The dream is everywhere: own a home, build equity, put down roots, feel settled. The implication is that the happiness comes automatically, that the keys unlock something.
But the data tells a more interesting story than the dream suggests. Yes, homeowners report higher wellbeing than renters. Also yes: nearly three quarters of homeowners have at least one significant regret about their purchase. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the tension between them is where the real insight lives.
If you’re thinking about buying, or thinking about helping someone you love buy, this is the research you should read first.
What the Studies Actually Say
The most comprehensive recent survey on this question comes from Home Bay and Clever Real Estate, which surveyed 500 U.S. homeowners and 500 U.S. renters on their overall wellbeing. The gap between the two groups was striking.
Overall happiness: 88% for homeowners, 67% for renters. Quality of life: homeowners averaged 7.4 out of 10, renters averaged 6.2. Mental health: 7.1 for owners, 6.0 for renters. Physical health: 6.9 for owners, 6.0 for renters. Stress levels: owners averaged 5.1 out of 10, renters averaged 6.2. Even free time differed: 53% of homeowners reported seven or more hours of free time per week, compared to 40% of renters.
The benefits owners cited most often were privacy, building equity, and stability, which is interesting because those are also the exact things renters said they most wanted. The gap isn’t about desire. Both groups wanted the same things. The gap is about who had them.
Now here’s where it gets complicated.
A 2025 Bankrate survey of 1,363 homeowners found that 45% have at least one regret about their purchase. A 2024 Hippo survey of more than 2,000 homeowners put that figure at 73%, up from 63% the year before. In Bankrate’s survey, the most common regrets among homeowners who had one were maintenance and hidden costs higher than expected (42%), buying too small (21%), and a mortgage payment that turned out to be higher than they could comfortably afford (16%).
So homeowners are happier than renters, and nearly half of them also wish something about their purchase had gone differently.
How do you hold both of those things at once?
The Answer Is in the Preparation
The research doesn’t directly measure financial preparation as a variable, but it points at it from every angle.
The number one homeowner regret is unexpected costs: maintenance, repairs, property taxes, insurance, the hot water heater that fails on a Sunday in January. In a 2025 Guardian Service survey of 1,005 homeowners about buying their first home, 41% said they underestimated how much ongoing homeownership would cost, and more than one in four said they felt unprepared when it came to financial knowledge. In an earlier study of first-time buyers, 55% said they wished they’d had an independent advocate coaching them through it.
According to Hippo’s 2026 Housepower Report, 76% of homeowners say at least one home-related issue affected their financial stability in the past year. Only 32% have an emergency fund specifically for home repairs. The share of homeowners with no maintenance budget at all doubled in one year, from 9% to 18%.
These are not numbers about bad luck. They are numbers about gaps in preparation. A leaky roof or a broken HVAC is not a surprise. It’s a foreseeable event that requires a financial system capable of absorbing it. The people who struggle most with homeownership are not the people who encountered problems. They’re the people who encountered problems without a plan.
And here’s what the age data adds. Bankrate’s breakdown by generation shows that millennials (ages 29 to 44) have the highest rates of regret about mortgage payments being too high: 22%, compared to 10% for boomers. Gen Z’s no-regret rate is tied with Gen X’s for the lowest of any generation. Younger buyers, buying earlier, with more financial pressure and less savings cushion, are the most likely to regret the size of their mortgage payment.
That is not an argument against buying young. It is an argument for buying prepared.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
When I work with buyers, I use a simple framework: there is a difference between being financially qualified to buy a home and being financially fit to own one.
Being financially qualified means a lender will approve your loan. It means your debt-to-income ratio is within guidelines, your credit score clears the threshold, and you have enough for the down payment and closing costs. The mortgage industry will hand you the keys the moment those boxes are checked.
Being financially fit means something different. It means you know how much money comes in every month and how much goes out. It means you have chosen, deliberately, where every dollar goes: not because you ran out, but because you decided. It means you have an emergency fund. It means your budget has breathing room, and you’ve looked honestly at what homeownership will cost you beyond the mortgage (property taxes, insurance, maintenance reserves, the unexpected) and you’ve planned for it.
You can be financially qualified without being financially fit. And that gap is exactly where regret lives.
The mortgage company doesn’t ask whether you have a budget. They don’t ask whether you understand how to track your spending. They don’t ask whether you have an emergency fund large enough to absorb a $10,000 roof repair without destroying your financial life. They ask about your income, your debt, and your credit.
I ask all of it. And the answers change what I recommend.
What Happy Homeowners Have in Common
The happiest homeowners in the research aren’t necessarily the ones who bought the nicest homes or got the best interest rates. They’re the ones for whom homeownership aligned with their actual life.
They had a budget before they had a mortgage. They understood what they could sustainably spend on housing: not just what they were approved for, but what they could actually live with month after month without financial stress bleeding into every other area of their life.
They bought the right size for their actual needs, not the maximum they could qualify for. (The regret data is notable here: buyers regret going too small more often than too big, which suggests the pressure to buy less than you want is real. But “too big” regret still clocks in at 11%, and “mortgage too high” at 16%. Both directions cause pain.)
