This article might be good food for thought in your decision.
https://gailvazoxlade.com/blog/archives/category/home-buying
As for the ridiculous idea that renting is "wasting your money" - it's colossal ignorance. Renting is not just for poor people who don't know what to do with their money. For the record, my husband and I make well above the median household income in our area and we are Smug Renters, honey. It's a very smart move, financially. I know, because I actually sat down and worked it out.
My husband and I have rented a cute little house with a great yard for seven years now. We have low lving costs and have socked away over $70 grand for retirement savings, emergency funds, education savings for our son, etc, not to mention the student loans we have paid off (another $40 grand there). If one of us loses our job, we have savings to keep us off the street. And because our cost of living is so low, we are further cushioned from economic downturns. And hey, we're living in a great neighbourhood, enjoying a great piece of real estate with none of the headaches of home ownership.
And all around us? Well, in our city, the suckers who thought renting was throwing their money away are currently enjoying a personal bankruptcy rate that is up 42% from last year. They failed to have any safety net and took on a mortgage that was more than they could handle (egged on by banks, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents). Now they are paying the price. Or rather, we are all paying the price because there's this little thing called a global recession going on that just happened to be set off by people buying houses they couldn't afford. Hey, they weren't called "sub-prime" mortgages for nothing.
Financial well-being means that you have taken care of all aspects of life, not just put every penny you own into a house. If you own a house, but don't have an emergency fund set aside, or have no retirement savings, or even nothing put by for your upcoming Baby Year, you are taking huge risks with your family's financial well-being.
The way to determine if you should rent or own is to do as the article says and examine your lifestyle to see if home ownership suits your current circumstances. Then run the numbers. If the cost of renting is really high, then maybe home ownership is a viable alternative. But I'd be very surprised if you found that to be the case.
Taking on a mortgage is a very big burden. I'd think very carefully about it.
Good luck with your decision.
I'd appreciate if you didn't use that 'tone' when directing your words towards me. It's very immature. I didn't once say or even suggest that renting is for poor people. IMO paying rent is money wasted. You have nothing to show for the thousands you have spent. For example, my auntie has rented her entire life. She got the oppertunity about 20 years ago to buy her house and she decided not to. Instead of having her mortgage paid off and to be living rent and mortgage free she is STILL paying out every month. If she had decided to buy, she would also have a house to sell on or leave to her son and daughter when she dies. Property is a long term investment. + the whole 'people buying houses they can't afford and taking high interest mortgages' is quite irrelevant in todays climate. Houses are cheap especially for the 1st time buyer and mortgage rates are pretty reasonable. Mine for example is only 3.1%.
First of all, I would like to apologize on two matters - I was not directing my words towards you in particular, I was reacting to a phrase that has really pushed my buttons in the past (renters are throwing their money away). I can get very passionate on this topic, and if I had been addressing my words to you specifically, I agree that they would have come across as very belligerent. Please accept my apology for this - it was not intended.
I would also like to apologize if I got too uppity on a matter that should have been a friendly debate, as BnB threads are supposed to be.
So with those things clearly stated, I will defend the points I was trying to make.
I react to the saying that renting is throwing your money away because it is insulting to me and every other renter out there. You have to admit, you're not exactly complimenting me on my personal finance skills when you say something like this!
I recognize that this saying has been accepted as common sense by many when it comes to managing your money. However, I, and many very eminent economists, disagree strongly with this statement. I feel that there has been a tremendous fallacy promoted with home ownership. It is not a better use of money than renting, as a general statement. In some circumstances, owning makes more sense. In the vast majority of circumstances, home ownership is jumped into with very little understanding of the risks involved or the true cost.
First of all, ownership is not ownership until you've paid off the mortgage. By today's standards, that is generally a 25-40 year commitment, with a frighteningly high percentage of recent mortages falling into the longer payment plan. By this definition, you are not paying off your mortgage every month. You are paying an incredibly large amount of interest to the bank to "own" your house. In the first 5 to 10 years of home ownership, those with longer term mortgages are putting a tiny amount down on the priniciple. All the rest is interest. That's not equity. That's interest. You don't see that money again. How is that so very different from rent?
You are paying the bank a lot to borrow that money. In longer term mortgages, that's as much as three times the cost of the house. Of course a bank wants you to think that buying a house is a better option when they're making that kind of money off of you. Contrast that with renting. Sure I pay my landlady a set amount every month, and yup, I'll never see that money again, but I've met my basic need of shelter very cheaply and I now have a large amount of room in my budget for savings. I also have a set and predicatable cost for shelter that is not going to get hit by my furnace breaking down or a roof that needs to be replaced, etc. I don't have to carry the cost of home maintenance - further savings on my part. Put the savings into long-term investments, and you'll be making far more money over the long term than real estate. Look at the stock market and the real estate market historically. Both have their ups and downs, but by diversifying and investing your money over a wide range of investments, the renter would come out ahead of the home owner. How's that throwing my money away?
Secondly, the home-and-garden tv attitude towards home ownership has made housing into a very status-based, consumer-oriented market, with buyers borrowing far more than they would have been approved for historically. Twenty years ago, you needed a 25% down payment for a house, with an excellent credit rating and proof that your mortgage payment would not exceed 35% of your monthly income. You could not get approval for a loan that was more than 3.5 times your gross annual income. Lenders did this to protect themselves and to protect the consumer. Today, you barely need a pulse to be approved for loans that you don't have a hope in hell of paying off in a conventional mortgage time frame. Yet people line up for these high-risk loans, telling themselves that real estate always goes up (false), that they need to buy now or be priced out forever (that somehow justifies borrowing beyond your means?) and that... renting is throwing their money away. So now you have a lot of people with mortgages that far exceed the conventional loan standards. They are just exactly making ends meet every month, or not. Judging by the per capita debt in most western countries, it's usually "not". You get a downswing in the market, or someone loses their job, or breaks their leg and has to go on disability for awhile, and suddenly you can't afford this mortgage anymore. There is a reason we are seeing mass defaulting on mortgages in the US, Canada and the UK - people borrowed more than they could afford. It should not have been allowed in the first place, so banks and governments need to take some responsibility. But the borrowers, the consumers, should recognize that they also need to take some blame.
In the case of your aunt, I don't know her circumstances, but it sounds like she regrets not buying. I say you don't have to buy a house to retire wealthy and you don't have to live with regrets if you have savings. Again, I'm not speaking to her personally, I'm speaking to the situation you described, but in general, if you are putting savings aside, you'd have something to leave your kids. If you aren't a saver, home ownership isn't the soundest idea, either.
Home ownership is not the definition of security, yet banks and the entire real estate industry have been making billions by getting people into expensive mortgages that they cannot afford, And that includes the low interest rates we are enjoying now. When that fixed interest period is up in 5 years, you may be looking at interest in the double digits, as hyperinflation is what historically follows deflationary cycles. Could you afford your mortgage at 11%? I can give you several examples from the past thirty years where homeowners have been faced with this scenario.
This post is getting ridiculously long, so I'll sum up: home ownership does not trump renting and renting is not throwing your money away. It's not a very respectful cliche, so I will challenge it. I am happy to continue the debate with you in what I hope is a more friendly manner than my earlier diatribe!
So hopefully we will be building again in a few years 
