After many years of renting, I became a homeowner earlier this year (and made it through my 36th moving day). It’s something I dreamed about for a few years before making it happen, but even I can admit that renting comes with certain perks I’ll miss now that I have a home loan to pay off.
Here’s a closer look at five reasons renting can be better than owning a home.
1. Maintenance isn’t your responsibility
Honestly, not having to worry about maintaining a home is probably the biggest perk of renting, other than the cost factor. There are degrees of maintenance — if you own a condo, for example, you’ll generally only need to directly worry about the inside of your unit (and pay a condo fee for maintenance costs for the outside of the building and common areas).
But buy a single-family home like I just did, and you’ll need to maintain the inside and outside, along with the lawn, the driveway, the sidewalk in front, and any outbuildings you might have, like a detached garage. If anything goes wrong with any of it, it’ll be on you to pay for it and arrange to have it fixed.
Routine maintenance also costs money — to use me as an example, I’m looking at forking over $200 to an HVAC technician for a seasonal check of my boiler and radiators. That’s not a ton of money, and I have an emergency fund, but if I rented, I wouldn’t be responsible for that cost.
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2. Neither are property taxes
Property taxes are one aspect of homeownership that has the potential to be extremely expensive over time, and renters don’t have to worry about them. According to a CoreLogic study, median property taxes on single-family homes rose by 25% between 2019 and 2023, thanks to those higher home values in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This statistic should give you pause, especially if you’re currently living in the Northeast, where we have the highest property taxes in the nation. In 2023, New Jersey (the state with the highest property taxes) homeowners had a median tax bill of $8,498. Ouch.
3. Your upfront costs are far cheaper
Want to buy a house? You’ll need a fair bit of money to do so — because you’ll be covering a down payment (which need not be 20%, but many people aim to put that much down), closing costs, and other incidental expenses, like a home inspection or appraisal.
But if you’re looking for a new rental, on the other hand, your upfront costs are quite minimal. When I signed a new lease all those times, I was only required to pay a security deposit equal to a month of rent (which would be returned to me when I moved out, if the home was deemed to be in the same condition as when I moved in), and pay my first month of rent before moving in.
4. Breaking a lease is easier than selling a home
If you need to move, say, for a new job (which has been a major reason I’ve moved around so much), doing so as a renter is easier and cheaper than doing so as a homeowner.
I got lucky a handful of times when I moved as a renter, and was outside of an established lease period (also known as being month to month). In these cases, when I had to move out, all I needed to do was call my landlord and give them 30 days’ notice. If I had an active lease, I likely would’ve needed to pay a few months’ rent to be free.
But if I’d had to sell a house, I would have hired a real estate agent (a real estate agent will market and price a home to help you sell it faster) and potentially put cash into repairs and painting to make the house more appealing to buyers.
Plus, there’s no guarantee that a home will sell in a timely fashion or that you’ll get enough for it to entirely pay off what’s left of the mortgage and make a profit. The larger economic factors of the housing market are outside of your control — for example, buyers have been a bit leery of higher mortgage rates the last few years.
Selling a house is expensive, and it’s just one more complication to the already-stressful and expensive process of moving.
5. Included amenities can be pretty sweet
Depending on the type of place you’re renting, you might get to enjoy perks and amenities included in the cost of your rent. I once lived in an apartment complex that covered the cost of cable TV for residents (this was over a decade ago, before streaming services were so ubiquitous).
Some apartment buildings and complexes have gyms and even swimming pools. And others have common areas you can reserve for parties or business centers with computers and printers. If you want any of these perks for a home you own, you’ll have to pay for them separately or as part of an HOA.
If homeownership isn’t right for you, either now or in the future, that’s perfectly fine. Don’t let anyone shame you for it — renting isn’t “throwing money away,” it’s paying for a place to live, and enjoying perks like lower costs and flexibility.