They had reserves. The 32% of homeowners who have an emergency fund for home repairs are far better positioned to absorb what ownership throws at them without it becoming a crisis. The homeowner who faces a $6,000 HVAC replacement with a funded emergency account has a problem. The homeowner who faces the same bill with nothing saved has a catastrophe.
And they had a longer time horizon. The psychological benefits of homeownership (the sense of stability, the feeling of control, the connection to a community) tend to deepen over time. But they require staying. The financial stress that comes from buying more than you can comfortably afford creates pressure to sell, to move, to undo the decision. Longevity is the mechanism through which homeownership compounds, financially and emotionally.
Does Renting Make You Unhappy?
This is a question worth taking seriously, because the answer is genuinely nuanced.
Renters report lower wellbeing than homeowners across nearly every dimension the research measures. But it’s worth being careful about what’s driving that.
Some of the wellbeing gap comes from the instability of renting: the rent increases, the lease renewals, the landlord’s decisions about your home that you have no control over. Some of it comes from the absence of equity, the sense that your housing costs are building nothing for you, that you are paying someone else’s mortgage instead of your own. Some of it almost certainly comes from the fact that many renters are renting not by choice but because they haven’t yet been able to get into homeownership, and that gap between where you are and where you want to be carries its own psychological weight.
But some renters are renting by choice, and for them the calculus is different. The happiest renters are typically ones who are either not yet ready to own (financially or situationally) or who have made a deliberate, values-aligned decision that renting fits their life better right now. The least happy renters are those who feel stuck: who want to own, believe they should own, but can’t get there.
What the data makes clear is this: the goal is not homeownership for its own sake. The goal is a housing situation that aligns with your financial fitness, your life stage, and your actual values. For most people, at most life stages, that turns out to be homeownership, eventually. The research supports that. But “eventually” should mean “when you’re ready,” not “as soon as you can get approved.”
What This Means If You’re Thinking About Buying
The research paints a consistent picture. Homeownership is associated with higher happiness, lower stress, and better wellbeing across the board, but those outcomes depend heavily on whether you were prepared for what ownership actually costs and demands.
The people who struggle are not unlucky. They are unprepared. Specifically, they didn’t have:
A realistic picture of total housing costs before they bought: not just the mortgage payment, but taxes, insurance, maintenance reserves, and repairs. A budget that left room for those costs without stress. An emergency fund that could absorb the unexpected without financial crisis. A home sized to their actual life and income, not to the maximum they qualified for.
Before I help any client close on a home, regardless of their down payment size, their income, or their credit score, we sit down and look at all of it. I have a five-question monthly test I call the financially fit check:
- Do I know how much money came in last month?
- Do I know how much money went out?
- Did more come in than go out?
- Do I know where all my money went?
- Am I satisfied with where it went?
Five yeses, consistently, means you’re financially fit. It means you have a system. It means you know your numbers and you’re making deliberate choices with your money, not just surviving month to month and hoping. And it means you are far more likely to be in the group of homeowners who are glad they bought, rather than the group who aren’t.
This isn’t a gatekeeping exercise. It’s the opposite. It’s what makes homeownership safe to pursue: what protects you from the regret statistics and positions you to capture the wellbeing benefits the research consistently shows.
Ready to Buy the Right Way?
Let me be transparent about why I’m telling you all of this.
Saying “get financially fit before you buy” could sound like a reason to wait. It isn’t. It’s a reason to move deliberately, and usually faster than people expect, once they have a clear picture of what “ready” actually looks like.
I offer an online course to teach you the S.A.V.E. System for financial fitness. S.A.V.E. is an acronym for Spend in Alignment with your Values, not Ego.
The S.A.V.E. Online Course is a 14-module online course, about four hours of self-paced video, built to get you to five yeses. It covers your relationship with money, building a complete financial organization system, and creating a values-based budget you’ll actually live by. It costs $187 (less than most people spend in one unplanned weekend) and it comes with a complimentary one-on-one Zoom call with me and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
If you go through it and it doesn’t move your financial clarity forward, you get every dollar back. That’s how confident I am in the foundation it builds.
And if you’re already at five yeses (if you have the budget, the emergency fund, and the system) skip the course and book a call directly. I’m a financial coach, a REALTOR®, and a mortgage broker, all in one. Let’s talk about the home.
Get the S.A.V.E. System: $187 →
Sources
- Home Bay / Clever Real Estate. “Are Homeowners Happier Than Renters?” Survey of 500 homeowners and 500 renters, reported by The Mortgage Reports, April 2024.
- Bankrate. “Nearly Half of Homeowners Have at Least One Regret About the Purchase of Their Current Home.” Survey of 1,363 homeowners conducted April 2025, released May 14, 2025.
- Hippo. “Hippo’s Housepower Report Reveals Top Trends Shaping the Homeowner Experience.” Survey of more than 2,000 homeowners, November 2024; released January 8, 2025.
- Hippo. “Housepower Report 2026.” Annual homeowner survey.
- Guardian Service. First-time homebuyer survey. Survey of 1,005 homeowners about buying their first home, May 2025.
- Framework, reported by HousingWire. “Study: Most First-Time Homebuyers Feel Overwhelmed and Underprepared.” September 25, 2019.