The house was a three-bedroom raised ranch. It was in a quiet, treed cluster of houses that was more country than city.
We looked at it twice, paying attention to the big backyard with a forest behind it.
We started talking. Started dreaming.
“The kitchen sucks, but we could expand it in a few years. What if we do an addition? The windows could be changed? If we knock down walls in the basement, we can make it workable…”
And then, after wrestling with the decision for a few weeks, my wife and I realized the truth: We hated this house…
We were just desperate.
Not really desperate for housing. Fortunately, we had a roof over our heads and enough bedrooms for everyone.
We were desperate to fit the mold. We didn’t want to keep being losers who rented. Our families were pretty sure it was a sign that we were failed adults.
What were we doing to our kids by not giving my family home? How could we build financial stability without the “forced savings” of a mortgage?
Finally, we were forced to answer some hard questions:
- Do we want this house? No
- Do we want to spend $5,000 of our cash flow every month on this asset? No.
- Is it realistic to expect we can do a ton of renovations and not lose money? No.
- Is a house a good investment right now? It doesn’t make sense for us.
Since quiet quitting is a word that gets thrown around to describe checking out at work, we had to ask the question: Were we quiet quitting the housing market?
What is quiet quitting the housing market?
“Quiet quitting” in the workplace meant you just checked out and did the bare minimum. And quiet quitting in the housing market would be something similar. You do the bare minimum to keep housed.
No going all in, throwing your time, energy, and money into a house. Instead, we’d keep a roof over our heads and spend our money elsewhere.
It could be because you can’t afford a house. But it might also just be because you think the whole dang thing is ridiculous.
We’ll get to that.
Why we’re quitting the housing market
The social pressure
There’s a sickening social pressure to buy a house, and quiet quitting the housing market means swimming upstream.
For a certain generation, a house meant that you had arrived. It was a sign of success and stability.
It’s freaking difficult to buck this trend. So many well-meaning friends and family assumed that we hadn’t made it without one.
They would ask questions about our kids. They were “worried” about us. They even offered to lend us money.
And we started to give people the answer they expected: “We can’t afford it.”
It usually shut down conversation and left people pitying us, which was an easy way to avoid the awkwardness of the conversation.
Because that social narrative worked on us too.
It wasn’t about the money
The thing that nobody knew (unless they read this blog post, I guess) is that it wasn’t about the money.
We actually make more than pretty much anyone I know. Our current income puts us in the top 1% in our country, and we easily clear the “yearly income you need to buy a house” number.
We made enough money to do it. So why did we decide to quiet the housing market anyways?
It felt like a bad investment
“Houses are always a good investment.”
That was the mantra, and for my parents and grandparents, that was true!
But it just didn’t sound right.
What is an investment? With the housing market, we usually use the word investment to mean “my house increased in value.”
While that’s not a definition I agree with, let’s ask the question: Will my house increase in value?
Hard to say. As the op-eds are quick to remind us, there is a very low supply in the housing market. that makes you feel like you better take what you can get.
But since the government is raising interest rates, actively trying to tamp down the cost of living (which includes the housing market), buying a primary residence as an “investment”–based only on the appreciation of the asset–seems a bit farfetched.
The truth is, in my country (Canada), there are tons of millennials who bought houses only to watch the values drop and the interest rates go sky-high. If they manage to hold onto the house, it might be a good investment one day, but if you lost 400,000 in the last few years on a housing market gamble, you’re probably pretty mad.
Buying a house–especially right now–doesn’t feel like investing. It feels like playing a million-dollar slot machine.
It would kill our cash flow
Making good money is fantastic. You know what’s not fantastic? Giving $5,000 of your income away every month for housing.
Robert Kiyosaki had a different definition of an investment in his wealth-building book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
He famously said, “An investment puts money in your pocket. A liability takes money out.”
(He also pretty blatantly teaches that your home is not an investment.)
That money represents an opportunity cost. It’s money that won’t be spent on other things. It’s money we could put into our brand, or into investments.
Even though we can afford to buy a house, doing it would seriously cramp our style. And we spend most of our hard-earned money paying interest to the bank instead of buying real assets with cashflow.
It felt like handcuffs
Quiet quitting the housing market wasn’t just about money. It was about lifestyle.
Hanging that enormous asset around our necks represented a loss of real freedom and opportunities.
The house would take our energy, our work, and our money. And while I’m willing to do that for the right house–the beautiful thing about renting is that it takes almost no energy.
And freeing up our energy meant that we could focus on other things.
Here’s what quiet quitting the housing market means for us
Traveling
We’ve lived abroad a few times, and have been lucky enough to call Berlin, Nice, and Athens our homes.
And not being dug into a house means we can feel great about spending our extra money traveling.
Canada has a ridiculously high cost of living. And we learn from experience that booking airbnbs in some places for long stays is actually cheaper than renting here.
So quiet quitting the housing market means we can travel and build memories with our kids that will last forever. We’ll work remotely from other countries and experience the world.
Spending lots of time with family
I was raised in a small mining town in Canada.
A lot of my family still lives there. The fact that we work remote and have freedom from the house means that we can go spend long stay time with our family
And we do! When I was a kid, living far from my grandparents meant I could spend a few days a year with them.
And we can spend weeks with our families–until we overstay our welcome. 😂
Getting what we want
Instead of buying a house we don’t want, we can save up until we get really excited about something. Renting at this point is a few thousand dollars cheaper every month for us.
That’s extra money we can put into savings, investments, money that will give us options when the time comes.
We can be intentional about our life
Here’s the real power. We actually get to be intentional about designing our lives. No working on autopilot. No doing something just because it’s what’s expected.
Quiet quitting the housing market means that we can choose the type of life we want to live. And thinking differently is a superpower.
