You’ve started a family, and you’re looking for your first family home. Lots of options present themselves, and you’re in a fortunate position to survey them all. Primarily, one option that sticks out is whether or not you should rent a house. Renting a family home can have a few advantages, with the main one being that you have more freedom to move around. If you don’t like where you currently live, you can move elsewhere with less hassle. This is a guest post.
Reasons why renting a home may not be for you
Nevertheless, it certainly comes with more drawbacks than buying a home. If possible, every family should buy a home instead of renting one. Why? Well, let’s look at some key talking points:
Renting offers less stability
As mentioned above, some people see a lack of stability as a benefit. However, it’s mostly a big disadvantage. If you rent a home, you have no control over what happens to it. What if the landlord decides they want to take it off the rental market? You have no say in this, so you’ll be kicked out in a few months. Now, you have a young family and a frantic panic to find somewhere new to live. What if your kids are in school and happily settled? You need to find a suitable home in the same area, or else they’ll have to move schools!
This sort of thing happens all the time as you have no stability when renting a home. In contrast, buying a family home means you are solidly grounded in one place. Provided you keep up with mortgage payments, nobody can force you out of your house! To be honest, it just gives you one less nagging worry at the back of your mind.
Renting limits your options
Run a little experiment and search for properties to rent in your area. You’ll find a fair few but look at the houses for sale as well. All of a sudden, you notice a few differences in the searches. For one, the rental search mainly shows apartments or townhouses. You will rarely find detached homes up for rent. Secondly, the first search won’t throw up any brand new houses. Again, these are rarely put up for rent as most people buy a new house.
Therefore, you could argue that your options are limited when you rent a home. This point is driven home even further when you consider what happens after buying a house. As the owner, you’re free to make as many changes as you like. This could mean you instantly build an extension or alter the way a certain room likes. In essence, you can tweak the property to match your vision of a dream home. With rentals, you can do no such thing. You rent a home, and you get what you’re given. So, the options are even more limited as you will find it harder to rent a ‘dream home.’ When you buy, you have more houses to choose from, more scope to improve them, allowing you to live in your dream property.
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Renting may feel like a waste of money
Now, this is the main disadvantage of renting a family home. For want of a better phrase, you’re basically flushing money down the toilet. Every month, you pay someone for the privilege of living on their property. What do you actually gain out of paying rent? Nothing. In fact, think about it this way: you’re paying for someone else’s mortgage! The money you spend on rent gets sent to the back by the landlord and slowly clears their mortgage while you get nothing in return. If you buy a house, you’ll at least spend money on your own mortgage!
Secondly, think about the financial benefit of buying a home. You get your hands on an asset that will grow in value. You can live there for decades, then sell the house for a nifty profit when you retire. Or, you can pass it down to your children, and they pass it down to theirs, etc. There are more options, which is why your money isn’t wasted when you buy a house. Yes, you spend a lot over the years, but it’s all worth it in the end. With renting, you can spend thousands a year, and your finances aren’t going to see any benefits.
Ideally, everyone should look to buy a family home. If this isn’t possible right now, that’s fine. Still, you should try to save up every month as renting may be worse for your finances in the long term.