Rent Instead of Buy And Save Money!
One of the greatest satisfactions in life is purchasing something and knowing you have been granted it due to your hard work and ability to save. It provides a rewarding sense of ownership and pride. Beyond that satisfaction however, comes further expense and ultimately further stress in terms of meeting repayment deadlines. Yes, what I am suggesting is that if saving money is high on your priority list maybe it’s time to start renting your goods instead of buying them!
The list of things you are able to rent in this day in age is never ending and varies, from the standard renting of a house, to hiring a wife or a pair of jeans. Listed below are a mix of some of the simplest ideas and a few quirky ways to save you money for the future by renting:
- Although owning your own home is an important goal to reach in life, sometimes it actually makes more sense to rent. For example, it’s better to rent if your market is inflated because you avoid the risk of paying off a mortgage double the value of your home. The same applies if you plan to move soon, or are saving to buy a home. You’re better off to rent until the time is right, and you’ve saved enough for a large deposit on the house of your dreams.
- Parking spaces. Everyone knows that parking spots in New Zealand can cost a small fortune, especially if you work in or around the city. If you’re unable to utilise public transport, there are other ways to avoid the palaver of finding a park, and the cost of paying for it. You can search for car parks to rent on TradeMe or check out https://www.justpark.com/.
- Instead of buying into “great deals” for fitness equipment from dodgy infomercials that’ll clutter your garage and cost you a small fortune look into renting the gear you need. At $19 p/w for an average treadmill VS $5000 for a new one, you’d have to have hired the treadmill for around 263 weeks or 5 years to spend the same amount. By then you’d be onto your next fitness craze! Most fitness equipment stores offer a rental option, check out Elite Fitness Hire, Fitness World, or on HireThings where you can hire a range of equipment from camping gear to tennis racquets. You can also hire out those old skis you never use on HireThings to add to the saved money.
- Most university students will find forking out for their textbooks each semester hugely surpasses any other expense. Fortunately you can generally find second-hand copies on TradeMe but if you don’t want to navigate through illegible notes and unnecessary highlighting, renting could be your best option. Chegg is a great example of a textbook rental website, you can save up to 90% by renting and they plant a tree every time a book is rented, sold or bought!
- Do you have a wedding or a ball coming up but no spare money to fork out on an expensive designer dress? Well luckily for you, there’s a myriad of online renting sites providing short-term formal wear. Sites like https://www.renttherunway.com/ and http://lendingluxury.com/ provide a service where you rent the item for 3-5 days for as little as 10% of the full retail price, and they usually send two sizes in case anything doesn’t fit.
- Video games are becoming exceedingly expensive and can easily clutter your home. If you’re only playing one game at a time, why not rent them instead? You can rent them from your local DVD shop for a fraction of the retail price or rent them from website such as http://www.gamefly.com/ and http://www.gamerang.com/. You can even sell the games you’ve clocked on TradeMe to cover the rental cost.
- Are you guilty of buying power tools to complete one job and then leaving it in your shed to accumulate spider webs? Every home should be equipped with the basic tools for maintenance, but who needs a shed of expensive power tools when you can rent them for so much cheaper these days? Instead of buying that tool for the one project, do some research and find out if you’d be better off renting it. Bunnings Warehouse offers a HireShop for your next DIY project or check out http://www.hirethings.co.nz/ where you can rent tools. For example, you can hire a water blaster for $60 per day opposed to over $1500 for a similar product to buy.