Renting is Throwing Money Away, Right? (2015)

With the implication that the ONLY costs of a house are PITI, insurance, and taxes. However, if you add in reasonable, even cheap values for yardwork/lawncare, roof depreciation and replacement, HVAC depreciation and replacement, and general refurbishment remodeling and replacement of interior surfaces, OP is losing a large amount of money per month. The gamble is, will OPs house appreciate in value more than OP is losing per month, or will OPs other investments made with 380 be able to keep up? OP can always walk away and mail the keys to the lender, of course, if it comes to that, so maybe extracting $400/month with the intent to foreclose when eventually necessary is a legit plan.

A lot of people treat normal household expenses as an unfair accident, as if replacing the old fashioned tank water heater every decade is some totally unpredictable meteor strike that should never be accounted for in the cost of ownership.

In general most models of home ownership hold water if the only expenses accounted for are annual or shorter term, but I spend roughly the same amount, maybe more, on average, of expenses of longer than annual duration. $15K every 15 years for a roof is not unpredictable meteor strike but is actually about $85/month. Built in dishwashers are designed to break down requiring replacement every three years, which isn't a disaster but is thirty bucks per month on average. A new 5K asphalt driveway every twenty years is not an unpredictable accident but is about $20/month. True, none of these are small bleeds are over $100/month or so, but the average house has well over a dozen of them. Figure about $1K to $2K per month of longer than annual term expenses.

Then there are remodeling costs. Its very difficult to sell a house with a 1970s kitchen. Most house kitchens seem to get remodeled every two decades for perhaps $25K each time. You can pretend that was an unpredictable uninsured natural disaster, but more realistically you need to save $105/month for the periodic kitchen remodel. Of course a stylish avocado color bathroom or shag carpet era living room will require similar amounts of money... The expense of "fashion" is around $500 per month for a typical house. You can do the elderly WWII or boomer thing and refuse to remodel your house, but the cost is coming out of the sales price eventually. Wood paneled shag carpet rec room in the basement ... people are going to make fun of stainless steel appliances and especially granite countertops the same way in 2030 or so, if not sooner.

There do exist weird pseudo-accidental problems. Planting a fast growing inappropriate tree in a dangerous location is the same thing as committing to spending $1K for a bonded insured tree service to chop it down and grind the stump. You can try to hand wave away that nobody could have known that cute little pine sprig on the property line could be a kilobuck liability a decade later, but uh, yeah, many people could tell that a big dead tree overhanging the neighbors house is going to be an expensive and entirely predictable problem, eventually.

That's not a true equivalency. Unless your loan has language or provisions for "mailing back the keys", doing so is an act of default and regardless of how well (or poorly) the lender(s) has/have hedged against the default you are breaking the agreement.

A real equivalency is stealing from walmart "because they can afford it". You shouldn't do that and you also shouldn't default on agreements you enter into.

Your cost to live there is the same as as the landlord's, except for 1. Landlord's profit 2. Mortgage transaction costs and 3. Efficiencies through shared expenses.

For #1, You have the power to shop around.

For #2, You want to find a place where the landlord has owned or plans to own for a long-time, so e.g. the realtor's fee has long since been amortized.

For #3, One larger, more efficient heater is better than a bunch of smaller ones. Same goes for insulation. Industrial appliances like washers and driers mean cheaper cost per use.

Optimizing the system is about balancing your landlord's fees for running the house against your own opportunity cost to run your house as a hobby, with two credits in your favor for shared resources and buried expenses like realtor's fees. If you're handy, or have a partner who can work from home, running the house as a hobby is easier. If you or all partners work out of the home, your non-work time is much more valuable and running the house as a hobby is much more difficult.