Why bother buying when you can rent

This article is so me.

Why bother buying when you can rent. For example, it is possible to get a 3 bedroom apartment Abbey Road in St. John's Wood for about £2,383. For those who don't know London very well, St. Johns Wood is residential paradise. It has everyone you want, and nothing you wouldn't want. Just try buying the same place with a similar mortgage payment.

With the likely prospects of significant capital loss in the future, renting makes sound financial sense. Moreover, rents can not increase due to speculation. If the landlord pushes the rent up, then just move to somewhere cheaper. Rents do not diverge from fundamentals. In this regard, buy-to-let speculators are just wonderful; the more there are, the more competitive the rental market, and the lower will be rents.

I just loved this quote:

"Fashionable or not, this “lifestyle choice”, (ie. renting) as I have discovered, provides an enjoyable holiday from all sorts of worries. When you rent a place, even the way it looks ceases to have much importance. Just so long as it’s comfortable and convenient, and it works – which it will, assuming you have a decent landlord (and, yes, I know there are some appalling ones out there). The council could turn our entire street into a halfway house for paedophiles and heroin addicts: it wouldn’t matter. We’d move – and with no agent’s or solicitor’s fees or stamp duty to pay, or Hips to arrange.

These days, I spend my spare time and money not on property brochures and household improvements, but in expensive clothes shops – much more enjoyable. No doubt I’ll end my days dossing down in some sad centre for the homeless, but then so might you if the property market crashes or your naughty, greedy children manage to sell your house from underneath you.

Life is full of uncertainties. And who knows? Perhaps, if the market really does crash, the temptation to submit to the national obsession will overcome us and we’ll clamber back onto that ladder once again. In the meantime, at least I won’t have wasted any more of my precious time searching for a sales assistant in Homebase."