The bank offered a surprisingly low rate, and I looked at my FIRE research and thought, "Eh I can probably beat that in the market" and so the money that would have been frozen in the house (if I had bought in cash) is growing in index funds, hopefully faster than the mortgage is consuming it.
It's fucking weird. I think all these are true at once:
- Renting is not inherently bad
- A force is slanting the market away from "rent" and towards "buy"
- Too many people have an emotional stake in home ownership as its own end, and they would be better off seeing it as a tradeoff made coldly.
- Because the market has been slanted so badly for so long, these people are correct, but for the wrong reasons. They'll say that renting is throwing money away, because you don't get equity, but they won't say that equity is also throwing money away because of opportunity cost. They have never lived in a market where renting was actually allowed to compete with buying.
- Part of the reason buying is favorable might simply be that it's a proxy for credit score and wealth, and anyone making a loan would give a cheaper rate to a wealthier person. Since renters tend to have less money, they have to pay more in case they default. It's not fair, but I don't expect markets to be fair.
I think it's all an extended effect of the "White Flight". Having forgotten its racist roots, it's still got a strong emotional core of "Cities are full of crime and poor people. Renting is for poor people who are too dumb to save their money, and so they have it chipped away by rent." Or a leftist would say "Rent is inherently exploitative because landlords make money doing nothing."
It's a weird horseshoe when my far-right Baby Boomer parents agree with 2020 Twitter communists that home ownership is its own end, whereas I only see it as a means to an end.
The only time I rented an apartment, it was a fabulous experience. The only flaw was that it cost too much per square foot. And the ambient noise was high, because it was closer to the city core. Other than that, I really miss my old apartment.