Nevertheless, I have never, ever met one person who owns a home freehold who has said that they regret that they ever bought it and they wish that they remained renting their whole life. Do you, Shane, regret that you bought your house? If you could start again, would you choose not to?
I can't speak to your specific question to Shane, but there is a tendency in humans not to admit to themselves that they made mistakes, especially where major life decisions (such as buying a house) are concerned. From some non-scientific personal observation I believe (and this is admittedly speculation) that there are quite a few people who bought houses in hot markets and who would have been much happier if they had kept renting. But they
- either never really thought through that their house (or rather: their mortgage) is the root cause of their unhappiness by chaining them to a city or a job.
- or they did think it through but are not willing to admit it to themselves or others.
Many people also seem to consider crushing debt a relatively normal thing. Hence, they won't express unhappiness with a crappy mortgage situation because they simply see this as the way the world works. It would be like being unhappy that humans can't fly or breathe under water.
WerKater's right. Most people will rationalize all the bad stuff that comes with homeownership away and never admit they made a mistake. It's human nature.
Personally, I don't regret that my wife and I bought our place, but our situation is not at all the norm. We've never had a mortgage. In 1997 we paid $90K cash for a piece of raw land in the country. For a few years we continued renting an apartment while we saved more money to build a house. In 2001 we moved into the 1/2 finished 1 bedroom/1bathroom house. Over the years, as our family has grown, we've slowly added on to our house so that now we've got 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms in the main house and a guest house that we've rented out to the same good tenant since 2007. In addition to the houses, we've also built several farm structures on the property, as well as fences, gardens, orchard, etc. So, in our case, we never had the stress of having a mortgage, but we've traded pretty much all of our free time and money for that privilege.
Financially, we would be better off today and would've been FI several years earlier if we had just continued renting our inexpensive apartment in town and instead dumped all of our money into an S&P500 index fund. Right now, our place is for sale for $649K. If we get close to full price, after realtor's commissions we'll net ~$600K. Instead of buying and developing our land, if we had just continued renting and invested the surplus money in VFINX, today we'd have ~$716K, or over $100K more than our home is worth, and we wouldn't have had to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of our time and energy to build it.
Having said that, homeownership isn't only about dollars and cents and the bottom line. If you get significant satisfaction from caring for your home and improving it, then that's something that's not necessarily quantifiable in money terms. If, on the other hand, you'd rather spend all of your free time playing with your son and hanging out with your family and friends doing fun stuff like going to the beach or reading books or sleeping, then don't buy a house. It'll suck up all of your time and energy and you won't have as much left over to enjoy yourself when you're not at work.
That's one of the main reasons my wife and I decided to sell our house this year. We both find that when we're home we're constantly thinking about all of the things that need to be done around the house, and it makes it harder for us to enjoy ourselves and be fully "there" in the moment with our 7 year old daughter. We're looking forward to moving back into a small, inexpensive apartment, that's easy to keep clean, and where we don't have to even think for a moment about a list of projects that we have hanging over our heads. If something breaks, we'll just call the landlord as we're headed off to the beach to go play.