This weekend's report from the Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission brings yet more bad news for under 30s trying to get on the housing ladder: apparently the amount of young people owning houses has halved in 20 years. But hey, renting's not all doom and gloom! Sure, we may not be clambering on to that property ladder as soon as we'd like (or, for some of us, ever) but let's look on the bright side of life. And by life, we mean renting.
If your boiler breaks, it's not your job to fix it
You don't need to, like, call an electrician and deal with them being pricks about it. And then pay them £5,000. In fact, all you have to do is make one call (or, um, several) to get it done for diddly-squat. That's 'free' if you're Dick Van Dyke in popular film Mary Poppins where he portrays a cockney. OK so it's not cool when your landlord refuses to fix things or acts like a dick, especially when you're paying through the nose, but at least you don't have to also pay through aforementioned nose to get odd jobs done.
You are saving roughly a million billion pounds
OK so renting isn't cheap if you're forking out the average £1,516 a month for a flat in our fine capital city of London Town, but elsewhere you're looking at an average of just £665 monhtly. Compare that with the fact that the National Housing Federation are warning you'll need a salary of around £100,000 to afford a typical 80 per cent loan and, well, it's barely even comparable.
READ MORE: Housemate Auditions Are The Hunger Games Of The Renting World
You can do the place up just as if you were living in it
Well, sort of. Some landlords are peaches, and up for any improvements provided you run it by them first – think about it, if it makes a flat look more attractive and you're willing to put in the manpower and paint those weird sickly green walls/put up some shelving units, then it'll be easier for them to rent it out after you've left. You can buy rugs to cover gross flooring, get new sofas in if the old ones are shitty and buy ornate lampshades for every room if you fancy it. And you don't have to wade through all the paperwork of getting a mortgage.
If you change your mind about the area you've moved to, you can… move away
Moved to where you thought was paradise, but now you've noticed that everyone on your street appears to be getting broken into? Have YOU been broken into? Utilise that natty six-month break clause (please make sure there's a six-month break clause in your contract) and get the hell out of there and into an area that doesn't freak you out.
If you split up with your boyfriend/girlfriend/best mate then there's not that much paperwork to deal with
You've moved in, you thought it'd all be perfect but in fact it's a perfect nightmare. There are arguments, crying, hair in the bath and you just want to live anywhere else and never see this person again. Unfortunately, you've bought the place so extricating yourself from it is going to be an even fresher circle of hell than when you spent a whole year attempting to buy it. Yeah, it's a cynical reason to be happy you're renting but sometimes life is crap and paperwork only makes it worse.
You're a bohemian, dude. Enjoy it.
Buying a house means you're your parents. Nowadays, shitty housing prices and a squeezed job market mean that barely any of us are living like our parents' did when they were our age. Whatever that age should be. I'm 26, in an entry-level job, I rent a flat and I can't drive. Sometimes this makes me feel sad, but then sometimes this makes me feel like a free-wheelin' free spirit. If I want to pack up and move to America I can't because their working visas are too stringent. But I could go to Hull. Or Scotland. Or, like, France maybe (my French isn't great so maybe not). Look you get the picture.
You're not incredibly boring in conversation
No offence to anyone who has bought a house but have you heard yourself? You talk about it constantly. It's like the week of January 31st when everyone's discussing tax, but it goes on for months and most other people can't relate to you. Also, you look tired and upset and, because the house as so expensive, you're living in the middle of nowhere. You'll have to drive for three hours to get to work. I don't hugely envy you.
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Picture: Taken from 2 Girls 1 Flat
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.