It feels shameful to admit it, but I want to own a house. I’ve read many of Millennial Revolutions anti-home-ownership posts to know better. I’m a big fan of theirs, and being from Canada I appreciate their knowledge of the Canadian housing market because it is tremendously different from the US market. I also highly recommend that people read their many posts on home-ownership including: Why houses are a scam, and Would we be richer if we had bought a house.

But even after reading these, I still want a house.

To provide some context, we actually already own a condo, but we don’t live in it. The husband bought it about 7 years ago long before we knew FIRE existed. He lived in it for all of 2 years before we moved and it’s been rented out ever since.

It’s break-even-ish so we don’t plan on selling it until one day perhaps we need to, or we want to cash out and invest the $$ instead.

Since moving back to Canada we’ve been renting and it hasn’t been the best experience. We’re in a new city so we decided to rent “downtown.” I use “” because we’re in a small city so the downtown is hardly a downtown. Unbeknownst to us, our building permits Airbnb, and even in a pandemic, living in an Airbnb building is a nightmare. We have literally been woken up to the sound of very aggressive vomiting taking place at 3am in our hallway, and then found a massive pile of vomit in that hallway the next morning. Do your research, never live in an Airbnb-permitted building. 10/10 do not recommend. Also just a few months after moving in, our landlords decided to put this place up for sale. We don’t have friends and family over (pandemic), but sure, let’s have complete strangers walk through our home on a regular basis. Not to mention one time we returned from a walk to find strangers sitting at our kitchen counter – no joke. The realtor forgot to inform/ask our permission prior to a showing and just showed up. We were not pleased. It’s an incredibly violating feeling knowing someone was in your home (strangers) while you weren’t there and without your knowledge.

My ranting above isn’t a good enough reason to want to purchase a home to live in. We’re not in an ideal renting situation, and we’ve had great renting experiences in the past, why not just find somewhere else to rent? Why do I want a home?

I want space. I need more space. I don’t mean a big home, in fact I would rather not have a big home. But I want more outdoor space. We have a small balcony and in the Summer we spent so much time out there (when the drugged-out neighbour wasn’t blasting 90s rap and yelling about how he likes to party). I want a yard for my dog to play in.

I want a dog. Our current landlords won’t allow pets. It sucks. Some rentals do but most don’t. I also don’t love the idea of having a dog without a yard.

I want to feel like I live somewhere semi-permanent. I say semi-permanent because we have a feeling we won’t be purchasing our “forever home.” I’ve lived in seven homes in the last 11 years. I’ve barely hung a photo in any of them because I knew they weren’t permanent. And because I’ve always been a renter and didn’t want to deal with patching up holes when I left. But I do want to be somewhere long enough to hang a picture.

I don’t want to be at the mercy of landlords. This is related to the point above. It’s an awful feeling knowing that our current place is for sale as it means we’re just hanging out in limbo wondering if/when it will be sold and if/when we’ll be kicked out. We have some security because we did sign a 1 year lease but once that’s up (in just over 3 months), we can be given the boot.

If/when we have kids, I want them to have a permanent home. Again, I think there’ll be a few more moves in our lifetime, but I would like to not have to worry about moving around and getting kicked out of homes if we have babies and/or toddlers with us.

I’ve heard people in the FIRE community say that purchasing a home should be recognized as a purely emotional decision. I mostly agree. Renting is cheap compared to owning in our market. However renting a house is not, and I don’t think I can live in these 2 bedroom condos much longer.