Like so many discussions, I think our discussion on Deppy renting vs owning is a kind of Rorschach test of our own feelings.
I'm sadly (to me) a renter after having been a homeowner, and I would never pass up the chance to be a homeowner again if I had the money for it (and of course the longer you rent, the less money you have saved to buy). Y'all must have great landlords, since no one seems to have mentioned the problems with
not owning your own home, like having the landlord wander in (which I think has happened to Deppy), things
not getting fixed, or the landlord pulling up in a fancy car to announce that he's not going to replace a 40-year-old appliance that would cost just one month's worth of the rent raise he came to tell you about.
I take the point that owning is potentially more of a hassle, but there are ways to deal with that. We think of Deppy as two guys huddled cosily together in their apartment--because that's how they want us to think of them--and forget that they work with a management company and accountants and lawyers (and Phil's brother
) and who knows who else to manage their business empire. It just doesn't seem that big a step to pay someone to help oversee any necessary home maintenance, for example if they are away for a few weeks. (And yes, privacy. But they've already spent two months on a
bus with people they are paying to do stuff for them, so I think they've worked out how to cope with that.)
There is always the possibility that buying a home is a risky short-term investment. But come on, this is London. Will the housing market really crash so much that they'd lose their shirts? It seems even if they move out in a few years and it's a bad market in which to sell, they'd have no problem renting their house. In the US, the median home purchase is for only 6 years. That means that half the time when people buy a house they will be out of it again in a very few years (and most of the time in order to buy another house). I don't know so much about UK home ownership, but I found
an article that suggests that maybe Deppy are just swept up in a larger trend: London is in the process of switching from being majority homeowners to majority renters. (Weird fact: it took until February 2015 for the population of London to get back to what it was just before WWII.)
I actually like the idea someone mentioned a while back that they are in the process of building their forever home, and that's why the are renting. That makes sense to me: investing in two homes--buying one at the same time as building one--could easily be beyond their budget. Let's hope that koi pond is being dug right now.