[seanmcdirmid]

You'll never finish paying rent, but you will finish paying your mortgage eventually. Also, your mortgage payment won't increase much while you own your house (just the part for property taxes), while rents will often go up (and sometimes down) with the market. So if you are in it for the long term, a house will provide stability after 10 or so years. And that isn't even considering the fact that it is your place to make for your needs vs. your landlord's.

[tmn]

You’ll never stop paying. Pick rent or property taxes. Obviously property taxes are less than rent in your typical case. But it’s not even an order of magnitude difference

[seanmcdirmid]

No, it is around...a third where I live maybe? Or maybe a 4th of what rent would be like. But I can always sell/downsize and retire to somewhere with cheaper property taxes, which is something I couldn't do renting. Rents don't do that.

But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.