4 Perks To Buying Your Home Over Renting

4 Perks To Buying Your Home Over Renting

Have you ever been dreaming about your ideal place, only to be shocked back to reality from hearing the clatter of your neighbour’s newest home renovation project? There is something quite comforting about having your own space. However, is buying really much better than renting? Let’s look at discuss the pros of buying your own home.

1. Financial Investment: Building Equity over Time

Third, and most importantly, buying a home is an investment. Look at it this way. Every month when you pay your mortgage you put a little bit of money into a jar and, unlike that other jar you artfully used for saving rent money, this one earns as it grows. Rent expenditures are like blowing cash into the wind and never seeing it again. But with every mortgage payment you make, your equity grows and grows and grows. You are paying yourself, kind of.

A friend of mine who recently bought her first house would say, young and enthusiastic: ‘Renting is just lining someone else’s pockets!’ Now she’s lined her own pockets with a place of her own, and in the process has helped herself to the next rung of the property ladder.

2. Creative Freedom: Make It Your Own

Remember those neon pink bedroom walls you coveted as a teen? Or perhaps now you dream of a home office to rival a cosy den instead of a cubicle-style workplace. When you own a home, the only person you need to ask for permission to decorate is yourself. Well, yourself and your partner if you don’t want to live the rest of your days on the couch!

With a home of your own, things could change: it means you can paint, renovate and decorate to your heart’s content (nothing short of red velvet walls unless that is your thing?) I remember them, my first home. Firstly, getting the keys. Two of them. Secondly, the anxious counting out of the money and the trepidation while the landlady filled out the tenancy agreement, piece of paper with my name in shaky scrawls and theirs in immaculate writing, a marker of the difference in power. With a home of your own, things could change: it means you can paint, renovate and decorate to your heart’s content (nothing short of red velvet walls unless that is your thing?) For me, it opened my eyes; one wall painted a deep, deep sea blue (something which could have horrified my original landlords, I am sure!).

3. Stability and Security: Settling In without Surprises

If you’re renting, especially, there’s a weird kind of uncertainty. A lease comes to an end, a landlord decides to sell up, or maybe just to raise the rent beyond what you can afford. Buy a home, and a fixed-rate mortgage gives you a probabilistic payment that’s exactly the same every month.

My god, there is something in knowing where you are going to live for the next five, 10, 20 years. Don’t we all want a bit of that stability? Especially if you have kids in school, or you are thinking about having a family. Stability allows you to avoid a bunch of things you really don’t want and gives you that simple, calming sense of equilibrium.

4. Long-Term Savings: Avoiding Rising Rent

Ever notice how rent keeps climbing every year? Owning a home can be cheaper in the long run – if you have the cash for the downpayment plus closing costs. Those are the big expenses up front.

But also a certain thrill at the knowledge that, once your mortgage is paid off, you’ll have very little living to pay for. A house, no payments!

So, are you ready to stop paying rent and holding onto those rent receipts and start using a key to a place that you own? There are some downsides to buying a house, but there are many more advantages to owning than inconveniences to renting. Where do you see yourself 10 years from now? Owning a home a part of the picture? If so, perhaps it’s time you started looking for that house. After all, don’t you deserve to invest in yourself?

What’s holding you back from potentially making the single best (and most difficult) choice of your life?