<prompt> Human: Details: I am about to be 25 years old. I make 80kyear but this is from a recent promotion. 2 months ago. Currently live in Indianapolis Indiana. I have only been out and in real world for about 2 years now. First thing I did was pay off my credit cards. Now I have no credit card debt so I increased what I put into savings.I live life pretty well. Currently with my girlfriend of 1.5 years we share an apartment that costs us 750 a month utilities not included. She pays about 250-300 a month of that depending on how many hours she gets in a month. So yeah life is not difficult except we are now looking to take a step up. We have a dog and we want to get a yard for the dog. We are currently looking at renting either a duplexhouse. We have set up a limit of 1200 a month which isnt too difficult to find a place for that amount here. The problem is the kick back we are getting from our peers co workers and such. They are a bit older and keep telling us we should get a house as we are wasting money buy trying to rent a house. I get their points as a mortgage payment would be cheaper. The big problem to me is we are not married. I dont want to go in on a house with someone Im not married to. I think we may end up married but at 1.5 years, Id like to give us a bit more time before we actually get married. This means I would have to go in alone if I bought a house. Right now I could afford a 150-200k house according to online calculators. I wouldnt have the recommended 20 though.So yeah I was curious what everyone thinks? Is it really that great to buy young? Or should I keep saving up?  <response>: tl;dr Buy a house because you want to and when you feel ready to, not because other people tell you to. Dont invest in housing.Anecdotal: when I was your age my parents told me to buy a house. My dad gave me a little speech about how housing never goes down and I can leverage my down payment to ride the wave of value up. My coworker owned a condo on an interest-only loan, that is 100 of his payment was interest and none of it went to principal. That coworker said I was throwing my money away by renting, I should be buying into the hot market. This was in 2005. I decided to ignore all that advice. 3 years later everything crashed. Everyone who was telling me to buy got real quiet at that point.I did buy a house in 2009, after getting married. I figured I had everything settled, I was going to live in that city and house until I retired. 3 years later I got a surprise job offer to move to Seattle and ended up moving my family up here. I sold the house this year for about 20 more than I bought it for; but after all the taxes, interest, and commissions that I had paid over the years it was basically a wash. I could have dropped my money into the stock market and made more return than I did on the house.A house that you live in is not an investment, youre paying to live in a place. Its only an investment if youre not living there, at which point youre collecting rent from someone and realizing a return on your investment. Ive read in various places that the money you make on real estate, in the long run, barely stays ahead of inflation. Donald Trump, real estate mogul, could have made a better return on his money if he just stuffed it into the SP 500 Source 