And you may find yourself in a beautiful house /
With a beautiful wife /
And you may ask yourself, well /
How did I get here? /
The Talking Heads captured the zeitgeist better than their contemporaries, but they didn’t have a crystal ball. They couldn’t imagine that, 30 years hence, a mushrooming student debt crisis would render their most famous query moot for most of their fans’ kids.
Homeownership? These days, it’s for trust funders and VC-funded founders, at least anyplace anyone who ironically appreciates “Once in a Lifetime” would want to live.
Ah, but kids today are every bit as resourceful as the early Gen Xers who bought the Talking Heads their first proper houses. Perhaps more so.
In a particularly enjoyable-to-write deep dive for Money Crashers, I unpacked an increasingly common trend that’s already come home to roost in my social circle: buying a house with a friend or acquaintance.
At first blush, buying a house with a friend seems like a slam dunk. Why wouldn’t you want to be your own landlord, if you could? Why wouldn’t you want your monthly housing payments to build equity that you can tap down the road?
Besides, if you’re not in a serious domestic relationship and have no plans to couple up, pooling your resources with a non-romantic friend or partner might be your only realistic shot at near-term homeownership. You shouldn’t have to choose between the single life and the homeowner life.
But you do want to think twice about entering into a long-term ownership agreement — a business partnership, really — even with someone you’ve known for years. My post explores the downsides of buying a house with a friend, too, and makes clear that homeownership — joint or otherwise — is not for everyone.
Read the whole thing here.