I think I’ve been mis­in­ter­preted in my pre­vi­ous posts. I’m not sug­gest­ing that rent­ing is bet­ter than own­ing. You have to run your num­bers and make your own choice. There are many as­sump­tions to con­sider (financial and not). The not fi­nan­cial ones of­ten are more im­por­tant. You have to run your num­bers, but in gen­eral rent­ing looks bet­ter if:

1. You can­not buy ( 🙂 ) and/​or
2. You plan to stay in a place for a short time and/​or
3. You be­lieve houses are vastly over­priced in your area and they’ll re­turn will be neg­a­tive for a while and/​or
4. You don’t want the psy­cho­log­i­cal part of hav­ing a house (maintenance, tax pay­ments,)

In my case the most wor­ri­some sce­nario is 3.

Back to our sit­u­a­tion, we are buy­ing a house for the plea­sure of liv­ing in a par­tic­u­lar lo­ca­tion. Financially it is an OK trans­ac­tion (fair price, I think).

I’ll prob­a­bly post a lit­tle rent-buy spread­sheet as soon as I have time to re­fine it.

Thanks for all the good com­ments.