Lets back up. You don't have a mortgage because your rent is dirt cheap.
Why not get a mortgage, rent out the house and maintain your current place? There is absolutely no reason to use your current place as a reason for or against a mortgage. Before bashing mortgages, just consider the possibility of buying a house that you can rent out. Once you approach house ownership from the perspective of numbers, it removes all the fluff about your current rent and distance to work.
A lot of people assume that you need to live in the first house you buy. In simple terms, a house is just another tool to diversify your NW. Stocks, bonds, houses, art, land, gold etc. are all just tools to accumulate NW that have different levels of returns and risk.
There are a couple of reasons I don't this:
- I'm currently don't have enough capital to do this, and my credit score is shit. I'd have to take out a subprime loan, and the interest rate would be garbage. To get a good interest rate, I'd have to either wait awhile OR deal with credit bullshit to get a credit score. And I don't want a good credit score.
- It is a buyers market right now. To get a decent house, I'd have to do a ton of research, work with buyers, get a real estate agent, negotiate a deal, etc. etc. THEN I'd have to either vette a housing manager or deal with the renters myself. None of this I want to do.
- I have no idea how long I'm going to be in my area. I'll be here as long as I'm working for my current employer, but, if I leave my job for some reasons, I'm most likely going to move. I definitely don't want something like a rental property holding me back, as I don't think managing a rental from long distance is a good idea.
- After all is said and done. I'd just end up with an investment. An illiquid investment that is tied to a very specific area of the country. This investment would take time to acquire. Time to be profitable, and a lot of BS I'd rather not deal with. By comparison, I could just invest more online, and not have nay of that.
Now that is me and my situation specifically. In general, I don't think real estate investing is a bad idea. Personally, I'd only do it if I knew I was going to be in an area for a long time (10+ years), it wasn't my entire portfolio (preferably less than 30 - 40%), and I could buy any investments in cash. Even then I still might never since I don't really put houses on a pedestal and arguments could be made for other types of investments.