The Hidden Cost of Home Ownership

The following is a guest post from MD of Studenomics. He is releasing a brand new eBook today on making the decision if you should buy or rent a home in your 20s. This quick read is the best investment that you can make when it comes to helping you decide if right now is the right time to buy or rent.

When it comes to buying a home we’re all well informed of the costs that go along with this purchase. We understand that you need to pay taxes, pay for moving costs, deal with loading your place up with furniture, pay the lawyer, and deal with many other expenses. There’s one more expense that we don’t really factor in.

What’s this hidden cost of home ownership? It’s TIME. Time is a ownership cost that most of us rarely factor in when we decide if we should rent or buy a home in our 20s. We run all of the financial calculations and crunch all of the numbers. What we don’t do is think about the time that we’ll now have to invest as a new home owner.

Why is time such a hidden cost when it comes to home ownership?

• You’re going to have to wake up an hour earlier in the winter to shovel your driveway.
• You’re going to have to spend a Friday night raking leaves in your backyard.
• You’re going to spend time on fixing up rooms and customizing them to your expectations.
• You’re going to have to spend an afternoon waiting for the cable guy to show up to fix your internet connection.

Simply put you’re going to have to spend lots more time on your new home than you ever did with your rental. When you rent a place you don’t really have to deal with anything at all. As a renter you just deal with your own basic household chores. The rest of the work or anything that breaks down gets delegated to the landlord of the unit. The renter simply calls the landlord to deal with most issues around the place.

What if you don’t want to invest all of this time into your new property?Well then you have two clear options for how you can avoid this heavy capital investment:

1. Outsource the work. You can always pay someone else to do the work. You can hire a landscaping company shovel your snow in the winter and mow your lawn in the summer. You can also outsource all other household related tasks. The obvious benefit here is that you can save yourself lots of down. The downfall is that it’s going to cost you even more money.
2. Avoid the work. You can also attempted to avoid the household work. We all have that one home in the neighborhood that always looks like a complete mess. The benefit here is that you don’t have to worry about investing time or money into tasks around the task. The obvious setback is that your home won’t be attractive at all.

As you can see there’s going to be a heavy time requirement when you decide to buy a new home. Once the euphoria of owning a home fades away, you’re going to be stuck with all of these new tasks on your plate.

Is there any other solutions to the time investment required with your property? You can either enjoy the work or think of it as an investment. Enjoying the work can become really easy because after a while, mowing your lawn on a summer morning can be a great feeling. The investment part comes into play when you start to perform upgrades on your house. In the process of upgrading your home, you can improve its market value when you plan on selling it eventually.

As a young professional are you ready to invest all that time into your new home? Would you rather outsource these tasks?