Because rent is money that could be going toward owning a house. If I had the chance to move directly into my own home and skip renting, I sure as heck would have.
I've never owned, and given the amount of money my parents have put into renovating perfectly good homes (but ones that wouldn't sell as quickly if they hadn't renovated), I will probably never own.
Owning a house is great if you want to make it how you like. But the minute a pipe bursts or your bathtub backs up, you're going to wish you rented. All our drains backed up one day and we just called our landlord's maintenance man. He was out here the same afternoon, and when he couldn't fix it, he called his trusted plumber who came out at 8am the next day, which was a Saturday, to crawl underneath our apartment and replace all the pipes.
If it had been up to us, we wouldn't have known where to start! My boss agrees. He's owned a house once, and when it flooded thanks to Hurricane Katrina, he vowed never to own again, because they spent
weeks cleaning it up. Owning is great when times are good, but when times are bad, it's all on you. If you've never lived on your own, I highly recommend getting a few roommates and trying it out first, before you buy a house and having that be your introduction!
I disagree with almost everyone in this thread. Self-respect is important and if you're living in your parents' basement, you won't have it. You're an adult. Take the initiative and find a cheap place to rent, maybe with a friend you can split the costs with. If you can land even a mediocre-paying job, you can afford a couple hundred dollars in rent a month. If apartments aren't cheap enough where you are, move to an area where they are. Your parents might not encourage you to move out, because of empty-nest syndrome or because they haven't fully accepted you're a man, but you know it's wrong. Furthermore no one in their 20s has a house. And you don't need one until you have your own family, with a wife and kid. But that brings us to our next problem. NO, most women won't date a man who's living in his parents' basement. I'm sure some will disagree and talk about how true love can look past that blah blah blah, but just no. The sooner you move out, the better for you. It will be hard, but you will feel proud and will build your own life free of your parents. And yes, you will get ass.
I agree with that. Owning a house is tons of responsibility, but it also traps you. It really doesn't make sense to own unless you KNOW you're going to stay in that area for at least 5 years. I hate moving, and owning is SO much money up front, that I'd have to have a guarantee of 10 years.
You'd have to find a woman who's willing to stay exactly where you are for that long. For some couples, that's easy, but for others, it's not. I know a few couples who got married before going to graduate school, and all of them had to move for that.
And it'd be different if he were living at home indefinately with no plan of moving out. If it's a temporary situation then there's no real drag.
I agree with this. My fiancé lived with his parents (who live in the east bay) when he worked in San Francisco, because it really did not make ANY sense to drop $1500/month on an apartment in the city when he'd be working 80-hr weeks. Self-sufficient or not, when it's THAT amount of money for so little in return, how could you not live rent-free even if it's with your parents? He saved sooo much money that year.
It was definitely different for us though, because I still lived in SoCal so it was long-distance. Him living with his parents didn't cut down on sexy time for us.
But it wouldn't have made a difference if I was living with roommates closer to him anyway.
The average price in NJ for a home is 300k. I know when I watch HGTV and some homes in say Texas, and Georgia were 100k. What home can you get for 10k?
Detroit?
If we stayed here, we wouldn't be able to own a house in our entire lifetimes. Anything halfway decent is above half a mil, and we're talking 2-bdrm, so still pretty small.
