I rent. I don’t own my home. There, I’ve admitted it.

I know people who have bought houses recently (although bought is probably a misleading term for the arrangement really). And being that I have married with a kid, and another on the way, people seem to just assume that we’re planning to buy a house.

We’re not. We have no plans to purchase any property (beyond planning how to spend our eventual Lotto winnings). People say “Oh, but you’re just paying someone else’s mortgage” and then they waffle on about security and investment, and so on.

For some reason as I was doing the dishes before I thought about this - I’ve been living away from the safety of my parents house (they rented for a lot of my life too) for almost exactly 10 years, so I was wondering, how much of somebody’s mortgage have I paid?

By my calculations (and they are rough) I’ve paid about $78,000 in rent in total (although much of that was shared with others, and some included various expenses). Since I’ve been a proper grownup and living with my then-partner-now-wife Melanie it’s been about $37,000.

That’s a lot of money, indeed, but not all that much of a mortgage. Even if I look at where I live now, and what we pay in rent I’m not really paying anyone’s mortgage. I’m paying part of it, but then again, I’m not paying house insurance, rates, complience costs, maintenance or any other expense of ownership.

In fact the home we live in now has a valuation of $330,000 (from 2005) and attracts annual rates of $1,400. If were were to buy this home, assuming we got it for that price, had a 30 year mortgage and managed to pull together a $50,000 deposit, we’d be paying at the very least $550 a week (which is a fair bit more than we pay to live here), as well as $1,400 a year in rates, plus a home insurance premium (and probably a mortgage insurance premium too).

“But,” they say, “it’s an investment!“ And yes, it is, but only if you can realise the capital value. While you are simply sitting in it paying the mortgage it is a liability - it takes money. It’s $550 a week you have to come up with or not only do you lose your home, but all the money you invested so far. Yeah, if you can go out and buy a house and own it outright then it’s an investment. Or when you sell it and make a net profit, then it was an investment, but otherwise it’s not.

“SECURITY!” they scream! A house is financial security. Again, only true if you can liquidate it for money, or leverage it’s value (and then you’re really just getting more debt).

We’ve looked at the options for buying, and to be honest we wouldn’t want to live in a house we could afford, it would either be in an location we didn’t want to live (for our money, probably not even in the same city) or it would be a house we’d hate (small, cramped, rundown). “But you’d own it, you could do it up,” they emplore. Yup, that’s true. But paying all our spare money in mortgage payments doesn’t leave a lot of money for tools and materials. And then we’d get to spend the next few years living in a building site while we spent every spare moment trying to realise our dream (which would come in over budget and under delivered).

So, quite frankly I’m happy to live in a nice house and have someone else subsidise my lifestyle to the turn of a couple of hundred dollars a week in extra mortgage payments and expenses (it’s okay though, their accountant has it all setup so that the money they shovel into this place is a tax write off for them, in 15 years they’ll actually own the place outright!)