Is it better to rent an apartment or buy a manufactured home? I found a good location where they are selling a 2 bedroom manufactured home for $170K. The mortgage calculator says, for a no downpayment for 30 years at 6.12% interest, I pay $1,032.39 monthly.

Today, Im renting a studio at $1,000 a month. So I thought would the mobile home be better? I mean in 3 years, I would have paid out 36,000 (more if the rent goes up). That money goes away. But I buy that mobile home, I can sell it in 3 years for a super discounted deal, say, 80,000. I would not be only be able to regain the 36,000 but also would have made money.

Will this approach really work?

I have a dream, that one day, the ability of our children to live in decent neighborhoods will be based not on the content of their pocketbook, but on the content of their character.

Several years ago I thought I was clever because I found a great deal in an obscure neighborhood with good value. (Cheap rent but without the usual neighborhood negatives.)

But now the gangbangers and illegal aliens are moving in because they’re getting displaced from gentrifying neighborhoods.

invest4life – In some cases renting is throwing money out. But I am the front page photo of renting is better sometimes. I was working a miserable tech job in Dallas hating every minute. Rather than buying a home and putting down the 20% downpayment, I continued to rent. A fantastic opportunity in Denver opened offering nearly double salary but I had to act fast. I left Dallas June 3rd, instructed to report to work June 5th…..my apartment lease expired on June 4th!! Relocation was a breeze with me jumping into the car and leaving that miserable place behind. No house to sell, paperwork to deal with, just walked away and forgot all about it.

It is the intengible factor which makes the difference.

This has led me to obsess on finding and keeping the most affordable housing I can find. (Took me four months of daily pavement-pounding one time.)

Most people don’t know this little tidbit about low-rent housing: A large proportion of low-rent units are occupied NOT by renters with the lowest incomes, but by renters with average incomes who have ferreted (or in some cases networked) out the cheapest deals. The resulting “mismatch” forces many with the lowest incopmes to pay much higher rents than they should be paying.

Equal sized one bedroom apartments in Boston’s North Shore ran nearly $1400! So instead, we started looking at multi-family houses which were rented out. We ended up with a decent sized two-bedroom with a good choice of amenities for $1200.

However I think it’s important you consider your apartment more than just a temporary space. Most people rent for at least one or two years, so why not spend some pocket change decorating and making the space comfortable.

The landlord never raised my rent; he was just happy to have somebody that paid on time.

We found a house, though, and were remarking this morning how much healthier we both were over the past year, despite the fact that my wife spends all day every day cooped up in a small room with 100 other people.

Moving to a suburb of DC, we decided to sacrifice price (rent for an equivalent apartment here is 50% higher) for proximity to work (5 minutes each way instead of the original 90 minutes from Baltimore) and a few extra amenities (in-apartment washer and dryer, ceiling fans, stuff that doesn’t break all the time). But our apartment was still on the cheaper side compared to most others in the area.