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Comment by firtoz | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to paint the homeowner as an emotional person and the renter as the pragmatic, however both are roughly equally emotional.

As the rent prices keep rising, the renter in the end will end up spending much more money in the same duration as a mortgage, won't they? After a few years, when they end up owning more of the property, they can secure a good deal with better monthly mortgage payments.

They can also quite easily set up an AirBnB or get proper renters, if they want to have some flexibility, and in most cases the rent money will be more than the mortgage payments, so if they want to rent another place of their liking, the additional income will offset the monthly costs.

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its a unique math problem for the individual, but if you ARE buying, that likely means you have a down payment. so if you rent instead, you can then utilize that down payment for other investment opportunities.

this touches on something the author sorta hinted at, mortgage as a forced investment. Some buyers/renters won't view the down payment as an investment opportunity if they go the path of renting, they decide to rent and suddenly theyve got a new car loan and all new furniture or whatever, and that down payment is gone, instead of compounding year over year in an attempt to make renting a financial advantage

you can usually napkin math investing the down payment and it makes more financial sense to rent, but from a human perspective its just not gonna happen like that for so many people. they are gonna mess with that money instead.

How about the act of buying itself? Here where I live, you need to pay 12% on top of the home price simply for taxes and notary service. IMO it's one of the biggest obstacles and why most Swiss people prefer to rent.

Switzerland is a bit different from the US. From what I understand, property ownership entails paying the imputed rental value in taxes, which makes property ownership much less desirable. In the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible up to a certain limit, property taxes are deductible, and there's an amount of capital gains that's excluded from taxation when selling one's primary residence. Compared to other places in the world, the benefits of property ownership are pretty bonkers.

Wow that's quite unreasonable. In the UK it's not the case, there's some amounts to be paid if the property is in higher ranges of price, but there is a tier where that's zero.

As the owner builds equity it produces more and more drag on their finances, basically like a big cash pile.

The renter doesn't have to deal with this.

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