Do we have an unhealthy obsession with ownership?

We were staying at a luxury lakeside penthouse in Queenstown last year, enjoying some drinks in the spa with a breathe taking view. My husband then said - how much does a home like this cost? How can we make buying something like this happen?

We did some number crunching and worked out for this to happen we would need to:

• sell our home in Auckland

• use the full proceeds as the deposit

• be able to service a mortgage of $14,000 per month for the next 20 years

So pretty much not something we can afford unless I was to return to full time work and we were okay with working until our 70s (a hard no to both for me!).

He seemed pretty defeated that this dream seemed so out of reach. I then asked him - do we need to own something like this to enjoy it? Fact of the matter is that we can afford to come here once a month if we really wanted to - without having to worry about maintenance, rising cost of rates, insurance, etc. He then agreed that I was right and for some reason in his mind he had the story that 'it is a ‘waste’ to spend money on renting it and it would have been better to own it -but after looking at the numbers this didn’t make sense at all!

It was easy to trace his mindset of ‘owning is better’ given our obsession with property ownership (especially in NZ).

I have also found myself in various other situations in my life where society tells us to assume that the best option is to buy, however after running the numbers it made more sense to rent such as:

• a hedge trimmer that we would only use once every year (okay, I probably should be doing this more often!)

• a designer dress or wedding dress that I would wear once

• owning one car and using Uber on the rare occasions when we needed a second form of transport

Have you ever defaulted to thinking owning was the best or only option?

Photo by R ARCHITECTURE