Two couples share contrasting reasons why they decided against property purchase and opted for lifetime renting.
Before we begin, we would like to point out that this is their choice. They clarified that they are not preaching and that their lifestyle/choices will not work for everyone. So we anticipate your disagreement, but we request that you not be in a hurry to criticise them.
1. A home is where the family is. When I left my wife to work in another country for a few months, I realised that home is wherever your family is. Meaning we do not need to call a particular location our home. We can move anywhere we like; as long as the family stays together, that is our home.
I used to live in a big joint family, and I have seen many uncles and aunts grow old and die. For happiness in the evening of our lives, we only need ample money and love and affection from relatives. See: Why we must invest in relationships for successful retirement planning.
For the ample money, proper retirement planning is essential, for which we used Freefincal’s robo-advisory tool. For the relationships part, in today’s day and age, we can only rely on our spouse and children for physical and moral support in the event of sickness.
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We have no control over where our children study and work. Their passion and circumstances decide that. Our son works in New Delhi while we are in Bangalore. We soon plan to relocate close to him – either in a rented apartment or retirement home.
We had planned this after he finished school and did his UG and PG in two different cities. So renting makes a lot of sense to us. More importantly, renting allowed us to invest more and build a strong corpus for my son’s future and our retirement.
Buying a property only to leave it behind to stay with our son made no sense. Thankfully our son was academically strong, so we knew at an early stage that he is likley to go places (literally!). So we decided not to buy a property and instead focussed on investing. We make no claims that this is the best thing to do. Just that we did it. We also do not claim that this is the right choice for us. So far, it seems fitting. The future, as always, is uncertain.
2. Climate change! You might laugh reading this, but climate change has been a big worry for my wife and me. We believe that extreme weather events are going to dominate the news in the next ten years, and in ten after that, things are going to get much worse.
So we believe being a bit of a nomad is the way to go. Shift from a city where heavy rain, snow, or heat is expected, live for a few months elsewhere, etc. This may sound like paranoia to many of you, but we are convinced that rooted existence will be hard in the coming years. Maybe it will be a case of, we can run but not hide, but we would like to try this.
Naturally, we can afford to think this way only because we do not have kids and have no plans to have any. So it will not work for most others. Also, both our jobs are predominantly online, and when it is offline, it involves travel. So we are used to the nomad existence.
What do you think about these two contrasting reasons not to buy a home?