It’s not that simple. It is mortgage+insurance+maintenance

Rent is just rent.

You MAY be able to resell the house if the location is somewhere people want to live in several decades. All it takes is a major economic source to dry up. A military base closing, a factory shutting down, etc can wreck your property value.

Ramit Sethi does a good job of breaking this all down WRT to home ownership vs renting. He basically says the same thing as you.

It was worth it for us to buy, so we did. We’ve already replaced the roof and the hot water heater, though, and the furnace is next. It adds up.

THANK YOU! I get so tired of: buy good. Rent bad. The answer is it depends. 2008 was only 15 years ago. Many people lost boat loads of money from it. People HAVE lost lots of money from factory closures, base closures, market bubbles, a highway being built, etc

The ideal situation is a variety of housing options, for sale and rent.

The vast majority of people live in or around major cities. Those aren’t going to evaporate. The kinds of towns that exist only to support a single resource like you mentioned are so few and have so small a population that you could close and relocate half of them to other towns and cities across the country without them even noticing the increase.
Yeah, I was waiting for this disingenuous pap. It can still be easily cheaper to buy. If it weren’t, why would anyone buy houses to rent out?

Disingenuous…wow. Sometimes people just disagree and for good reason.

Buying a house is not a guaranteed way to build wealth. Ask those thought bought around 2008 and lost their shirts.

It doesn’t ALWAYS make sense to buy or rent. The honest answer is it depends. A location might be great…NOW. Case in point, Detroit. Lot’s of factories closed down. Or military towns during the many base closures in the 90s.

People buying houses to rent can and do lose money on it.