I took a look back at the MMM blog post about his family's 2014 expenditures - about $25,000. They own their home and don't pay mortgage or rent, which is pretty badass.
Looking at my household spending for the year, if I didn't pay rent, I'd be at about the same. Sweet! The problem? I pay just over $18,000/year in rent!
Now the whole world could complain that the rent is too high. Even so, in some places, it makes more sense to rent forever (even at high prices) than buy, from a financial perspective.
Sadly, we can't all own homes in Longmont. ;_; But there are plenty of people on this board from different cities, with different incomes, family sizes, and so on. So what do *you* do to get the most out of your living situation? Own? Rent? Sublet? Just make more income to make up for the cost? Spend even less in other categories? And why? I'd be interested to hear how people in different parts of the country (or world even!) optimize it.
I'll start, even though we aren't even close to ideal:
We rent a studio apartment because we really don't need much more space. It's $1,520/month, which is high but includes ALL utilities and parking in a fairly high COL area, where our jobs are. I don't think we could optimize much further for the next year or so. We could get a cheaper place - but that would require getting a second car for the longer commute. We could buy a place, but have no savings for that right now. We could move in with parents, but then lose our jobs and have no income. Once we know a bit more about how long we're staying here, we'll probably reconfigure for an improvement. If we stay, we might buy and then rent a room out. If we leave for a super HCOL area (which may be in the cards), we may move in with parents and get different jobs - buying there is not a great move. =/
Ok, your turn. Rather than complaining about rent/house prices, how do you optimize?