What have most of us been told since childhood. Do well at school, go to university, get a good job and buy a house. The school bit I get, a decent education is absolutely paramount, but the rest. I’ve never bought into the myth about home ownership, I could never see the point. That was of course, until I got married and had kids. A family needs roots, a stable platform to build from. I still wasn’t convinced that buying a house was the answer though.
To me, getting people to buy their own homes was just an act of subjugation. What better way to keep people working for most of their lives than to tie them down with twenty-five years of mortgage repayments. When asked what they do for a living, how many people follow up their answer with the statement, “still, it pays the mortgage”.
There is one inherent flaw in this plan to enslave people into a life of toil and drudgery though. House ownership, especially when it takes so long to achieve this goal, is a matter of diminishing returns. We live on a relatively small island here in the UK and there is only so many houses. Sooner and later, there’s not going to be enough to go round. What then? How are you going to enslave future generations?
Student loans of course! Genius!! After all, it’s still part of that mantra that is drummed into us since we were kids. University, good job, buy house. Apparently, if statistics are to believed (who said that about damned lies!), it is predicted that the average age of moving out of the family home is around thirty-four. Thirty-four, are you kidding me!! But it doesn’t matter that this generation of university graduates can’t afford a mortgage. Of course they can’t. They’ve got massive student loans to pay off!
Now, if you’ve read any of my previous diatribes, you will know that I always like to offer some kind of answer. My answer this time. Stop paying! Stop paying all of it. Mortgages, student loans, the lot. What are the banks going to do if we all decided to stop paying our mortgages. Take us all to court? Of course not. Society would be forced to come up with a new way of doing things. I still believe that we should pay rent, nothing in life is for free. Just without the burden of knowing that you are going to be in debt for your whole working life. Who knows. Maybe people will start doing jobs that they enjoy, rather than jobs that they have to do. Maybe we will see a rise in the numbers of nurses, policeman, teachers. You know, the jobs that matter and make a difference. Pie in the sky? Maybe, if we do nothing. Imagine if we all acted on this. Imagine what the outcome would be.
You could end up living a life that you actually enjoy. Fancy that!!!