We rent a nice 4 bedroom SFH — with a private backyard — in North County, about 10 minutes from the beach. It’s not everything we want, but we make due because rent is significantly cheaper than buying the same house, even with 20-30% down.
Our landlord has spent about $15,000 on repairs & maintenance in the past 4 years (big mold problem before we moved in took up most of that). We’ve spent about $5,000 with the agreement that there will be no rent increases until mid-2009, at the earliest. We got a new shower, and even got to choose the tiles, shower door, grout color, etc. 🙂
We aren’t trying to profit from someone else’s misery, but we certainly won’t enslave ourselves to debt for 30 years just to give someone else a profit on a over-priced house.
I think a lot of posters aren’t bottom-feeders, as much as they are realists. It’s entirely possible we won’t have pensions or SS or healthcare available to us as current and preceding generations do, thus forcing us to save even more. There is no guarantee that housing prices will rise in perpetuity. What if the multi-decade expansionary credit cycle changes direction?
