Owning a house has the advantage that, even in extreme contingencies, you will still have your Maslovian need for shelter under control. Same reason someone would eagerly trade gold for an equal weight of grain in a sufficiently severe famine.
This is true if you actually completely own your house. However, many “homeowners” don’t; they have mortgages which they are not yet in a position to pay off completely. Given sufficiently extreme contingencies (which needn’t, actually, be all that extreme) they could find themselves without shelter as easily as their renting peers.
Paying the mortgage involves a marginal step toward that desirable condition of true homeownership in a way that rent does not. Essentially, a mortage is rent + a commitment to investing part of your income every month, which many people would not otherwise have the willpower to do.
Yes, the structure of a home mortgage loan helps someone save when they might not have otherwise. But your original comment was that home ownership was helpful because it increased your security that you would have shelter—which is a different point.
If you lose your job and the mortgage has not been completely paid off, you are not in an appreciably better situation re: shelter if you own vs. rent. I suspect that the foreclosure process is more time consuming for the party trying to evict you than the landlord eviction procedures—but 1-3 months vs. 9-12 months* is probably not that useful a difference in the grand scheme of your life.
*These numbers are a guess, but I think the relative difference in time is roughly accurate.
Having three or four or twelve times as long to search for alternative sources of income can make an enormous difference in the grand scheme of your life.
Let’s say it’s 3 months for eviction, 9 months for foreclosure, and it takes six months of searching to obtain a new job. Someone who was renting would have to complete the second half of that search while homeless, a condition which brings with it many unpleasant, life-altering complications. Social capital must be burnt on preserving life and limb when it could have been spent to aid the search itself, or hoarded against future calamities.
Owning a house has the advantage that, even in extreme contingencies, you will still have your Maslovian need for shelter under control. Same reason someone would eagerly trade gold for an equal weight of grain in a sufficiently severe famine.
This is true if you actually completely own your house. However, many “homeowners” don’t; they have mortgages which they are not yet in a position to pay off completely. Given sufficiently extreme contingencies (which needn’t, actually, be all that extreme) they could find themselves without shelter as easily as their renting peers.
Paying the mortgage involves a marginal step toward that desirable condition of true homeownership in a way that rent does not. Essentially, a mortage is rent + a commitment to investing part of your income every month, which many people would not otherwise have the willpower to do.
Yes, the structure of a home mortgage loan helps someone save when they might not have otherwise. But your original comment was that home ownership was helpful because it increased your security that you would have shelter—which is a different point.
If you lose your job and the mortgage has not been completely paid off, you are not in an appreciably better situation re: shelter if you own vs. rent. I suspect that the foreclosure process is more time consuming for the party trying to evict you than the landlord eviction procedures—but 1-3 months vs. 9-12 months* is probably not that useful a difference in the grand scheme of your life.
*These numbers are a guess, but I think the relative difference in time is roughly accurate.
Having three or four or twelve times as long to search for alternative sources of income can make an enormous difference in the grand scheme of your life.
Let’s say it’s 3 months for eviction, 9 months for foreclosure, and it takes six months of searching to obtain a new job. Someone who was renting would have to complete the second half of that search while homeless, a condition which brings with it many unpleasant, life-altering complications. Social capital must be burnt on preserving life and limb when it could have been spent to aid the search itself, or hoarded against future calamities.
How important the difference between 1-3 months and 9-12 months is in that scenario depends a lot on how long it takes me to find another job.