We have been watching the economic situation progress for some time now, trying to determine what would be our best steps for the future; we weren’t sure whether we should consider another relocation, or whether we should settle in here — and if the latter, whether to keep renting or try to buy. My getting the job I have now steered us in the direction of staying put, unless I am relocated which is pretty unlikely. So that brought up the rent vs. buy question again.

The housing crash could potentially have a silver lining, in that people who otherwise could not have afforded a house are seeing the prices come back down into the affordable range, and in some areas of NC where economic factors have hit particularly hard there are some real bargains to be found. So lately we’ve been looking hard at whether it would be a good time for us to try and buy a house.

Ten years ago, I had this ‘money pit‘ of a Mercury Sable that required some expensive repair or another at least once a month. I remember saying to myself each time, “yeah, but at least I don’t have a car payment.” The last straw for the Sable was a blown head gasket, and when I sat and added up all the bills from the years I had it, I realized I had paid an average of three hundred dollars a month in repairs, and paid for the used car twice over. I could have been putting that money towards a car payment instead, and had the benefit of a vehicle I could trust to get from point A to B instead of worrying each trip would end with me stranded and waiting for a tow truck.

This morning, I was thinking back to that car situation, and contrasting it with our current rent vs. buy dilemma. I got the idea to add up all the rent we have paid in the last ten years, since we left NC for Arizona back in May of ’99. The total, which doesn’t include the non-refundable pet deposits we paid in some places (but does include the deposit the first landlord cheated us out of when we moved out) comes to over seventy thousand dollars. That’s pretty sobering.

Now, on one hand this doesn’t account for the above-mentioned pet deposits, or the improvements we made to some of these places to make them ‘home’ for us, like shelving and gardens, nor could I think of any way to factor in the fact that, because of the difficulties finding rentals that allow animals, we wound up living in places where we would not have chosen to be if we’d had an alternative. I do recognize that, on the other hand, there were financial hardships that occurred in some of these places that would have been our responsibility if we had owned rather than rented — like the new roof our current house just had to have installed. I’d like to think that, if we’d been buying a house, we would have been able to avoid getting into some of these disasters (we could see when we rented this house, for instance, that it needed a new roof among many other things) but we do recognize that home ownership comes with risks and responsibilities.

Fear of facing unexpected bills we might not be able to cover (like a new roof, or a blown furnace) has been one of the things that has kept us from really thinking about home ownership. There’s also the fact that it means we’d have to pick a spot and plant our ‘gypsy’ feet in it long term, and that’s a bit scary too. On the other hand, not being able to really put in a proper garden, or repaint, or do many of the other little things that makes a home a home gets frustrating.

I can go in mental circles on this all day. What if we bought a house and then I was laid off? On the other hand, what if our landlord decided to sell this house one day, and we had to suddenly move? I guess, either way you look at it, you can be a few short steps from homeless if things go bad. The frightening thing is that with the financial situation in the country the way it is right now, it’s hard to predict how bad they might get. So we continue to watch, and ponder, and try and gauge what the best decision would be.

Over seventy thousand dollars in rent. Wow. I am actually not sure if it was a good thing to crunch those numbers, as it was a lot less disturbing when it was just some vague nebulous concept.