And now for a bit of a departure or something completely different, which ever you prefer…

With all the depressing stuff going on right now, I’m going to blog about something a bit more down-to-Earth. Well, for us Americans, anyway. I’m going to blog about home ownership.

I’m an adult out in the world now for quite a few years. I’ve been renting my home for all of that time. I’ve lived in quite a few apartments since I moved out of my folks’ house back in suburban New Jersey all those years ago. I’ve had many friends buy houses along the way and most seem to agree that owning a house is awesome.

But me? I don’t get it. I remember when my old boss refinanced his house. He got a bucket of money, but agreed to pay it back over the span of thirty years! I can’t imagine what I’ll be doing in thirty years let alone how I’d pay for a mortgage for all of those years.

The benefits of owning a home also seem to be somewhat sparse. Sure, you get to own land that you have ultimate domain over, but–well, wait a minute, you don’t really have ultimate domain over your land, anymore. I just blogged the other day on the Supreme Court saying that barring any state laws, it was legal for cities to seize land owned by an individual if the land will supply jobs or tax revenue. Previously, the fifth ammendment said it could be done only if the land were for “public use”. Of course, you get compensated, but the point is, what’s the benefit of the mortgage if you’re not really in ultimate control?

Then there’s the other aspect of having a mortgage and that’s the fact that you don’t really own the house/land you buy until you pay that mortgage off. In fact, I seem to remember reading somewhere that if the bank suddenly needs the funds, they can demand them immediately from you and if you can’t pay up, they get the house.

Let’s put all of those high-end financing/mortgage/brainiac stuff aside and deal with the practical everyday stuff.

Now, if you own a home, you’re responsible for it’s upkeep, right? If the gutter needs cleaning it’s you who has to clean it. You can pay someone else, but it’s still you’re responsibility. Not so when you rent. Sure, your landlord may be lousy at getting your gutters cleaned quickly, but it’s his or her deal, not yours.

What happens if your refrigerator dies and your food is rotting when you own your home? You’ve got to go buy a new fridge. If it happens to me, I call my building manager and he’ll get me a new one. This happened with our water heater a couple years ago. He had a new one for us within a day.

So, in the end, between having to maintain your place yourself and having to commit to a multi-decade mortgage, I just don’t see the advantages of owning. Sure, renting isn’t always great either–we don’t have much control over doing things like knocking down a wall or putting in new windows. In theory the building owner could sell the place off to someone who wants to tear the place down and build a new building in it’s place. We’d lose our home, then, which would truly suck–but how often does that happen?

It happens probably more often than cities seizing land, but still, it hasn’t happened once in the many apartments I’ve lived in.

So, still, I don’t see the advantage of owning and the idea of that 30-year mortgage still freaks me out…