6 Reasons Why I Don’t Own a House
Sometimes, well-meaning sticks and bricks folks (RV lingo for people who live in houses) will allude to a future where I find a nice ‘real’ home to settle down in. They don’t really seem to grasp that I am not preparing for my life and taking a fun little adventure in the meantime but actually living my life right now, exactly how I choose to. These people are often surprised when I tell them we already bought a house and are past that point in our lives. Bought and sold, and no thank you!
Right after closing on our house in 2018
David and I got a house in semi-rural Connecticut as he trained to become a CPA and work with his dad, who lived in the area. We always knew it was temporary, but it was a dangerous gambit- veering dangerously close to permanent settlement and a path of routine that can be hard to pull out of once you’re in it. We had the house for four years and then sold it post-Covid once all our work was remote and we could live on the road. We went straight from our house closing appointment to our new home on wheels in the driveway and quickly drove west, with not a single look back.
Now, this is not a post to upset my house-owning readers or criticize their choice. I’m not arguing for rent versus buy or saying other housing doesn’t have its own disadvantages. I do think it’s a personal choice more than anything else, which I’ll get to at the end of this article. So these are my personal reasons why I don’t own a house. They may not apply to every house or neighborhood, but as a vehicle resident, they remind me every day why I love my wheels.
False Financial Security
The number one reason people generally think why they should buy a house is because it is hammered into us that it’s the best and biggest financial investment you can make, which is turn makes it the biggest sign of adulthood and having your shit sorted.
It’s been claimed as common wisdom that owning a house is how you save money and renting is throwing money away. It can be tempting to leap from rent to mortgage because the monthly mortgage alone is often cheaper. But a new wisdom is arising that “a rent is the most you’ll pay each month while a mortgage is the least.” Not only do you have to repair everything that will go wrong in your house (and there will be lots), you are still ‘throwing money away’ on interest payments that make up part of your mortgage, as well as on property taxes and insurance that will only increase while you own your home.
Living in a bigger space means spending more to furnish and decorate it. If you have lovely mature trees on your property, expect to spend thousands of dollars to maintain them. If you live in an HOA neighborhood, you’re definitely setting a chunk of money on fire every month. You can expect to spend between 1-4% of your house’s value every year on normal maintenance needs, major repairs excluded.
Ask me how we know about the trees
Besides the regular cash drain that houses are each month, let’s look at them in terms of a long-term investment for building equity. After all, it’s the fairytale story we hear about someone who bought their house for $70k in the 90s and just sold it for a million dollars and are set for life. Even without good timing (and inflation) of the market, people act like houses are a guaranteed wealth-builder, but house appreciation is generally overblown.
The reality is that while you can make a profit from selling a house, the stock market actually outperforms real estate in returns. There are lot of extra circumstances that will affect your own personal situation, but studies show that investing is a surer path to building wealth. Gains also aren’t guaranteed because when you do sell, many people don’t just cash out and return to renting or a lower cost of living area, but might buy an even bigger home (a la the whole silly idea of a starter house). Or, you stay in your house forever and while the value may increase, the actual usable money remains illiquid.
2. Never-Ending To-Do List
A dramatic reenactment of me tired of chores
They say to be an adult, you have to be able to take on responsibility. And I agree- to an extent. If you’re caring for a dependent, you are responsible to give them the best life possible. You have a responsibility to treat others well and be a conscientious person. But somehow, in our society, ‘adulting’ in the day to day instead often takes the form of doing housework and putting forward a fashionable, hosting-ready home.
Housework seems as inevitable as taxes and death. Dust is the most plentiful renewable resource in the universe, lightly landing upon every surface the second after you clean. It’s not uncommon for the smallest home projects to uncover even bigger projects that need to be dealt immediately with lest your house crumble beneath your feet at any moment.
But this responsibility is a choice. If you don’t own a house, you don’t do housework. Now sure, I still have to clean my camper. But cleaning all of my floors now takes 10 minutes. All of our laundry is done twice a month. I have no gutters to clean, no yard to landscape (and yet miles of nature outside my front door). I have less to do and it takes less time.
