Diversify Your Portfolio by Renting Mississippi

At the most basic level of financial investment, there are two maxims that can often be mutually exclusive. The first is to hedge your bets by diversifying your portfolio and spreading out your risk. The second is to invest in where you live; more specifically, if you are going to be paying a large percentage of your income towards your home, then it makes a lot of sense to be making payments towards something that you will someday own and may also, if all goes according to plan, appreciate in value.

The problem with all this great advice is that it can be difficult to diversify your portfolio when all your money is going towards a mortgage. This rings especially true during a turbulent market when people's adjustable mortgage rates are increasing and forecasted appreciation is suspect; it is making more and more sense, from an investment perspective, to rent an apartment rather than buy a house.

This strategy is buttressed by a study done by three Federal Reserve economists, who looked at the long-term relationship between home prices and rents. They found that from 1960 through 1995 annual rents averaged from 5 to 5.25 percent of home prices. Then the figure started falling dramatically after 1995, reaching 3.5 percent at the end of 2006. In other words, rents are unusually low relative to home prices, and to get back to normal, apartment rents would have to soar or prices to plummet.

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