Is it better to rent your home or own it?

There are many pros and cons to consider when looking to rent or own a house or a dwelling in general in my opinion. You have to look at a lot of different things when trying to decide whether you should rent or buy a home. I would tend to believe one of the biggest things would be price of course. Sometimes you can get a better monthly price on a place if you are paying off a mortgage as opposed to a lease where you are renting a place instead. As well usually when you are renting a home you can get a couple utilities included in on the rent and that might help to keep your overall costs down. It seems that if you want to save money you would go the route of renting. You also have to put into consideration that when you rent you're lease never ends. When you are buying home you have a set amount of payments to make and then the place you are living in is yours to keep. You have a mortgage and it will end unlike a rental agreement. A rental agreement will not end and you may face rent increases as well. With a mortgage your payment stays the same through the entire term of it. When you are done you have a home that is actually owned by you. When you are renting a place the home will never really be yours. In a house or condo where you are paying a mortgage you have the ability to make whatever renovations or alterations to the home as well. In a rental unit you cannot make any alterations without first asking the management company and they may not even allow such an alteration, depending on how big it is. There is one huge thing for me that would make me seriously consider buying a home over renting one and that is the ability to have a pet, especially a dog. I find it really hard to find a place to rent that will accept a dog without a large sum of money being paid upfront for a cleaning fee for having the pet there. At least in a home you're buying you don't have to worry about those fees or anything. Depending on where you're renting as well, you may not get the luxury of having your own fenced yard. With buying a home you can be assured you will have a fenced yard since you have the choice of where you end up living. I feel like for me personally, this is a very important thing to me, especially being a pet owner myself. In conclusion, I've tried to list some of the easiest and more well-thought of pros and cons when it comes to trying to consider which way to go when getting into a new home. Should you rent or should you buy? Only that can be answered by you. I hope that I have helped to offer up some things to think about! . . Thanks for allowing me to share! xx

OK you aksed for it..lol. i just bought a home 5 yrs ago and had been renting for many of years. My biggest concern is the maimtance on owning. If the roof leaks, the furnace quits working in the winter, find out you dont get along with your neighbors, plumbing and electrical problems. Do you have the money on hand to have these things repaired. If renting its the landlords problem to have them fixed. At least renting you can move out. There is a lot of things that need to be done to my house that i didnt know before i bought it. Now im looking at money for repairs that i realy could use on something else.

This is a great question. I wanted out of an apartment as soon as I could afford it, because I couldn't understand spending money each month on something that I'd never get any money for. Now, after 3 years of living in my home, I have it listed for $100,000 more than I bought it for. that is money that I can put towards a larger home, or invest it however I see fit. so, when you are writing your next rent check, think about where that money is going, and where you want to be in 5 years.

It's better to own. The cost of renting is more if compared as to the expense of buying one. That's how I see it. For now, it's my goal to have my own. I'm working for it up to middle of 2008.

I think that it is always better to own a house of our own if we have that much for a house. It is too expensive to rent a house. Besides as that is not your own house, you cannot fix it the way that you want. So I prefer to have a house of my own. And I do have a house of my own in my real life after working for so many years.

I rent now and I hate it. My land lord never does anything. We've had a pipe under our sink in the kitchen that has been leaking for a year now, the toilets are pretty much broken, a cupboard fell off the wall in the kitchen six months ago, and then there are a lot of other things, and she refuses to come over and work on it because she's an idiot. We're looking for find a home of our own in a reasonable price range. We need to get out.