While owning a home, I realized that I just didn’t care. I didn’t want to spend my one life thinking about baseboard replacements or fencing. I didn’t want to give my time to choosing between windowpanes or kitchen cabinets. I want to explore the world, read books, and go on long walks. I want to do nothing and give my brain space to be creative. By choosing tiny, nomadic housing, I have a clean, functional, minimal living space without sacrificing the things that matter to me.
I also found that housework was too closely tied with excessive consumption- always needing new tools, appliances, decor, building materials for projects. Especially in America, it seems awfully convenient to me that having a ‘respectable’ home involves so much shopping.
You can disassociate from some of these responsibilities while owning a house. You can break free from Instagram aesthetics and stuffy expectations. You don’t need a dining room table or a couch or a mattress box. But there will always be practical maintenance to do. There is maintenance for RVs as well, but they are generally on a much smaller scale and often easily done without hiring someone.
Now I get that housework can be a hobby to many people. They love fixing endless things or creating the perfect ‘look.’ But just know, if that’s not you, it doesn’t have to be. It’s just about priorities.
3. They Don’t Move
Now this one is obvious, but you may have noticed that houses are pretty stationary. Which is a quality, as an RVer, that I can’t help but hold against them. My home DOES move and it’s one of my favorite things about it, assuring that I always have my own cozy bed no matter where we are.
But even if you don’t like to travel with your home, there are other disadvantages to a house always being the same spot. Building developments, climate change, or new government ordinances can change the area around your house even if you’re on your dream plot. We live in a fast-changing world and what were once considered dream homes on cliffs, rivers, and coastline are becoming dangerous risks that insurance will have nothing to do with.
Hot Tip:
A 100 year flood chance doesn’t mean that an area will flood roughly every 100 years, but that there’s a 1% chance that it will flood every year.
And of course, everyone knows the horrors of having a bad neighbor. I think it’s completely outrageous to agree to live next to someone for potentially the next 30 years before ever meeting them. Or even if you like your neighbors currently, new ones could replace them at any time. This of course, isn't limited to houses, with apartments being an even more raw deal when it comes to proximity to other people, which why I’m a big fan of having a house I can just roll away from anyone I don’t like.
4. Less Freedom
Owning a house can feel like freedom to some people because they’re no longer at the mercy of a landlord. And it’s true that a bad landlord can be stifling or even predatory if they are constantly raising rent. But when you buy a house, unless you buy it outright with cash, you don’t own your house, a bank does in the sense that it can foreclose if you fail to pay.
You are also leasing your land through property taxes, and if you default on these, the government can seize your home. In extreme cases, your property can be whisked away from you through eminent domain.
These situations are a rarity for most people, but they go to prove that the all-American obsession with ownership is an illusion that shouldn’t be chased after for its own sake.
If your priority is doing whatever you wish with a piece of property, houses can potentially give you more opportunity to do that. But if you’re at the mercy of an HOA or community with certain property value expectations, you might find that social pressure limits your freedom as much as a landlord. Zoning laws also limit your ability to do whatever you want on your own land.
And just like all of our possessions, your house can easily own you instead of the other way around. As the largest investment of your life, it can become a huge source of anxiety; if the debt involves feels overwhelming, you worry about keeping it in good condition and safe, or you can’t achieve other life goals because of it. Ownership doesn’t automatically equal freedom and peace of mind.
5. The Noise Pollution of Yardwork
This reason is a personal pet peeve that I am inclined to rant about to no end, but I will try to keep it short (it’s still long). Single family homes in the suburbs are often touted as the pinnacle of peace and comfort, when in fact, they are a cacophonous maelstrom of endless yardwork. This yardwork involves a wide array of whirring, buzzing, whining, and droning machines that homeowners are convinced they need to maintain the perfect toxic wasteland that is a lawn.
Lawns are unsustainable, biological deserts, but American culture has elevated them to a symbol of wealth, tidiness, and good housekeeping. Sometimes, yard crews are hired and they pull up with a Mad Max trailer full of noise machines to make sure that all grass is a quarter inch shorter, no bushes have uncouth edges and not a leaf is out of place (place being an impossible construct of neighborhood that only includes nature to control it). And then the various crews all come at various times and everyone else does their yardwork throughout the week, so you have a rotating schedule of constant noise.
