Do rent your home? You might now have a new reason to become a homeowner. Australian researchers have found that renting a home instead of owning your own is actually shortening your life and is even worse for your health than being a former smoker.
A new study from researchers at the University of Adelaide and the University of Essex in Australia found that home renters could be losing as much as two weeks from their lives for every year that they rent. This is almost twice the amount of days lost from one’s lifespan from being unemployed or obese.
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The study, however, was not based on such a broad range of people. It was just an observational study on an all-white and European population. So, the researchers acknowledged there are limitations to their findings.
This study used data from surveys of 1,420 adults in Great Britain and took into account elements of housing such as tenure, meaning whether a person rents or owns their home; building type; government financial support available to renters; the presence of central heating, as a proxy for adequate warmth; and whether the house was in an urban or rural area.
This may explain why it seems contradictory.
Renters are free from a mountain of headaches and heartbreaks related to home ownership. Major issues that may arise and need fixing over the years are the problem of the owner, not the renter. And should there be any structural problems with the building, a renter can just move. An owner has to spend however much fixing it and dealing with the insurance company.
Also, a renter only needs to insure personal property from damage or theft. If the apartment or the house is damaged severely they can just pick up and move.
But the study’s lead researcher Dr Amy Clair, from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Housing Research, commented, “Our findings demonstrate that housing circumstances have a significant impact on biological ageing, even more so than other important social determinants, such as unemployment, for example, and therefore health impacts should be an important consideration shaping housing policies.”
“We hope to build on this work using data from different countries and exploring whether the association between housing tenure and biological ageing changes over time,” said Dr Clair.
