Why is our life’s ambition just to own our own home?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Perhaps it’s because our forefathers were tossed off their smallholdings like rag dolls by invading planters back in the day – but there is something deep in our psyche that puts owning our own homes close to the very top of our life’s work.

And we devote the best years of that life to getting our hands of the deeds of the place we call home as though owning the roof over your head was an achievement instead of a given.

We spend 20 or 25 years paying back the price of this home, sacrificing so much else we could be doing with our time, energy and money – just to someday say we’re actually homeowners.

And yet when us media-types speak of homeowners, we’re actually not talking about people who own their homes at all – because these days you’re lucky if you pull that feat off before you retire…if not before you die.

Your working life is likely to be 35 years – and for almost all of that time, you’ll spend a substantial part of your pay on reducing the deficit on your house.

But for what?

We place a notional value on our houses and we celebrated like Lottery winners as that price escalated through the good times as though we planned to cash in our chips and live off the fat of the land on the side of the road.

You can only sell your house for profit if you have two of them or you know of somewhere you can buy a cheaper one; for most people, how much their house is worth is utterly irrelevant because you have to live somewhere and it might as well be the place you’re already in.

The value of your home is important however when it is significantly less than your mortgage on it – and the hundreds of people traipsing in and out of courts up and down the country trying to hold onto those homes know all about this.

They are treated like common criminals because they made the mistake of getting caught up in the property boom, by buying a house that wasn’t worth what they had to pay for it.

They did this more out of fear than any notion of greed; the train of thought was that, as ridiculously dear as it is now, it will be twice as bad if you wait another year.

So the big guys built a thousand houses and if it didn’t work out they walked away from it all.

The little guy can’t walk away because they have nowhere else to go – and some of them find themselves stuck in a house that worth a third of what they paid for it, in a half-empty, unfinished estate in a part of the country that they never really wanted to move to in the first place.

Now the value of your home is important because the banks want you to pay up and you can’t – and even by handing back the keys, you won’t clear the debt because you just tried to get onto the bottom rung of the property ladder when the rest of the world was clambering all the way to the top.

Even if you’re lucky enough to own a house that you can continue to pay for – and one that’s not depreciating faster than your old eircom shares portfolio – you’re still spending a ridiculously big slice of your life earnings on what should be a basic human right.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.