My husband and I have been renting for a long time, but we did own a home briefly. We have only spent about three years as homeowners, but we have spent about 13 years as renters. We have rented condos, apartments, townhouses, and single family homes, and we have learned a lot along the way, so I want to share some of our first hand experience with renting, and also some things we learned from owning.
Although we loved our home while we had it, we did not really enjoy being homeowners, and I think we both agree that buying was a bad idea for us and we regretted it. After struggling for many years to be able to buy a home again, because we felt as though it was what we were *supposed to do*, we have recently decided that we are just fine with renting, and we may never buy a home again. But I’ll explain more about that in another post…
I thought I might spend some time thinking about what we have learned from all of those experiences, both renting and owning, and put it together into a series of posts about our perspective on whether you should rent or buy. There are a lot of things that need to be considered, and we have learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Personally, I get so tired of hearing everyone say that buying is always the way to go without taking into consideration differing circumstances! Seems everyone always thinks they have all the answers and what works for them will work for everyone, but I don’t believe that anyone can ever tell you what is right for you, only you know what your own finances, needs, preferences, and even personality will allow you to do. Ultimately, the choice is yours and you should never do anything just because everyone else does. All I can do is tell you of our own experiences, but I hope that our experiences will be helpful to someone trying to make such an important decision.
In my next few posts I will go through our experience with home ownership, why we prefer renting, and then I’ll throw in some tips and some lessons learned when it comes to renting.