What are the pros and cons of living in someone's basement?
Basement life seems to be the choice for people looking for a cheap place to rent. So what are the perks and the pitfalls of living in one?
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Answers ( 1 )
The obvious advantage is financial: every dollar you don't spend is a dollar you can save -- and every dollar brings you closer to financial freedom (or as I like to call it, "freedom"). So if you can save, say $200 a month on rent, then you can plow $150 of that into a regular investment and still have an extra $50 in your pocket.
Other advantages I can think of are that it's a cooler place to live (temperature cool, that is!) in the summertime and it's less of a pain going up/down stairs than, for instance, a fourth-floor walkup.
Disadvantages? Well, it's a basement. Natural light might be awful. It might be on the damp side, requiring you to run a dehumidifer to keep things livable. If you're in a city, the street noise might be at its worst (but maybe the dehumidifer acts as a white-noise machine that mitigates that!). If you're in a crime-prone area, maybe bars on the windows will be necessary and that's not a good look. But how much do those things actually matter to you? That depends on you. Maybe you're the out-and-about type of person who is constantly at work, at school, at play, or with friends and you only come home to collapse into bed and start again the next day -- then who cares about natural light?
So you'd want to balance the pros and cons beforehand and decide if it's right for you. And even if you think, on balance, it isn't -- you might consider giving it a shot for six months anyway. Those big negatives might not matter as much to you after a month as you thought they did -- and the money you save will be an unambigiously good thing. :-)