And in addition to noise pollution, all this yardwork also creates an immense amount of air pollution. Gas-powered lawn equipment emites as much pollution in one year as 234 million cars. And leaf blowers, well…I have no kind words for this useless, self-inflicted plague. Instead I will just leave some related reading here:
Kindly Go Fuck Yourself With Your Shitty Fucking Gas-Powered Leafblower, You Tremendous Asshole
I had a small little electric lawnmower that I used in sections on our massive pre-exisiting lawn. It was relatively quiet and didn’t throw smog into the air, but the production of batteries has a high emissions rate that still made it a less-than-ideal solution. We left one section of our lawn to grow wild and discovered that we and our unwieldy grass had become a talking point of our street. That didn’t discourage us too much however, and by the time we moved out, much of our yard had turned into a happy habitat for clover, pollinators, moles, and snakes.
It is possible to create a more sustainable permaculture yard, but if you’ve inherited a big empty lawn, that will take a lot of time, money, and effort. If you have all three, then a quiet garden cared for by hand is a beautiful thing, but certainly a labor of love.
6. The House-Buying Process is a Complete Scam
I’m not saying someone was definitely murdered in this house, but this is one ominous stock photo real estate agent
Where else in our society are we expected, nay, encouraged to plop down the most money we’ve ever saved in our life after a quick 20-minute tour of a massive product without knowing anything about it?
In competitive markets, house inspections are a thing of the past. I actually became interested in home inspecting when I met our inspector, as it seemed like a chill business to own, where you could set your own schedule and not work in an office.
I took a few national certification courses in home inspection, only to be horrified to learn that most of what home inspection is not looking too closely at anything so you’re not held liable when things go to shit in a house. I’m not saying that home inspectors are shady or that they don’t help anyone, but the whole process did seem to be on shaky footing….perhaps a job more fabricated for emotional and legal needs than practical ones.
I personally don’t think much of realtors either, being paired with a useless, pushy bunch as we were house-hunting before finally finding someone a little helpful (I still found the house we ended up buying). When we sold our house, we did so ourselves, without a realtor, and were pleased with the money we saved and the confidence we gained. Again, not that they can’t be helpful either, but working with one shouldn’t be the default.
House-buying and selling is a grueling, expensive process that sucks any joy you might have in finding a new home and can keep you trapped in a situation you’d rather leave.
Is Owning a House Right for Me?
Ultimately you will either like home-owning or you won’t. The constant tinkering, remodeling and maintenance that I hate is someone else’s project paradise. Depending on the house you get, you may encounter few of these issues, or all of them and more.
The important takeaway is that it is a completely emotional, not a financial, decision. If you want a house, buy a house. If you’re buying a house just to make money or feel more free, you may be in for a surprise. When thinking about buying a home, you just have to be aware of the downsides, then decide whether the trade-offs are right for you.
There are pros and cons to every single type of living situation and you just have to choose your top values. I like living a fluid, minimalist lifestyle with very limited and intentional responsibilities. I own my RV and pay no rent or mortgage. If it were to roll off a cliff, that would be unfortunate, but because it cost a tiny fraction of a house, it would not be a big loss and so spares me of that anxiety. But I’m a ‘never say never’ sort of person, so it’s not out of the question to ever buy a house again, though it’s certainly not in the plans.
Alternative living options may take an extra bit of creativity and gumption, but they offer the opportunity to design your life from the ground up and do things they way you truly want, not the way people think they should be done. It’s true that not everyone would enjoy living tiny or in a unique way, but it should be on the table as much as a traditional mortgage path.
Here are some alternative living possibilities:
Vehicle residency (in an RV,van, bus, car, or anything else on wheels)
Off grid homesteading
Digital nomadism (renting around the world while living out of a backpack)
Living on a boat
Co-housing
Intentional communities
Other unique housing like yurts, earthships, tiny houses, shipping containers, etc
Owning a house is not an automatic sign of success, of being more responsible, or being good with money. It is simply a home and what you make of it. Examine your priorities in life and you may discover that your dream home is not a house at all.
