(How to be broke. And deaf.)
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This is one of those choices we all make at least once in life, and it’s a decision that’s not as simple as it seems, like eating pizza after 10pm at your age. Renting an apartment has its ups, and it has its downs…but so does buying a house, if you have 30 years to kill and no interest in disposable income.
One of the advantages of renting is its list of don’ts:
- You don’t have to pay property taxes
- You don’t have to pay property insurance
- You don’t have to pay for repairs
As Mitch Hedberg, the gone-too-soon comic, once put it (and I paraphrase):
I live in an apartment. People who live in apartments can’t use “Home Depot.” People who live in apartments need their own store: “Apartment Depot.” Apartment Depot would just be this huge damp building filled with people walking around saying, “We don’t gotta fix nothing.”
But know this: apartment living has another “don’t” – you don’t get to listen to rock & roll. Ever.
At least, not as it was intended to be played.
As you probably know, in 1525 AD, the Catholic Church mandated that listening to Led Zeppelin at low volumes is a venial sin (it was a Friday). Unfortunately, if you live in an apartment, listening to rock & roll at levels the Universe intended (decibels = “jet at takeoff”) can result in things that’ll ruin your weekend, like jail time.
I once lived in an apartment complex in Pensacola, Florida, that I affectionately referred to as “Swamp Manor,” due to some real estate anomaly that forced residents to wade through standing water whenever entering or exiting the unit. And as if slogging daily through mosquito breeding farms weren’t bad enough, my soggy upstairs neighbors had two non-neighborly characteristics:
- an abnormal aversion to Vatican-approved volume levels
- a rabid fondness for stomping on the floor
Fortunately, however, the issue resolved itself after the couple drowned in a rogue parking lot puddle accident. (I have an alibi.)
So, if your personal goal is permanent ear damage (and minimal police intervention), you’ll want to consider buying a house. Just remember, though, that you will be opening yourself up for expected expenses, unexpected surprises, and a massive Behavior Modification program known as the “Home Mortgage.” I can’t tell you how much better behaved I’ve, how much more restrained I’ve become than your average idiot male, since taking on a mortgage. Over the years, at least a dozen irritating people probably owe their lives to the fact that I have an inescapable monthly mortgage payment.
The “expected expenses” part of home ownership are things like yearly insurance, monthly utilities, and of course, an eternity of taxes. You would think that once you’ve bought a house – and paid a bank for thirty solid years (see Behavior Modification) – you’d think you’d be done buying the house. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. No no no. From now on, year after year after fiscal year, you get to pay the government for the privilege of buying the house just that one time. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
A homeowner’s “unexpected surprises” can be anything from a broad range from anythings, beginning early on with what is known as the “closing.” The closing is a mysterious tradition during which a guy magically buys a house (well, after thirty years) by signing his name roughly 17,000 times. This is necessary because there are roughly 17,000 single-celled creatures who collect some sort of fee during each and every closing in the United States. So be proud. Every time an American buys a house, a small nation of government and real estate-related entities gets fed.
It’s natural. It’s majestic. Think of it as the great circle of term life.
In my lifetime, I’ve attended five closings. I always showed up on time, bearing 400 ink pens. Not one of those closings went well. There’s always something that’s late, or missing, or wrong. Here’s an example.
At one closing – yes, Pensacola again – I was told there was a problem: the house I was about to buy was too close to the back of the property. Mind you: I didn’t build the house; it was already there. Nor had I snuck in the backyard at midnight and masochistically moved the fence.
But there it was. My house had broken the law.
By now, you’re probably way ahead of me. Of course there was a solution. “Sir, just pay this little fee and we’ll wink-wink and look the other way. Sign here.”
Pensacola called it a variance. Suddenly-suspended future homeowners call it a jack.
Done. 17,001 signatures later, I was ready for the next round of home ownership surprises: repairs. Ever had to replace a furnace? I’ve owned entire cars that cost less.
Another source of surprises is the immediate area … and people … surrounding your new home. In my neighborhood, there are humans with perfectly functional yards who will leave their property and bring their dogs over to, um, decorate on my lawn. How that’s possibly legal, I have no clue. Maybe they got a variance.
Here’s another example of odd behavior: I really believe that my mail-carrier-person would rather walk on hot coals than get out of that weird boxy truck and put something on my porch. Except, to walk on hot coals, she’d have to get out of the truck.
By the way, last week, I bought a room humidifier, because it’d been nearly twenty minutes since I spent any money on my house. Among the several dozen warnings in the instructions and user manual was this advice: Do not sit on the appliance.
You know what that means: once, someone, somewhere…
Finally, from the wild world of home ownership, I have some good and bad news. The good news: There’s a swath of woodland immediately behind my home, and just beyond that is an area zoned ‘Commercial,’ so there’s no looming possibility that any rabid realtor will try to construct another neighborhood just behind me. Unless somebody gets a variance.
The bad news: The commercial enterprise just beyond the woods behind me seems to be caught up in some kind of Heavy Industry contest to see who can make the most noise. I think I’ve finally figured out what, exactly, this business makes. You know that beep-beep-beep that large commercial vehicles make when they’re in backing up? (The beep’s somewhere between an E natural and an E-flat)
I think that’s their product. I think the company behind me manufactures those back-up beeps. They have to be building the beeps, because nobody can back up for that long. They beep-beep-beep for hours.
But only when I’m at home.