Why would anyone rent over house hacking?

[Elliott Wood]

Renting on a home can cost upwards of 1500 a month for a lower end home, and you get absolutely nothing out of it, except having a place to live, but having somewhere to live won’t make you money, it’s not an asset in my eyes

On the other hand house hacking is relatively easy, correct me if I’m wrong here (I’m a real estate newbie), but you can just find a duplex that needs little to no work and you can get a down payment on it for a 3-3.5% mortgage, then you pay closing costs, and in some cases you won’t even need to pay closing costs, fix it if it needs fixing, find a tenant and rent it out, once you have that done you are either living for free or for extremely low rates like 300$ or less because the tenant is covering all of the expenses, if it’s a really good deal you could even be making money off of it, but it’s certainly less than the cost to rent would be, not to mention that you are putting equity into the property, whatever money you are paying you’re paying to yourself, which will save/make you even more money in the long term which you can then use to invest in more houses and build your real estate empire

So my question is pretty simple, what reason would anyone have to rent over house hacking?

[Blaine Alger]

You definitely have the right idea. Most people will rent over buy for 2 main reasons:

1). They lack the knowledge of the benefits of house hacking and how to execute it

2). They are unable to get a loan

You also have to take into consideration that even though an FHA loan will allow you to put down a 3.5% dwn pmt, that could still end up being 10k-20k ( could be more depending market) plus minor repairs and closing costs. So it still takes a little bit of cash to get into the deal and there are a lot of people out there who can't even afford that.

And then there are others who are just scared to make the jump and decide to do what everyone else is doing  instead of overcoming their fears and figuring it out.