want to love where you live.

This week’s post will be focused more on the financial considerations of renting vs buying a home. More specifically, what is the true cost of owning a home. If you have never correctly run these numbers before, the data may surprise you.

This week I will give you an example of what the true costs of owning a home are. In next week’s post, What You Don’t Know About Renting vs. Buying a Home Can Cost You Money, I will compare some real life examples of costs of renting vs buying a home.

I hope I am able to forever change how you look at buying the home you want to live in.

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What You Don’t Know About Renting vs Buying a Home Can Cost You Money

 

renting vs buying a home

“If you rent a home, it is an expense. When you buy a home, it is an expense. If you buy a home and rent it out to a third party, it becomes an investment. A better way to put it is that when you are renting, you rent from a landlord. When you buy a home to live in, you are renting from yourself.”

This is the third and last post of this series. The first post, Should You Rent or Buy a Home?, examined what factors you should consider when renting vs buying a home. The second post, What is the True Cost of Owning a Home? , examined the true cost of owning a home. In this final post I will be examining whether it makes sense to rent or buy a home. Numbers don’t lie, so lets look at some real numbers.

There are many calculators available online to help you figure out whether to rent or own. Unfortunately very few include the true costs of owning a home in their calculations. If you read the prior post, you will have some understanding of what was left out and how to calculate it. The math in post this will be relatively straight forward and a bit more fun.

I will be showing you some examples of real properties that I have found in the past year to illustrate this secret that very few people know. Whether you are a real estate investor or looking to buy a home to live in, you will want to know this secret.

“you are paying someone else’s mortgage, so why don’t you pay your own?”

There is a myth out there that when you rent, “you are paying someone else’s mortgage, so why don’t you pay your own?” This is a farce. It doesn’t matter whose mortgage you are paying, what matters is your costs to live in that home.  No matter where you live, your cost to live in that home is an expense. If you rent, you pay rent to a land lord. If you own, you pay a mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. There are costs for both options. Unless you live in a tent you will be paying for a home either way.

The reason many people think that owning is better than renting is that they equate owing a home as an investment rather than an expense. Once they make the realization that it is…

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