Your home is the most precious possession you could possibly achieve in your life. Destroy this and you destroy the middle class and the American Dream. Being secure in your own home IS the standard...is the American Dream.
I think you are always better off with a hard asset than not, whatever that asset is. If you own it, you have lower costs over time than renting it. It can also be converted to cash if need be. Cash is only good in stable economies. If the US economy goes Weimer, it wont matter how much cash you have as it will be essentially worthless.
The only exception I make is probably a vehicle. If you can get away without one, you’re probably better off financially.
Investors are now trying to interest retirees to buy several properties and rent them out.
Can’t have the public OWNING their homes when people have investment opportunities they are trying to make monthly income off of.
Totally makes sense to me.
Renting means someone still owns the property. Who does this person want owning it, government?
Several decades ago, a couple of my nutty sisters tried to convince my elderly mom to sell her house and just rent an apartment. I told my mom that was nuts, because even if she could afford the rent then, it would continually go up beyond her ability to pay. Years later, the house sold for many times what it was worth back then. Renting is okay while you're saving up for a down payment on a home, other than that it's money down the drain.
A house should be used as a home by its builder and owner, and houses do degrade and physically depreciate. There is something pathological about an economy that promotes disproportionate inflation of real property prices without real and substantial improvements. It’s only another fraud for getting money without doing real work.
I do own a house. But it in no way represents any form of “American Dream” to me. It is a house.
In my thought if a house is the “American Dream” and I achieve it at age 25 or 30 or 35 then I am going to have a pretty bored life for the next 30 - 40 years.
The “American Dream” is freedom. Freedom to choose, freedom to live, to pursue and achieve whatever it is I desire......
There is a certain permanence to that, a certain commitment, and if you aren't lucky enough to find a place that you're perfectly happy to contemplate being removed from wearing a toe tag, then perhaps the freedom of impermanence is more attractive. But if you happen to be determined and lucky enough to have what I do, that cabin in the forest on a lake overlooking a mountain, paid for by a lifetime of labor and with deed in hand, beholden to no one but a grasping state for taxes it routinely misspends...that's another issue...if you are in that position there is nothing in the world like owning a home. It's called a "dream" for a reason.
The author has the freedom to depart and put down new roots. I have the freedom to do what I wish with what is mine. Both have strictures preventing them from being labeled true "freedom" but I think I prefer the latter. If the author prefers the former, God bless him.
Owning a home is losing its appeal for me that’s for sure, in part because you could lose it through asset forfeiture just because some crooked bureaucratic government thief or vindictive leftist politician decides to snap his fingers and take it. No court need be involved.
There just isn’t as much financial security in owning a home as there used to be.
At least in the old days, if the market were falling, you could sell it and get out.
Now you could lose it in the blink of an eye.
Of course, you could always lose a house in the blink of an eye in the past as well (fire, flood, tornado, etc.), but now such loss is significantly more likely, what with every thieving bureaucrat in the country eyeing it as though it were some tasty morsel just waiting to be snapped up. And don’t think it isn’t going to get worse. It’s BEEN getting worse.
Some of us are getting the impression that you might as well just sit on a big bag of money on some empty lot somewhere.
Maybe I should just get a bunker instead.
Renting may seem appealing until you have a place you really enjoy living in and the landlord says you have to leave.
If the author means owning a home with a mortgage I can agree with him.Even though we truly never really own our home,even after the mortgage is burned.Because local property taxes will eat you alive especially if you have an irresponsible liberal government.
$100,000 House
$300.000 After paying off mortgage.
$60,000 Est. Accumulated property tax.
$30,000 Est. Accumulated property insurance
$100,000 Est. Accumulated Maintenance and repair.
$490.000 Est. Accumulated cost Over 30 years.
If your lucky maybe 20 years rent free $240,000
50 years of rent at $1000 mo. $600,000
This will probably be looked at as way off both ways.
The vast majority of people who have become wealthy in America have done so by owning real estate. Of course you can buy in too high in a bubble, but for everyone who loses out when a bubble bursts someone gets rich picking up the pieces. And ultimately everyone needs a place to live.
If the writer longs for a rented apartment, he’s certainly free to pursue it. Of course you lay down your resources and believe. We do that every day. Life presents risks on a regular basis. We either accept those risks and make strides or we stay in a risk-averse little bubble and cling to what’s perceived to be safe and guaranteed.
I had a thought; look at what has happened in Europe, specifically Germany. It has been reported that there are those who live in government owned houses, flats, etc. and rent them from the local government summarily to get out and move along because the ‘Muslim immigrants’ needed those place to live in.
Doing that if the occupant ‘owned’ the house would have been a lot more difficult that it was since the occupant only rented the place or more probably lived there ‘welfare system’.
The problem today is that most "homeowners" don't really own a home. They own a mortgage.
Owning your home is a great good.
Living in a home owned by the bank via mortgage is a great evil.
Don’t confuse the two.