>"renting is just throwing your money away"

Unless you think landlords are running a charity, some part of your mortgage is going to them as profit (over a large enough sample of renters anyways), and some percentage of your rent is covering 'bad tenants' (which you're not, right?).

Their entire improvement section is also something renters tend to not think about. It's a weird situation when renting that you aren't incentivized in any way to make improvements to where you live. You might not even be allowed to.

With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add. Though you also get the luxury of being able to ignore the value add if you just really want to paint that room neon pink for some reason.

> Unless you think landlords are running a charity, some part of your mortgage is going to them as profit (over a large enough sample of renters anyways), and some percentage of your rent is covering 'bad tenants' (which you're not, right?).

You can make the same argument about a bank not being a charity and making a profit from selling you a mortgage (both are true but are not helpful indicators about rent vs buying). Similarly the interest you pay is insuring the bank against bad debtors, which you presumably will not be.

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

You can improve your living situation in a number of ways when renting. If you want a new kitchen or bathroom, rent somewhere new with those things. Renting also affords you the freedom to leave when things go from good to bad (crime, noise, building ammenities, etc.).

> Unless you think landlords are running a charity, some part of your mortgage is going to them as profit

This isn't true due to market dynamics.

If a homeowners mortgage is say 4k/month and they list the property at 4.5k/month and receive no renters they can only do this for so long before they are forced to down the price.

Of course, what actually happens is that they list it for 5k/month because other properties are renting for that amount and that's the market price. But if supply increases in the area or demand decreases then prices will go down possibly below the owner's mortgage cost because uh getting 3.5k/month is better than 0k/month.

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

Just beware that it's usually much less than you put in though. We bought our house for £25k more than the next door neighbours even though they're cookie cutter houses sold within 4 months of each other. Our house was thoroughly modernised, new kitchen, all old windows replaced with double glazed windows, garage converted into home office and a bunch of other stuff. We definitely can't do all this work for £25k.

My understanding is that it does raise the value of the house, but less than you put in. I do find it strange, because personally I'd hate living in a building site or dealing with contractors, so if someone already did an extension/loft conversion that I would've wanted to do, I'd pay a premium. Apparently people want it done 'their way', which I can appreciate, up to a point.

Absolutely true if you're renting a home, but I feel like people never address that most people are renting apartments. These have substantially lower operating costs.

Home buying/rental is a totally fair comparison, but I know several people whose main justification for buying a home, rather than continuing living in an apartment, was that they wanted to, "stop throwing their money away". Totally ignoring how home ownership is actually more costly than renting a suitable apartment.

Of course, I fully recognize their are a lot of advantages to home ownership. Some of which you already called out. However, I doubt those advantages are actually sufficient to justify a small, but significant, portion of home purchases.

I think, in many places, landlords aim to break even with rent covering house expenses and interest on borrowing. The profit comes from capital gains. This works especially "well" when you keep buying places because with rent covering the interest you need very little capital so you can keep buying creating a demand that raises house prices that gives you your profit.

This works great until people are priced out of the market dropping house prices a bit and then you've just got a lot of debt and houses worth less, you go bankrupt and someone _really_ wealthy pick up all your houses at a discount.

You can at least hope that the really wealthy guy didn't get that way selling a "get rich in the property market" book.