Have you considered renting as opposed to buying somewhere for two decades?
As an example, say you pick Texas, and you buy a home in Dallas Texas, planning to stay there for 20 years. Then, you receive an opportunity to go take a job in Houston Texas at substantially more pay 3 years into your mortgage, but you’d have to move.
This can happen to any place we pick, to any of your five criteria, over 20 years. Recessions can occur, Laws can change, etcetera.
Renting as opposed to owning allows you flexibility to switch much easier. If Texas encounters a recession, you may be able to move to Maryland to take advantage of a biotech boom. If Maryland passes too many restrictive laws, you can move to Florida. If Florida then weakens property rights, you can move to Britain. The specific locations don’t matter as much for these examples. The important thing is that you are not as tied down, and so can fine tune your location to your five criteria.
This is not to say that renting is certainly the best for all circumstances. If it turns out Texas worked for 20 years, and you rented for those 20 years, it probably would have been better to buy.
Bear in mind that there are both Pro and Anti Rent oriented sites on the web, which will tell you things like “Never rent ever, you are throwing money away.” and “Never buy ever, it is a financial death sentence if anything goes wrong.” A full discussion of this would probably be outside of the scope of your question. But there are a lot of rent vs mortgage calculators available to run the numbers for you, such as here: http://realestate.yahoo.com/calculators/rent_vs_own.html
The main reason I was against renting is that it tends to be low status to rent (since poor people who can’t afford to buy often rent). You have a good point- it’s just an additional tradeoff.
Have you considered renting as opposed to buying somewhere for two decades?
As an example, say you pick Texas, and you buy a home in Dallas Texas, planning to stay there for 20 years. Then, you receive an opportunity to go take a job in Houston Texas at substantially more pay 3 years into your mortgage, but you’d have to move.
This can happen to any place we pick, to any of your five criteria, over 20 years. Recessions can occur, Laws can change, etcetera.
Renting as opposed to owning allows you flexibility to switch much easier. If Texas encounters a recession, you may be able to move to Maryland to take advantage of a biotech boom. If Maryland passes too many restrictive laws, you can move to Florida. If Florida then weakens property rights, you can move to Britain. The specific locations don’t matter as much for these examples. The important thing is that you are not as tied down, and so can fine tune your location to your five criteria.
This is not to say that renting is certainly the best for all circumstances. If it turns out Texas worked for 20 years, and you rented for those 20 years, it probably would have been better to buy.
Bear in mind that there are both Pro and Anti Rent oriented sites on the web, which will tell you things like “Never rent ever, you are throwing money away.” and “Never buy ever, it is a financial death sentence if anything goes wrong.” A full discussion of this would probably be outside of the scope of your question. But there are a lot of rent vs mortgage calculators available to run the numbers for you, such as here: http://realestate.yahoo.com/calculators/rent_vs_own.html
The main reason I was against renting is that it tends to be low status to rent (since poor people who can’t afford to buy often rent). You have a good point- it’s just an additional tradeoff.