The renting vs buying choice is absolutely a common topic when people consider buying. Also, when comes time to see how much you can afford per month, it is abs

The renting vs buying choice is absolutely a common topic when people consider buying. Also, when comes time to see how much you can afford per month, it is absolutely part of the calculation. In SF, NYC, Boston, etc, it can make a difference of 1000+ a month when doing your budget in the range software engineers look at (which is not an uncommon case, obviously).