Sir Mayor

I didn’t fully understand the concept of mortgages vs Rent until I invited a financial advisor to my home while living in the Netherlands 🇳🇱. Growing up in Nigeria 🇳🇬, all I knew was that my parents would take loans year after year to gradually build their house. That was my understanding of homeownership. I wasn’t really educated on how mortgages worked or how buying a home could compare financially with renting. So one day, I invited a Dutch financial advisor to our home. My wife and I welcomed him into our living room, and we started discussing our financial situation. He asked several questions about our income, expenses, savings, and even requested some supporting documents. Then he proceeded to educate us on how we could build wealth through homeownership. He introduced me to a website called Funda, where we could search for properties within our budget. I started searching for houses, and when we eventually found one we liked, he ran the numbers and calculated what our monthly mortgage payment would look like. To our surprise, the monthly mortgage payment was LOWER than what we were paying in rent! 😭😂 I was like, wait ooo, so we could actually own a house and pay less monthly than what we’re paying someone else’s landlord? 😂😂 But there was one challenge! We couldn’t find anything affordable in the city where we were renting. However, we eventually found a perfect home about 30 minutes away. That meant I would have to give up my daily bicycle rides to work and start commuting instead. 😂 Thankfully, my employer covered public transportation costs from anywhere in the Netherlands to the office. So basically, I could commute to work for FREE! 😂 That solved the problem! We proceeded with the mortgage application, got approved, and eventually moved into our own home! 🏡🇳🇱 And here’s the interesting part: Throughout the time we owned that house, our monthly housing payments never reached what we had previously been paying in rent! We even had MORE SPACE than we did in our rented apartment! Of course, buying a home comes with other costs and responsibilities, and it isn’t automatically the better financial decision for everyone. But in our own case, it turned out to be a very good decision. Now, let me tell you the most interesting part of this story. 😭 When we eventually decided to relocate to the United States 🇺🇸, we realized that we had actually built up equity in our Dutch home! Something we wouldn’t have accumulated through rent payments if we had continued renting. We eventually sold the property, and the equity we had built became a major part of the down payment for our first home in America! 🇺🇸🏡 Imagine that! A house we bought in the Netherlands helped us become homeowners in the United States. That’s when I truly appreciated what that Dutch financial advisor had taught us in our living room. One lesson I learned is that sometimes, getting an affordable home means being willing to live a little farther from your workplace, especially when you’re working with a limited budget. And sometimes, all you need is someone who understands the financial system to sit you down and explain the opportunities available to you. Financial education is really important!