During my interview for my current role, I engaged in conversation with the company owner. Being in an interview, I was fairly non-confrontational about the whole thing.

I let him talk and what he said kind of bothered me. His prediction was that in the future (he didn’t give a timeline), people would not own things any longer, they would rent/lease them at most. And he meant everything. From the car you drive to the house you live in… Everything would be delivered as a service.

It bothered me because I’m pretty sure I already know people who live that way. They don’t own their home, they rent. They lease their car, use ISP provided routers, finance or otherwise obtain their phone through their mobile provider, use streaming services almost exclusively (no purchased video/audio content)… I could go on.

His statements were not what bothered me, the fact that he’s probably right, is what bothered me.

On the flip side, I financed my car and it’s since been paid off, I still buy music and movies and whatnot, I house my data on servers that I own, for easy access (I “stream” it from my own stuff, to my own stuff), I’ve long used BYOD plans for my mobile phone, buying my device directly from the manufacturer, I recently bought a house and I’m paying off that mortgage.

I own just about everything I have/use. I am the outlier. The services I subscribe to are things you cannot buy, stuff like telephone and mobile data, internet access, etc.

So apparently I’m weird; and when the people like me, from my generation and I die, there’s going to be fewer and fewer people that want to own things, generation over generation.

Look, it’s not a bad thing, since operational expenses are usually easier to handle and calculate than capital expenses. Owning things comes with costs that renters don’t have to deal with. If my furnace dies tomorrow, I can’t just call up a landlord and make it their problem. I have to fix it, pay for someone else to fix it, or replace it, out of my own pocket. If my car breaks down, I don’t just get handed another and continue on while they fix and resell the broken one. I need to get it to a shop and pay them to correct the problem. Ownership comes with responsibility and liability that renters generally don’t deal with.

Ownership also has its upsides. If something isn’t broken, I don’t have to fix it, nor do I have to pay to get it fixed, in that way, as long as everything keeps working, once it’s paid off, I don’t have to spend any money for it to keep working. I don’t have to pay to maintain access to my car, whether I use it or not. I still have to buy gas, and pay for oil changes and whatnot, but everyone has to do that. If my car sits in my driveway for months, the costs associated with keeping it are basically the cost of storing it on my own property. Which is negligible. Meanwhile renters/lessors still have to pay to keep the vehicle even if it’s not doing anything. It can be quite economical, but it entirely relies on keeping things well past the date that you pay off the capital expense. My car is 12 years old now. Still runs great, probably needs a new battery though… some of the recent starts have been questionable. Still, that’s maybe $100 for the new battery and an hour or so of my time, far less than even one month of paying for a lease on a vehicle.

I will get long term benefit from owning stuff. My servers were picked up for around $2000 about 10 years ago and I’m just upgrading them now. They’re around as old as my car. Over 10+ years, that works out to $200/yr, or $16/month. Most of you more than that on streaming services alone. Granted that my upgrade will be much more than $2k, probably double, but still, even $30/mo is something most probably spend on streaming. I’ve also had many hours of education and entertainment from doing things other than just streaming from my servers. I’ve gotten way more than $50/month of value from having them.

The bottom line is that people like me, who own their stuff, can extract far more value from it than what they pay. People who rent everything pay continually just to maintain access to what they want to keep using, regardless of whether they get that amount back in value from having the item. The catch is, I can’t really shed cost if I need to. If I’m paying to finance a thing, like a car, I must keep paying for that until it’s paid off. A lease can be terminated, and you stop paying for that thing. If you need it again in the future, you get a new lease for something that is similar or the same. Unless you get locked in, or need it regardless of other factors like income. You can’t really stop paying rent and still have a place to live.

There’s merit on both sides, I’m just not a fan of burning money on things I will always need, which I can buy instead of renting/leasing. Everyone is different.