Why you should never rent a washer-dryer

published 20 August 2008

This article is taken from Money Sense, Merryn Somerset Webb's free weekly personal finance email. Sign up to Money Sense here.

Feeling a bit more cash-strapped than you were a few months ago? Not to worry. The Times has the answer: stop buying stuff and rent it instead. "Want to try an iPhone for a weekend or walk a dog for an hour for a fraction of the cost of owning either? Well now you can."

New websites are "transforming perceptions of what is rentable." At the same time, says the Times, people are rediscovering the "merits of small fixed payments and trouble-free repairs and upgrades" and starting to rent more in the way of white goods than they did last year. ForbesDirect, a national rental chain, reports an 11% rise in washing machine rentals over the last year.

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It makes absolutely no sense to rent white goods

This is madness. Lets look at fridge freezers. You can rent one from ForbesDirect for £5.25 a week. Sound OK? Well then, consider this: that comes to a total of £273 a year. Yet you can buy a similar one in John Lewis for £269. And before you start muttering about the free repairs on a rental, note that the John Lewis one comes with a two-year guarantee. So rent for two years and you'll spend over £270 more than if you just nip down to John Lewis and buy one (and you'll have nothing to show for it in the end).

That's such a huge difference that it even makes sense to buy a John Lewis one on a credit card pretty much regardless of the interest rate and pay it off over the two years rather than to rent one. Buy it outright and even if it breaks down irreparably five minutes after your two-year guarantee runs out, you'll still be massively in the money.

Much the same goes for washer-dryers. Rent one and it will cost you £5 a week, or £260 a year. Buy one with a two-year guarantee and it will cost you £349. So, over two years, renting will cost you £171 more. And for TVs -the Times points to the fact that you can rent a Hitachi 42in HD-ready TV from Hughes Electricals for £35 a month (£420 a year). But you can buy one from Dixons for £530 (not Hitachi, LG, but what's the difference?) with a standard guarantee. Even if you add on Dixons' grossly over-priced three-year "'Coverplan' (£169), that still means that buying, over three years, will cost you a huge £561 less than renting.

And that's assuming rental prices don't rise which they probably will. It's hard to see how any of this will help anyone feel less "cash strapped", isn't it? Sure, short-term, the outlay will be lower, but we're already in the mess we're in at the moment (the mess that has us all stuffed to the gills with debt) because we have been over-valuing the short term relative to the long term. We've been paying up to get our hands on stuff we want right now, instead of making do with what we have and saving up instead. Doing more of it won't help.

Still, it isn't just electrical stuff you can rent. Next up is furniture. Visit Stopgapsofas and you can rent a sofa for ten weeks for £195 - or not far off £1000 a year. Why on earth would you want to do that, when you can get a perfectly nice sofa a really nice sofa in fact from Ikea for around £300? Stopgapsofas say they cater for people who need a rent-a-sofa while they wait for the sofa they have ordered as a purchase to be delivered. At that price, why not buy a few cushions to tide you over? Or perhaps note that Ikea delivers in 48 hours.

The new craze for handbag rental

But madder than all this mad stuff is the new craze for handbag rental. Like all totally nuts ideas, this one came from the US, kicked off by such sites as Bag Borrow or Steal and From Bags to Riches, and fast imitated by our own Handbaghirehq.co.uk and Handbagsfromheaven.co.uk. These sites, says The Boston Globe "cater to fashionistas who lack the disposable income to satisfy their cravings for Coach satchels and Chanel clutches, but for whom carrying a cheaper knock-off is blasphemy."

Dear oh dear. I thought the whole point of owning this kind of over-priced tat in the first place was to show off how rich you are. If it doesn't even do that, why bother with it at all? What happens when the Chanel clutch goes back at the end of the month and your once-impressed friends ask you where it went? Somehow "back to the rental depot" doesn't have much cachet, does it? Worse, these rent-an-ego trips aren't even cheap. A Chloe Paddington bag will cost you £35 a week to rent. And it won't even be new. Better to just buy your bags in Topshop in the first place.

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.