All right guys, before I start the video, I know I have hair. Yes, it's real. No, it's not a transplant. I do appreciate all the compliments, and I'm sorry about your girlfriend.

Let's try to stay focused on the content of the video. Renting and owning a home can be financially comparable.

This has been the case in historical data in the US and Canada, and forward-looking estimates suggest it will be similar in the future.

Renters need to be disciplined savers and investors to make it work, but the expected financial outcomes from renting and owning are similar.

People will want to argue with me on that point, but let's just take it as a given for now and discuss what I think is an even more interesting question: finances aside, are homeowners happier than renters?

I'm Ben Felix, portfolio manager at PWL Capital, and I'm going to tell you how home ownership is related to happiness.

Choosing whether to rent or own a home is a huge financial decision. Owning has the benefit of security of tenure.

Nobody will evict you or jack up the rent, but it comes with significant idiosyncratic risk, like major structural problems with the home and market risk, the risk of the real estate market dropping.

Renting can be less secure, especially when housing costs are rising rapidly, and it requires more discipline with saving to accumulate wealth, but it's also a lot more flexible and doesn't require owning a big, illiquid, risky asset.

Based on their unique attributes, depending on your situation, either renting or owning can make sense. On average, over a long period of time, financial outcomes for renters and owners should be similar in an efficient market, and models show they have been similar in Canada and the US for decades.

with a slight edge for renters. I think it's a reasonable starting point to say that renting and owning are financially comparable. Even when people agree with me on that point, I'm usually told that life as an owner is just better.

A lot of people seem to believe that owning a home is necessary for living a good life.

Being a homeowner is romanticized as a means to happiness, while renting is painted as misery. I'm skeptical. I have owned my home for the last three years but rented for many years before that, and personally, I'm no happier as an owner.

I'm probably a little less happy because I find home maintenance tasks to be really annoying.

If someone is truly happier owning than renting, that's great, personal preferences matter, but I'm not convinced that owning a home should be prescribed as a path to contentment.

Renting can certainly have its issues. Rising rents, unattentive landlords, and unexpected renevictions are sure to cause headaches, but home ownership can cause headaches too.

Being your own landlord is time-consuming and often stressful.

I bought a house because we moved to a rural area without a lot of rental options. I really like where we live now because I can go mountain biking, kayaking, and skiing all within a 15-minute walk from my house, but if I could have found a single family home for rent in the same area, I would have done that instead.

To be fair to homeownership, an owned home can offer feelings of control, security, and even pride, but renting has its own well-being benefits and its relatively hands-off nature and flexibility taken together, it's not obvious whether we should expect owning a home to make people happier on average.

My personal experience and opinion only, take this conversation so far but the good news is that the question of whether homeowners are happier than renters has been studied extensively using large data sets from Canada, Switzerland, the US, and Germany, and the results are pretty insightful.

The 2021 study, Home Ownership and Happiness: Evidence from Canada, uses panel data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey to examine the impact of home ownership on individual happiness.

The study controls for individual effects that influence happiness like personality traits and finds that owning a home has no significant impact on happiness.

This Canadian study does find that in the lowest income category, owning a home negatively impacts happiness, likely due to the financial burden that home ownership creates for lower income people.

Similarly, 2024 data from Statistics Canada suggests that for comparable individuals living in comparable dwellings and neighborhoods, renters and owners report similar levels of satisfaction.

This means that holding things like the type and quality of the dwelling and financial health and marital status of the individual constant, the impact of home ownership on life satisfaction, if there is any, is small.

This makes sense to me. All else equal, why would owning rather than renting a home make people happier on average.

Moving outside of Canada, the 2019 paper, Home Ownership and Happiness: Evidence for Switzerland, uses data from the Swiss household panel to find that there is no or even a negative relationship for home ownership making people happy in Switzerland.

The authors find that other factors such as the financial status of the household, health, age, and partnership have a much stronger impact on happiness, while the happiness gains that I am told exist seem elusive in the data.

Future homeowners often overestimate the psychological benefits of owning a home. The 2022 study, Does the Dream of Home Ownership Rest on Biased beliefs finds for over 800 future homeowners in Germany that while home ownership does elevate life satisfaction in their sample, it does so much less than people anticipate when they purchase a home.

This is not surprising because people tend to adapt to their circumstances. The upward bias and expected happiness is stronger for homebuyers who value extrinsic things like status and money.

For these people, buying a home may be a status symbol compared to people with intrinsic goals like personal growth, intimacy, and community.

Extrinsically motivated people are less happy in general, and they overestimate the emotional benefits of achieving their extrinsic goals.

This study suggests that careful thought about why you want to own a home and how it will affect your life is worthwhile.

One important consideration is how owning a home will affect how you spend your time. Day-to-day happiness is largely shaped by how we spend our time minute to minute in it rather than more stable life circumstances that we adapt to.

The 2011 study, The American Dream or the American Delusion, uses data on US women to find that after controlling for income, housing quality, and health, homeowners in the sample are no better off than renters by multiple measures of well-being.

Instead, owners derive significantly more pain from their homes.

A potential explanation is time use differences. Homeowners in the sample spend less time on enjoyable activities like active leisure, which are associated with elevated well-being.

As a homeowner myself, I can tell you that home maintenance tasks have stopped me from doing fun stuff on many occasions. The other reality for homeowners is that in most cases, they will need a large mortgage to finance their purchase.

Mortgages are a great way for young people to access leverage, which can be a good thing financially, but a big pile of debt can take a psychological toll.

The 2024 study in Debt but Still Happy uses panel data from Germany to find a positive relationship between housing satisfaction and home ownership, but no significant positive effects of a home purchase on life satisfaction in the long term.

The authors show that mortgage debt negatively impacts life satisfaction, and increasingly so with larger mortgages relative to incomes. They conclude that the mortgage burden of owning a home can offset any positive psychological effect of home ownership.

This is particularly relevant in Canada right now where the government has relaxed mortgage rules to allow people to borrow more money to purchase homes.

If people incorrectly believe that buying a home will make them happy or overestimate the happiness benefits of owning a home and take on a huge amount of debt to do it, they may end up less happy overall.

Choosing how to pay for housing is an important life decision with financial and non-financial implications. Financially, renting and owning should have similar long-term wealth outcomes.

Non-financially, owning a home is unlikely to increase your life satisfaction, and if it does, it probably won't increase it as much as you expected.

In some cases, owning a home may even decrease happiness by soaking up your active leisure time with home maintenance tasks and saddling you with a big pile of debt.

There are good reasons to buy a home, like wanting to secure your housing in the specific location that you want to settle in, but buying a home on the expectation that it will make you happier is likely to lead to disappointment.

Thanks for watching. I'm Ben Felix, portfolio manager at PWL Capital.

If you want to learn more about how PWL helps people make important financial decisions, you can book a meeting with us below.

No… Homeowners are NOT Happier than Renters

I post videos on investing, financial decision-making, and living a good life.

My name is Ben Felix. I am a Portfolio Manager and the Head of Research at PWL Capital. I am a CFA charterholder and CFP professional. I am securities licensed in Canada by CIRO.

All channel content is produced and owned by PWL Capital Inc.


No… Homeowners are NOT Happier than Renters

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