How Much is the Rent?

When I paid off my mortgage, I thought – finally – I’d no longer have to make monthly payments. Anyone who “owns” (a sad term, given the realities) their home knows better. The payments aren’t monthly – like a mortgage or rental payment – but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re making them.

It occurs to me that it would be a helpful exercise – to help people understand the reality of their situation – to think about the payments they’re having to make on a monthly rather than once every six months or once a year basis. This way, it’s very clear you’re paying every month to avoid being evicted from what isn’t really your house, just as if you stopped paying your mortgage or rent. The latter word is italicized because it’s the proper word to use. A mortgage is finite. At some point, you pay the thing off. At the point, no more paying. Rent, on the other hand, is always due – forever. Or at least, for as long as you want to avoid being told you’ve got to leave (and helped to leave, if it comes to that, by the sheriff).

The way property taxes – i.e., the rent you’re required to pay to avoid being evicted from the home you thought you “owned” – are structured is deliberate, in the same way (and for the same reason) that what they call “withholding” was structured the way it is structured. “Withholding” means they subtract money from your paycheck before you even get the chance to hold it, however briefly. The genius of this is it conditioned people to regard their so-called “take home” pay – the money they actually get to hold – as their actual pay. In other words, they are conditioned to not even miss what they never actually had. If instead people had to write a check to the government come April 15 for all the money the government says they “owe,” there would probably be a revolution. Instead, people just plod along, never missing the money they never actually had (though they did actually work to earn it).

That is why they “withhold” the money you never get and so never miss.

Property taxes are similar in that they are structured to induce the false belief in the “homeowner” that he is that rather than a renter. Things would be a lot clearer if the rent were due every month – as opposed to once every six months or once a year, which is how property taxes are generally structured. People would feel it more. Or at least, more frequently. They’d have to think about writing that rent check every month, which would serve to rind them that they are in fact renters. This would be psychologically healthy in that it is always psychologically healthy to come to terms with reality; to not live with a false belief floating around in your head. It would also probably awaken people to the affront – very much as it would if people had to cut that big check to the government every April 15, rather than anticipate their “refund” for a small pittance of the money withheld from them.

Especially if the rent goes up. Which of course it always does, because the landlord – your county or city, in this case – is the arbiter of how much the rent will be. When you were a renter – of an apartment – did you have an say over how much the rent was going to be? When the landlord decides to raise the rent, you pay what he says or else you no longer have a place to stay. Property taxes work exactly the same way.

My property tax/rent is currently about $250/month – which probably seems like not much to people who are having to pay $1,500 or more to rent the apartment or house they’re living in. That is indeed a lot to pay each month. But – in my defense – I paid that much (more than that much) in monthly mortgage payments to “own” my house. I paid a five figure sum as a down payment on my first house, then heavy monthly mortgage payments for years. I currently own my second house – after having paid six figures for it. Yet I still do not actually own it, even though I finally did pay off the mortgage. The rent I have paid so far since I paid off my mortgage amounts to around $50,000. That’s a lot of rent, isn’t it? And this rent will never be paid off, no matter how long I “own” my house – and the same goes for you, too. Many people will – after decades of living in the house they paid off years before – have paid rent equivalent to a third of what they paid to buy the home they don’t actually own.

It is – arguably – the most vicious of all taxes, even more so than the withholding tax on income, which you can realistically avoid paying at some point by simply not earning income.

Well, you could do that, were it not for having to pay the rent.

. . .

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