Sentences like that are a huge red flag. It cannot be as clear cut as that. You can't ignore price levels when making that kind of blanket statement. Think of it as a reductio ad absurdum: if it's always better to buy, then it's still better to buy when buying costs 25x the annual rent, right? 50x? 100x? 1000x? 1000000x? People really do fall into thinking like this; it's exactly how bubbles happen.
Buying my current place would probably cost about the equivalent of 35 years' rent (before taking into account opportunity costs etc). That's longer than I expect to live. I could just about swing it, but my savings would be gone, I'd suddenly be stressed about losing my job etc. You might think it's still clear-cut, but it's far from obvious to me. If prices weren't completely ridiculous, sure, I'd probably go for it. But they are, and that matters.
Average life expectancy in most of the world is >70. So somebody expecting to die in the next 35 years would have to be over 35, at which age I'd hope they would have learned about basic economics and arithmetic.
This isn't a very difficult discussion since it can be pretty easily rooted in readily available information and pretty basic calculations. There's even on-line calculators that will do the hard work of adding numbers together if people can't be bothered.
The hard realities that lots of people can't seem to get into their noggins are pretty simple:
- housing costs money, are you recouping that money in some way? owners do eventually, renters do not. Period.
- property owners don't run charities, all those things house owners pay for explicitly, renters pay for implicitly, they just don't get the itemized list
- renting a bedroom out of some guy's basement is not the equivalent of buying (or renting) a house, if you think they are, you've entered into a conversation you cannot possibly understand and you need to back slowly away
- owners get many more options to sway the cost of housing into their favor than do renters, in surprisingly common cases, owners can even make money off of their property
Sentences like that are a huge red flag. It cannot be as clear cut as that. You can't ignore price levels when making that kind of blanket statement. Think of it as a reductio ad absurdum: if it's always better to buy, then it's still better to buy when buying costs 25x the annual rent, right? 50x? 100x? 1000x? 1000000x? People really do fall into thinking like this; it's exactly how bubbles happen.
Buying my current place would probably cost about the equivalent of 35 years' rent (before taking into account opportunity costs etc). That's longer than I expect to live. I could just about swing it, but my savings would be gone, I'd suddenly be stressed about losing my job etc. You might think it's still clear-cut, but it's far from obvious to me. If prices weren't completely ridiculous, sure, I'd probably go for it. But they are, and that matters.