Millionaire home renters: The start of a multi-income bracket trend

“We steadily began to realize the magnitude of the task ahead of us, not even in terms of financial resources, but just time and effort and coordination. The hour that we can save a day, it’s time that we can spend with the kids or to have a glass of wine together.” Those are the words of biotech executive Arun Das, as expressed to Wall Street Journal reporters Gina Heeb and Paul Overberg.

Das was explaining his decision to rent where he and his family live, as opposed to buying. Tuck Das’s words away somewhere. They’re a look into the future.

Figure that ways in which the well-to-do spend their money are invariably a preview of how we all eventually spend our money. Housing will be no different in that regard. Das shows why.

The simple truth is that the purchase of a house involves a great deal more than purchasing a house. And that’s the problem, one that foretells a future increasingly defined by renting.

Figure that amassing the wealth necessary to make a home purchase is paradoxically the good part. It’s all about individuals pursuing a particular career pursuit associated with their unique skills and intelligence. The problem – as we point out in our book Bringing Adam Smith Into the American Home – is what follows the joy.

Suddenly specialists within various career pursuits are forced to become generalists, or more realistically specialists in things about which they frequently lack a clue. You need more insulation in your attic. Your windows aren’t double-paned. Your air-conditioning unit is amassing ice, and the replacement will cost $15,000 with installation. But don’t worry, we’ll shave $1,500 off the cost, plus we’re offering low-interest financing.

About all the alleged problems (and many more) associated with your house, what about the knowledge you amassed up to the time of purchase gives you any kind of ability to answer any of the recommendations or critiques? Tick tock, tick tock.

Which is the point. It’s not just that maintaining a house is expensive, it’s that it involves expenses that the vast majority of us are almost completely unequal to in the knowledge sense. About the latter, it would be the triumph of naïve hope to assume that this knowledge deficit decreases those costs. Quite the opposite, most likely.

More troubling, the costs aren’t just of the financial kind whereby we blindly spend on repairs and enhancements that we don’t realistically understand. Arguably the biggest losses have to do with precious time spent thinking housing repairs, enhancements, and costs associated with both at the expense time spent with the kids, thinking about the work that increasingly animates their lives, or time spent having a glass of wine.

Which is why the smart money (Heeb’s and Overberg’s article is titled “These Millionaires Can Afford Their Dream Home. They’re Renting Instead”) is slowly but surely navigating toward renting. Why work so hard (and frequently joyously) in pursuit of a consumptive item that’s so expensive not just in a dollar sense, but also peace of mind and family sense. Why indeed?

Which speaks to what’s ahead. As with so many consumer trends, “venture buyers” from upper income brackets signal how more and more of us will consume in the future. Housing is worrisome principally because the costs associated with ownership are so worryingly high. Watch as more and more consumers of all income and wealth brackets rent their homes so that experts on home maintenance can do their worrying for them.

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