everyone’s talking about buying flats and houses. everyone.

my friends are doing it, my classmates are doing it, the newspapers are doing it. apparently, for every 1 property that goes on the market in london, there are up to 8 people vying to put down a deposit. and, apparently, prices are rising at about £40 a day or something stupid like that.

so what am i doing about this?

am i jumping onto this flat-buying bandwagon, considering that i can get a 100% mortgage because i’m a graduate and/or a professional mortgage because i’m going to be a solicitor? am i saving up money now to put a downpayment on a nice 1/2-bedroom flat in east/south london? am i?

well, i’m paying rent to my landlord who owns at least 3 properties around east london, that’s what. and i’ve decided that it’s not that bad a thing to be doing right now.

see, i refuse to jointly own a property, so i’ll have to buy a 2-bed property to rent out one room to collect half the mortgage payment. and until what i have to pay on my mortgage is less than what i pay for rent on a similar property, i’m not going to drown myself in all this mortgage/housebuying/debt malarkey. and i’d only buy in london (i don’t believe in commuting), so my market is already very small. and the choices aren’t exactly great for my price range. unless, of course, i win the lottery and have a quarter of a million pounds to spare.

and anyway, there’s nothing bad about renting. sure, you can view it as me paying someone else’s mortgage for them… but i’m living here not them, so it really amounts to the same thing. who cares whose name is on the property deed as long as i’m the legal occupier. the only difference is that the landlord is in debt and i’m not.

the other thing is, since everyone is mortgaged up to the hilt, one day everything is going to come tumbling down. not by loads, but enough. and when that happens, and if it happens in the next 5 years, i’ll go in for the kill. otherwise, i’m quite happy to remain debt-free thank you very much.

after all, i’m still rather young, and my benchmark age is 30 to be property-owning. i think this is related to my mother - we had a conversation once in the car and she said that if i couldn’t afford a HDB-flat by the time i’m 30 i ought to be reconsidering what i’ve been doing with my career. so, somehow this has translated into my belief that if i don’t own a property by the time i’m 30, i’m a failure. no, not really, i don’t believe that at all. it’s just a random milestone that i’ve decided upon. if all goes well career-wise, 30 is the age to be signing away a significant portion of my income to the bloodthirsty institutions we call banks. it’s like those population control campaigns: stop at two, but have 3 if you can afford it. my mantra is: carry on renting, but buy if i can afford it.

but even if i don’t end up owning anything for the next few decades, there’s no significant drawbacks i can think of at the moment. the lack of debt and the liquidity of my finances just mean that when the time comes, it’ll be much easier for me to ditch my career and become a world traveller instead.