Some cities just have it.
Every time I come to Paris, I sooner or later end up thinking about buying a small pied-à-terre.
The process is always the same. I start eyeing apartment buildings, make mental notes on good addresses and imagine myself sitting in the corner café next to our own little place.
Then I start browsing apartment ads. And every time I am astonished by the price level. People from all over the world seem to have the same idea of a second home in Paris.
That is when realism strikes. I wouldn’t be spending more than a few weeks a year in the apartment and with it would come maintenance costs, bureaucracy and plenty of other things to worry about.
To make good use of the investment, I would have to rent out the flat on its idle times, which would mean more maintenance, more bureaucracy and further worries. What’s even worse, the apartment would then not feel like a home anymore, it would feel like a rental apartment.
Therefore, we rent.
This, I believe, is a major lifestyle decision. Should you concentrate on assets that secure your position (and your children’s) or look at optimizing cash flow? Save your money to do things when you retire or spend a little more to live today?
This thought was what I liked in the bestseller The 4-hour workweek when it came out a few years ago. The book is no literary classic, but it promoted in a fresh way short-term life balance over the concept of saving for a later day that may never come.
(As a side note: Looking at his web site now, it seems that Mr Ferriss has detached himself from his own philosophy. I doubt he can manage all his new books and the bazaar around them in just four hours a week.)
I am not saying that you should burn it all on vanities, but I vote for a little more cash flow right now. Pay the loans back a bit slower and spend some of it on travel, clothes, fast cars, art – whatever makes you happy (I count cars and art as cash flow because they offer instant gratification and only a tiny minority of items hold their value over time).
We put too much effort on collecting assets. With assets come worries and I don’t want to worry. Renting is worry-free and worry-free hours are valuable. So there you go – a piece of home-made life philosophy from a café in Paris: To live is not to worry about assets.
We’ll always have rental apartments.
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