<prompt> Human: Im 22, by the time I buy Ill be 23. Zero debtMy goal is to have 30k as a downpayment and 20k in savings. Which will happen at the end of 2019 at the latest. I make 60-70kyrIm getting told to not rent because you obviously know the 1 reason people say not to... and to buy. But I stress just thinking about how much it takes for a down payment and all the responsibilities that come with owning. Renting has always been favored in my mind but people around me are doing an okay job at talking me out of it which my mind dislikes lolSo, Ive ran the calculators many times and I would probably live in the house till Im 30 so 7 years Max. From a smart financial standpoint whats the best route so i can come to my final conclusion instead of just only hearing out financial advisori dont pay him hes a good friend and parents  <response>: you obviously know the 1 reason people say not to... and to buythrowing money away? Just because lots of people say it doesnt mean its true, especially if it comes from young people who havent yet learned the hard lesson of how buying a house can cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Heres an abbreviated version of my story: WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE yeah, I went there I was in college. It wasnt until age 27 or so that I graduated and got a big-boy job in the city - had a decent apartment 2 miles from work. After 4 years I started saying OMG IM THROWING MY MONEY AWAY so I bought a house, but houses in my neighborhood were expensive so I got a place way out in an outer neighborhood 10 miles away. I was so concerned about home value that I completely overlooked the cost of the commute. 10 miles may not seem like much but in my city thats the difference between a 15 minute free bike ride and an hour-long train ride that costs 4 each way, so 8day... 160month vs 0month didnt seem like a big deal, until I bought the house... oh and I also decided to go back to school because work sucked, and the house I bought was a piece of shit that needed to be gutted so all of the sudden TIME, not MONEY became the limiting factor in everything I did. And you know what I didnt assign any value to in making the decision to buy a house 10 miles away? The value of my time. 3 years later I was fucking miserable, trying to study on the train to come home to a shitty house that I didnt have time to fix. Some of the worst years of my life. Shocker - my girlfriend left me. Then the real depression hit, started drinking way too much, stopped caring about the house... But things got better. I finished school, met a great girl online and married her. She owned her own house too, in a way cooler neighborhood that was 2 miles from the city. She made the right decision, so we went with her house and thats where we live now. I did the math too and it was depressing as shit. Not only would not buying that house saved me thousands of dollars, it would have saved me thousands of hours that Ill never get back. To that Im not entirely bitter, I did learn a lot about construction by gutting the place and fixing it up, and had some good weekends with my dad when he came down to help me with the construction, but from a financial standpoint it was a huge failure. Had I just continued to rent I would have saved tens of thousands of dollars, and from a non-financial standpoint I would have been closer to the city, made more friends, and had a better life. Buying that house was the worst decision I ever made, no question about it. 