Home truths and rent rants

I’ve been trying to identify a place to live in for the past couple of weeks. It’s an exercise I’m quite familiar with, been there, done that in 2008, when I was in Dubai on an earlier stint, and rents were horribly high, teetering on a precipitous cliff.

This time around, rents have “stabilised”. Therefore, it’s a given I need to find “some place cheap”, insisted whoever I was talking to since the time I landed. “Save money.” (“For your sake, I’ll use the term ‘competitively priced’,” a thoughtful colleague offered. “That sounds more politically correct than cheap.”)

I was getting terribly defensive whenever someone asked me, “How much is your rent budget?” Really scared I’d quote a sum and be confronted with a thundering, “THAT MUCH?” Followed by unsolicited suggestions that if I could only muster up the gumption to consider another building, another area, another emirate, I’d save at least Dh10,000 a year. Then a perturbed, “Do you know how much that is in Indian currency?” And a triumphant, “INR 2 lakh!”

I tried to say I’d rather not upgrade non-essentials, like, you know, smartphones, laptops and clothes/shoes/handbags collections and pay more for a space that will be my comfort zone. Alas! It didn’t cut the mustard.

They say this is the age of experiences. All over the world, caches of consumers are paying for services and indulgences that make them feel good. Air BnB and Uber — and others of their ilk — have become a rage as millennials set the trend of eschewing well-thought-out mortgage plans. Seize the moment, live the life, YOLO, I’m being told by marketers. We, the pre-millennials — Generation X-ers, baby boomers and other species — need to take a leaf out of modern market diktats and stop being fuddy-duddy and clutching at purse-strings.

So why is everyone around me getting so worked up that I’m not conscientiously working towards saving an extra grand a month, or maybe two, in the ease of living department? Even when I throw in, for good measure, that this is the age of Covid, we’ll have to be home as much as possible, so maybe I’m perfectly justified in shelling out more for heightened ambience?

That apart, it amazes me how people I barely know do not consider it odd to quiz me about personal finance. “Where do you live?” is invariably sequenced by “How much rent do you pay?”

“Why do you care?” is how I’d like to handle that, a question for a question, like an eye for an eye, but I end up apologetically mumbling out a number that’s greeted with, “Really, that’s way too much! You know, my aunt’s neighbour’s son, who recently moved to Dubai, was telling me the block where he lives in is giving one-bedroom places very cheap, let me share his number with you, please call him and give him my reference.”

In another setting, somewhere next to a yacht club, egged on by well-wishers who felt I was being hopelessly cavalier about rent spends, I called a broker handling the account for a furnished one-bedroom, and cut to the chase.

Me: “Why is it so cheap?”

He: “What do you mean?”

Me: “I mean, this is in Marina, 3k a month, what’s the catch?”

He: “Catch? What’s a catch?”

Me: “Is it a badly-maintained building? Furniture falling apart? Rodents crawling out of the woodwork?”

He: “Oh no, madam, the flat, it’s very good, please come and see, you’ll love it.”

Me: “Okay then.”

Gosh, did you hear yourself speak, one of my friends who was privy to the conversation remarked. “You sound like a spoilt brat, instead of being grateful, there’s an apartment going cheap, you are hell-bent on finding faults!”

I went to check out the value-for-money housing the next day and shot out in five minutes — but I did compliment the broker on his motorised scooter. “It’s a lovely one — can’t say the same for the apartment.”

I don’t think he got me because he WhatsApped me a couple of hours later to find out when I’d be moving in.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com