It doesn't always make sense to buy rather than rent, but it all depends on your assumptions for stock returns vs house prices changes, inflation, maintenance,

It doesn't always make sense to buy rather than rent, but it all depends on your assumptions for stock returns vs house prices changes, inflation, maintenance, real estate tax increases, rent increases, how long you expect to live in a house and if there's an arbitrage in the local market between renting and buying. Also most people don't buy a house for life, and if you sell the house through a realtor they get 6% or so of the proceeds. This isn't something you can just logic an answer for without running it through a rent vs buy calculator, but investment expert and author William Bernstein suggests a rule of thumb that you should not spend more than fifteen years of market rent on a house purchase. In other words you can look up what the house you are considering buying would cost to rent, and as a rule of thumb if the sale price is more than 15 years of rent it's a bad deal. This is obviously an imprecise rule of thumb since it doesn't account for variations in real estate tax per region, but it's a starting point if you don't have a good rent vs buy calculator.