[mywittyname]

Not everyone lives in an area where a 30y mortgage is cheaper than rent. Even those that claim to may not have the math right (not accounting for maintenance, taxes, increases in utilities).

I live in the midwest, where housing is supposed to be cheap, and the renting v. buying equation heavily favors renting when factoring in commute times. Since I'm a working professional, I'm limited to living in "working professional" neighborhoods if I want to live <20m from work. This means the median house value for the area I want to be in is over double the national median, the houses are all massive (cleaning and utility costs) and they all have HOAs of varying costs.

The total savings of renting for me is solidly $12,000+ a year, in addition to saved commuting time.

[kazinator]

Those that find rent cheaper than a 30y mortgage also may not have all the math right.

They may be looking at instantaneous rent prices, not accounting for rental increases over 30 years (while the mortgage will remain relatively flatlined, modulo ups and downs in interest).

When I started my mortgage in 2010, it was a bit more expensive than renting in my area. Not so any more. Comparable places now rent for hundreds of dollars more per month than what I pay in total.

Mortgages have some flexibilities in them. What landlord offers "skip a payment"? Haha.

One little thing that isn't a matter of all that much money is that renters often live without home insurance, quite unnecessarily. Even if you live in someone's home which has homeowner insurance, the policy doesn't cover the personal belongings of renters; if the place is destroyed, you lose everything in it with no compensation, unless you have your own policy. It costs like a couple hundred bucks a year.

[mywittyname]

In 5 years, my rent has gone from $1250/mo to $1380/mo. So 2% pa increase, there-about. But this past lease I received a free month of rent, so in reality, my rent has increased like $15/mo over five years. The complex is still pretty empty, so I'll probably get another similar deal this year.

Obviously this varies per market, but rents do not have to match housing prices in areas. Most people in the US are adverse to renting, so hot housing markets tend to push renters to buy "while they can still afford it," which seems to seriously depress the rental market. The bulk of my rent increases came in 2014 & 2015, after that, it stabilized, then went down (while housing went up-up-up).

Property taxes have exploded in my area though. Looking at Zillow, the taxes on a now $330k house is ~$6000/yr where it was more typically low ~4000s in 2012. So a solid 10%pa growth. (And $6000+ local taxes is probably still less than the standard deduction for a couple, so there's no tax benefits here). So, while your mortgage may have stayed constant, your monthly tax bill increased by ~$180.

Factoring in property taxes, HOAs, maintenance, improvements, utility costs, etc, it looks so hard to come out ahead buying. Really, the big factor is if you need more than 1200sq feet, then its cost effective to buy, since big apartments are rare and expensive. But if you can live comfortably with 1200sq ft, renting is a no-brainer, financially.

But the crux of my calculus depends on area, if I didn't need to live in this specific area to be <20m from work, then I could spend drastically less on housing. But as it stands, the good jobs are all concentrated in a few very expensive areas. But lucky for me, expensive housing doesn't translated to similarly expensive rent. So a 100% increase in housing prices translates to a 20-30% increase in rent prices.