One of the advantages of purchasing your home is that it has doubled as both a source of shelter and as a source of saving. As well real estate has historically been a good investment.
If you are happy with renting and your current home meets the needs of your family then you should feel no pressure at all to purchase a home. However, everybody should save some money to invest for the future, and you can do that without buying a house. Having a mortgage provides you with the discipline of obtaining shelter and saving in a regular payment.
If you choose to rent long term you need to figure out a way to save & invest in addition to writing your monthly rent cheque. I would recommend speaking to your financial advisor and setting up a monthly investment program.
The draw back to the rent & invest approach is that your landlord has invested money to own your home and must be charging you a rent greater than the cost of owning the property in order to earn money from it. This in turn mean that it must normally be more expensive to rent your home than it would be to own it directly so you end up with less money to invest with in the long run.
When you first buy real estate the proportion of your mortgage payment that goes towards savings is very small but increases with each payment until the mortgage is paid off. As a renter it would be possible to be initially saving more money per month and quickly grow the value of your investments; however you also need to consider the potential for the real estate to increase in value and as a renter you will never stop paying rent.
Now lets consider how the baby boomer generation will impact the real estate market as they retire since they have always had a significant impact on society. Lets start by noting that nobody can predict the future, so we cannot say their exact impact on the housing market in any specific year.
However if we look at the broader trend that as of today North Americas population is still growing and as long as it continues to grow there will be a need for more housing. In addition a growing population means that every day the baby boomers fall as percentage of the total population.
The baby boomers were born in an eighteen year period between 1946 and 1964 so they will not all retire or sell their homes at once. Nor will they will they flood the housing market by selling all of their homes at once. We should not be facing a US style housing melt down. The passing of large 4 bedroom homes from the baby boomers to the next generation should be a gradual process with lots of young families willing and able to buy.
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