When it comes to homeownership, it’s more than building equity.
Jason Zweig recently wrote a letter to his grandchildren in The Wall Street Journal that documents the joys of homeownership and what many young adults may miss if they continue to be lifelong renters. He says it took him decades to learn the true value.
Zweig wrote the letter after working with his brother to move their 87-year-old mother from the place she called home for half a century. The home contained memories. It was where the family grew up and even where her husband died in 1981. Their mother had turned the home almost into a museum of family treasures over the years.
“I have no emotional attachment to the house,” Zweig’s mother told him. “I never liked it physically. But everything important that ever happened in our life as a family is here, and I can’t just leave all that behind.”
“A home is more than an investment,” Zweig writes. “It is the place that helps shape who we are. Your generation may well be thankful that you don’t have to bear the burdens of owning one – the mortgage, the maintenance, the pain of pulling up roots that run decades deep. My generation, and my mother’s, are thankful we had the blessings.”
Source: “The Real Value of a Home,” The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 27, 2015)
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