Renting versus Buying a Home: The Happy Philosopher’s Experience

This has been a busy week for guest posts on other blogs. Earlier this week I wrote a post over on 1500days about how to be the happiest person in the room. Today’s blog post is published over at PhysicianonFIRE.com. It’s about the decision process of buying and renting a house. First, let me tell you who Physician on Fire (PoF) is and why I wrote this article for him.

PoF is an anesthesiologist who writes about financial independence, early retirement and other personal finance topics from his perspective as a physician. It turns out he and I have quite a bit in common.  We are both physicians.  We both love personal finance, and share a similar philosophy of working to achieve financial freedom at a relatively young age. I had the pleasure of doing a guest post over there last year where I had the opportunity to answer questions and introduce myself to his readers.

He has relentlessly featured my blog posts before I even had much of an audience. He helped spread the word about the sorts of things we are doing over here at The Happy Philosopher, and has driven a lot of traffic my way. I am very grateful for his support. Many of you reading this may have come to discover my blog from him.

If you are a physician or any high income earning professional you will find some really good stuff over there, so after you read my guest post, stick around and check out some of his other work. I think you will enjoy his writing. Additionally he has a weekly roundup of posts he publishes each Sunday from around the web that are quite good.

Why a guest post?

Great question. Back to the topic at hand.

You have probably noticed this blog is a bit scattered at times. It’s one part philosophy, one part personal finance, a little running and even the occasional experiment thrown in there for good measure. It’s not as focused as many other blogs.

This is both good and bad. Good in that I have a lot of freedom in what I write, but bad in that unless you are just like me some of the posts may not be relevant to you. Some you will love and others…meh.

I’m also pretty sure SEO (search engine optimization) doesn’t really know what to do with me…

This in and of itself is not a problem, as I trust you are smart enough to filter out the bad posts (to you) and read the good. Hopefully I write enough good ones to keep you engaged and coming back for more. When I put a lot of work into a post I want people to read it, and I just wasn’t sure this post would be widely read here.

Over at PoF I know it will get much more traffic, and reach an audience that is more likely to enjoy and benefit from it. I also really like PoF and I wanted to write an article for him that his readers would love.

The article is about my experience buying a house during residency, and more importantly how to approach the buy vs. rent decision, especially when you know you will be living somewhere for a defined period of time. It’s a long article, and it’s heavier on the personal finance side of things, but please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments (here or over there).

Here is the link:

Renting versus Buying a Home: The Happy Philosopher’s Experience

While you are visiting, here are some of PoF’s posts I love and I think you will enjoy them as well.

http://www.physicianonfire.com/how-much-is-enough/

http://www.physicianonfire.com/happiness-early-retirement/

http://www.physicianonfire.com/50ways/

http://www.physicianonfire.com/physicians-retire-early/

http://www.physicianonfire.com/the-frugal-physician-self-serving-or-self-denial/

http://www.physicianonfire.com/top-5-reasons-to-achieve-financial-independence/