What The Fuck is wrong with Renting?

We should be ok with renting our homes and using our capital in other ways.

More people are going to have to get used to this idea.

There is nothing wrong with renting your home. Even if it is FOREVER.

You can make as much money or more than someone who owns a home while being a tenant.

If I was younger, if I didn’t have kids and my roots weren’t deeply rooted here in Toronto,

I would be out of here.

My wife and I should have left 20 years ago. In a fact in hindsight we never should have came back to Toronto from our honeymoon in Hawaii.

Now I’m stuck here in this frozen, expensive, banana republic, writing a fucking Sub Stack article, in a city where I have to work 10 times as hard to own a home as some other asshole in Calgary, Saskatoon or Trois Rivieres.

Dude. What the fuck, Bro?

But, What The Fuck is wrong with renting?

Why do I have to own the home I live in?

Apparently Real Estate doesn’t always and only go up. An expensive lesson many owners will learn very soon. If they haven’t already.

But the renters won’t. That’s for sure.

The renters are sitting pretty, drinking their lattes, unfazed and likely completely ignorant of what is going on in the economy around them.

Suck on that one.

If you are able to rent a nice place in a nice area that you are happy to live in and you can use your capital in other ways to get the same or similar returns then what is the problem?

Why the stigma around renting?

It’s a lifestyle?

My wife and I have chosen to rent multiple times during our relationship so far.

The first time we decided to rent an apartment when we first got married. We had purchased a new home in Thornhill Woods in 1999 or 2000. We paid $286k for a 1980 sq ft 3 bedroom SFH with a 1 car garage.

Of course our timing was off and the house was not going to be ready when we got married.

We chose to rent and keep our sanity, instead of living with one of our parents and saving more money. Thank God we did that.

It doesn’t always only have to be about money.

The second time we chose to rent was after I had my ass handed to me by the Real Estate market in 2008-2009. We chose to rent a much nicer house in a much nicer area than we could have afforded to live in had we owned it or something similar.

We chose to “Piss our money away”

We could have bought a house instead. A crappy little house, in a shitty area just to “get back onto the property ladder”. We would have been miserable, Living in a tiny house, with one washroom, ugly old finishes. Everything falling apart. No yard. Disaster.

Our marriage would have likely ended in a divorce.

“Oh my god.” they said.

“What an idiot.” they said.

“Paying someone else mortgage down. Aren’t you in real estate? What a clown.” they said.

I decided that whatever capital I could save now was better used to build a business than it was to park in a house, hoping for appreciation.

I used the profits from the business to buy the house a few years later.

Some people make way more money owning a business and trading the stock market then they could have made owning their house over the same period. Sometimes, for some people it is one or the other. Some people make a bad decision based on what other people are telling them.

It doesn’t always only have to be about money.

Renting gives you a freedom. It allows you to care less. To worry less. To move around more. To live a different kind of lifestyle.

Of course renting has drawbacks as well. No one likes being told they have to move. Especially if it’s impossible to find a new place to live in the same area for the same price.

Most people would argue that they don’t like the fact that the landlords use shady tricks and tactics to raise the rents or kick them out. Of course these are very valid concerns. I have been the tenant who was asked to leave. The landlord was older and his family wanted to sell the house.

Tough shit princess.

Find a new place to live.

It could always be worse…

You could have bought a house in Toronto or Vancouver in January through March 2022.

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