Too often, when people think about housing costs, they only look at the mortgage payment. In reality, the cost of owning a home is much broader. It includes principal and interest, property taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance and repairs, HOA fees, and the opportunity cost of having so much money tied up in a single asset.

On a typical $300,000 home, those annual carrying costs can easily be more than $50,000 and look something like this:

Category	Annual Cost
Mortgage (Principal & Interest)	$18,000
Property Taxes	$5,000
Homeowners Insurance	$2,500
Utilities	$8,400
Maintenance & Repairs	$6,000
HOA Fees	$1,200
Opportunity Cost of Equity	~$12,000

(For the purpose of looking at our own situation, I’m going to ignore the opportunity cost. Yes, our house has almost doubled in value since we bought it, but we purchased it back in 2001. Once inflation is taken into account, the appreciation is barely keeping up with inflation.) Anyway, here are our actual monthly housing costs from when we chose to pay off the house to last year..

Category	2019	2025
Mortgage & Interest	$950	$0
Property Taxes	$400	$600
Insurance	$150	$300
Utilities	$400	$700
Maintenance & Repairs	$300	$600
Total	$2,200	$2,200

After paying off our mortgage, our housing costs were…

…exactly the same.

Within five years, increases in taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance have completely absorbed the savings from the eliminating principal and interest payment. The “cost to carry” a house just keeps climbing and there is no relief in sight. 

Now, if we wanted to stay in the same four-bedroom suburban Dallas house forever, ownership would almost certainly still beat renting. Landlords want to make a profit, after all. But that’s not the comparison we’re making.  It is not apples to apples, but apples to grapes. We’re comparing a house we no longer need with a lifestyle we actually want.

Katie and I don’t need four bedrooms. We don’t need a yard to maintain, proximity to schools, or a garage full of stuff. We don’t even need (or want) to stay in the same place year-round. By downsizing, taking advantage of geographic arbitrage, and remaining flexible enough to move when rents rise or our interests change, we’ve been able to build a lifestyle that costs less while giving us experiences we value more.

Some people push back on our decision to rent, and I get it.  For many, homeownership represents stability, permanence, and security. Some of our best friends are perfectly happy to nest in the same house they’ve lived in for decades, surrounded by memories and possessions, until they are wheeled out (hopefully many years from now).

There’s nothing wrong with that.  For them.

For us, though, the opportunity to wake up overlooking downtown Omaha one season and the Atlantic Ocean the next isn’t a compromise or a way to save money. It’s exactly what we were hoping for. Having the freedom to explore different communities and different ways of living isn’t a bug in our plan. It’s one of its biggest features. 🙂

The Takeaway

I think homeownership is often oversold as a path to wealth.. It can be a good tool for forced savings, but it isn’t the only path to financial success, and it isn’t automatically the right answer for every stage of life.

Our priorities have changed. We value flexibility over permanence, experiences over square footage, and optionality over accumulation. Renting while we slow travel lets us experiment with different communities, avoid unexpected maintenance headaches, and adjust our plans whenever life changes.

Will we own another home someday? Maybe. But after this first year on the road, we’re more convinced than ever that renting isn’t a temporary compromise while we figure things out.  For us, it’s exactly the lifestyle we’ve been trying to buy all along.