Hidden Costs of Owning Your Home


hidden costs

Plainly speaking, we Pinoys have a culture of “Home Ownership”. Para sa atin, owning a house is one of THE milestones in life and many tend to think of renting as a waste of money — in fact I have seen ads touting renting as “nagtatapon ka ng pera”. I can see where they are coming from, and I agree to a certain point, but what they tend to gloss over are the hidden costs that come with owning a house — costs that were once again brought to the fore by last night’s bad weather.

Home ownership

What am I talking about? Time and stress.


Let’s crunch some numbers. If, on average, you spend three hours a day commuting to and from work; that constitutes 15 hours a week, 60 hours a month and 720 hours a year. 720 hours is one entire month. Are you aware that you spend one month or more of every year on the road? How much stress does that put on you?

Does this therefore make renting a place near where you work automatically better? Far from it. Renting has its own set of problems and issues — the first being the fact that you are regularly paying for something that you will never own. THAT will always be a major issue.

But what I’m driving at is that when you finally do choose to buy that house for you and your family, your decision has to go beyond the monetary figures. You may very well be able to afford the monetary costs of owning the house, but what about the time and stress of owning that house? Put another way, how much value would you put to having 15 or 20 more days every year to do the things you want?

Aya Laraya, Investment Advocate

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Comments

  1. Eugene says

    I need to know more. I’m running a bodybuilding gym business…it has been running 2 years now but it isn’t earning that much yet. But i can’t give it up…bodybuilding is my passion. While running that gym business, i work for a company in makati area.

  2. Ian Quinn L. Sureta says

    From my own point of view, I definitely disagree with the above writings by Mr. Laraya. This post is partly misleading and just purely focus on the value of money which is not the ultimate meaning of owning a house.
    First of all, ” Home is totally different from a House.I will not further discuss that statement because I do believe that everyone can easily differentiate the correct meaning of the two words.”
    Let us not get be blinded by just the so called monetary analysis. Instead, let us go back to the golden rule which reminds us that “MONEY is not EVERYTHING”.
    When you set a goal of building your own house, one should expect the difficulties co-exists, due to TIME and STRESS. This is for the main reason that, “mas masarap sa pakiramdam ang magkarooon ng sariling tahanan na galing sa bunga ng iyong pawis at pagsisisikap.” There is no short cuts for such a great achievement, unless you are inside the family of the corrupt politicians.

  3. Wesley Gonzales says

    I think what Mr. Laraya is emphasizing on this blog is the biggest consideration when deciding to own a house namely, the “accessibility”. Always look closely at the hidden costs of “time” and “transportation expenses” resulting to stress in choosing your dream home. It makes better sense when you get to save more by temporarily renting closer to work thereby allowing you more opportunity to invest more and grow your money until you’ve save enough to find a house that you can afford (and closer to work).

  4. says

    You could definitely see your enthusiasm in the work
    you write. The sector hopes for even more passionate writers such as
    you who are not afraid to say how they believe.
    At all times follow your heart.

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