Find a rental now or wait until forced out of home

[researchnerd]

We've talked about this alot this afternoon and actually am thinking seriously about moving back into our rental. The thought of renting - two dogs, not feeling like it's my home with the freedom to paint and do what I please - I just have owned a home for so long, it bothers me to rent.

It's a renter's market out there right now, and I think it will continue to be for a while. We have 2 dogs + 3 cats + a teenager, and we easily found a nice, affordable, newish (<10 years) home to rent where they let us repaint every room in the colors of our choice before we moved in. We had to pay a small extra deposit for the pets, but otherwise they were more interested in good references and a steady income. They didn't check our credit, but even if they had, I think they would have been flexible about BK. So many people have had to file recently, many of them during/after foreclosure, and I think landlords understand that.

I used to believe the line about paying someone else's mortgage, but once we started talking about it, we decided that wasn't any worse than paying "rent" to our Big Bailed-Out Bank mortgage lender. I haven't rented in years, and at first I felt a little funny doing it at age 47. I do miss that feeling of the house being "mine" - but even that was false, it always belonged to the bank anyway. Once I figured that out, I started to find it freeing to rent. Last summer we had to replace both A/C compressors in our house within a month of each other, which wiped out what little was left of our savings. If something like that happens to our rental house, it's not our problem.