You pay $5k monthly in mortgage and other expenses, I assume you include home maintenance in this. 30 years later the mortgage part no longer factors in, and yo

You pay $5k monthly in mortgage and other expenses, I assume you include home maintenance in this. 30 years later the mortgage part no longer factors in, and you only pay a much smaller portion of that (just the tax and maintenance). I don't know what the proportion of it is typically but principal and interest payments are usually the majority of the mortgage, so at that point your payments should shrink. So there's wealth in a few areas. One, once your mortgage rate is locked in it's usually not going to randomly go up, while with rent you can be sure the rent will always go up over time. Two, after your mortgage is paid off you have significantly lowered your living expenses, and any inheritor who continues to live on the same property will receive that benefit as long as they live there. Three, if/when you or your inheritor no longer want to live there, you have a house you can sell to someone else for a large chunk of cash. Owning a high value asset that's easy to sell is basically the definition of building wealth. If the difference between home buying and renting is as big as you describe, then maybe it doesn't make sense. But it isn't always such a big difference; usually rent is more like 0.8x-0.9x the mortgage payment. >The people before me 3x their money over 20 years, but they also did 2 renovations, including adding extra rooms. Where is this generational wealth I’m supposedly building by paying $2k extra per mo than if I rented? With the numbers given, over 20 years the renters will have saved $480k compared to the buyers. But they also don't own anything by the end of it. So if your house you bought is worth more than $480k at the end then you effectively made money by buying the house. Then for every year after that, the deal only gets better for you, as your payments plummet and the rent only continues to climb. This is simplifying things a lot of course, the renters could invest the money they saved, their rent will go up over time, your house could go up in value or it could burn in a disaster, etc. But it's a good starting point for evaluating where it becomes worth it.