Just Renting

Bear with me for a moment while I do something taboo and talk about finances – you know, how much money we make (or don’t make).

My husband and I are the last people we know who are still renting. Seriously. I don’t just mean the last in our group of friends. I mean all of our friends and acquaintances and the new people we meet all seem to own a house, a townhouse, a condo, something. It’s like we’re the last people in our demographic who are still renting. Although, what demographic do we really fit in anyway? If it’s age, that’s easy. But income? Class? That’s a little trickier.

I have started to notice the subtle ways we apologize for things we think society finds objectionable, like renting. When we moved to our small town in 2008, everyone assumed we were escaping the Big City real estate prices and were surely buying a place. When we moved from our 1 year lease last summer into our current house, everyone assumed we’d bought our cute too small war time bungalow. Our answer is always this kind of bashful “No, we’re just renting.” Sure, some of it is by choice, but really, honestly, truthfully, we can’t afford to buy. It’s hard not to feel apologetic when you’re revealing a semi-embarrassing class barrier. Especially when all of your friends are on the other side of it.

The people our age who own a house, have done so because:

1) they are professionals
2) their parents have helped them out SIGNIFICANTLY
3) they were the recipients of an inheritance

We are not professionals. I am a stay-at-home mom and former administrator. When I went on maternity leave, I had been working my way up at the company I worked and was getting to the place where my salary was not too shabby. But I’d be back at the bottom if I returned to work now, after all the time off. My husband is in the trades. The non-unionized trades. So no big bucks there. Most of our married life we were paying off my student loans for my General BA in the humanities – you know, the degree that gets you tons of high paying job offers? There was no chance to pull together a down payment for anything.

Our parents will not be helping us out. Our parents are working class. My in-laws are farmers in Saskatchewan. My parents are former Nazarene ministers who lost a house in the early 80’s. (Oh, yeah and those student loans I was paying off? Also because I wasn’t getting help from my parents. I’m ok with that. I do think it builds character. But it definitely changes things when you leave school with massive loans. That’s a totally different blog post though.)

Our extended families are also working class. There will be no surprise inheritance from a great-aunt or aged grandparent. Even if there was, we’d be splitting it 36 ways with cousins. And for the few friends I have that were able to buy a place because they’ve already lost a parent? I can’t think of anyone who envies them their houses…they came at a price far far greater than any mortgage.

I stay home with our kids – with two, I’d have to earn a lot to cover the childcare anyway. Aaron just started his own business so the banks won’t be looking at us seriously for a few years. For some reason, I feel apologetic about that. Every time someone asks me if we own our house, I forget the choices we made and I toss in that little just, “just renting”.

So after all this whining about class and income, why am I saying choices?

Because there was a time, before we had kids, when we lived in the Big City and were both working when we probably could have bought a place. But we consistently made choices not to buy real estate.

Aaron’s parents did give us a bit of money. At the time, it would actually have bought a house in small town Saskatchewan. In Vancouver? It was barely a dent in a 5% down payment. We were grateful to them. We used it to buy our bus. It was our project together. It was an expression of our values: less space, less consumption.

About all we could have afforded to buy was a condo, in the suburbs, the cookie-cutter suburbs. We couldn’t imagine putting Eliza in storage and moving to the burbs to live in a condo made of cheap disposable materials. We talked about it and we couldn’t do it. We were living with my sister and her kids in vibrant East Vancouver. We couldn’t imagine leaving our family, our community, our garden, our park and trading it in for long commutes and Strata fees.

We were saving for a down payment and we realised that we were never getting anywhere so we cashed in our ING account and paid off my student loans four years early and were briefly, sweetly, completely debt free for the first time in our adult lives. The thought of a mortgage right then made my skin crawl. No thanks.

We saw the commercials for 0% down mortgages and I worried about interest rates and housing market crashes. It felt too risky. The Scotia Bank slogan “You’re richer than you think you are” made my stomach turn uneasily. Bigger mortgage, more debt? That makes me poorer, not richer. We steered clear.

I chose to stay home when my maternity leave ran out. We chose to live on less so that I could do that. I wasn’t eligible for maternity leave the second time round so Aaron took parental leave and we spent a blissful 9 months home together. Aaron got to see his daughter while she was a baby. Every day. Again, we chose less income (considerably less) for more family time. These were deliberate choices. If we owned a house, we could never have done those things.

A financial planner might say we’re not being smart. I’ve heard the argument over and over about not throwing your money away on rent every month, about paying it to yourself, about getting in to the market as soon as you possibly can. Anything to get ahead.

For some people, getting into the real estate market comes at a price. For some dear friends of mine, they lost mothers first. For us, it would mean sacrificing time together as a family. That’s not true for everyone. But for us, it would have meant staying in the City longer, working long hours at jobs we disliked and commuting, getting home late after picking up babies from daycare. For us, owning a house isn’t worth that. Some people are lucky and they don’t have to choose. We do.

To me, our priorities are honourable things: family, community, values. Important things. I’m more than ok renting. I just have to stop apologizing for it.