If you can afford to buy a house/condo should you do it to avoid rent?

[otis_nixon]

Depends man.

I'm living in a semi-retardedly overvalued market, it's not Orlando or anything but geez, I'm paying $1200 a month to rent a place that would go for $250k. If I got a loan to buy this place my interest payments alone would be $1700 / month for the first 5 years not to mention the cost of maintenance and taxes and insurance. So by buying I'm actually flushing away $2200 or so a month in unrecoverable costs and by renting I'm only throwing away $1200. Not bad!

Either home prices have got to come down around here or rents are going to go up, either way renting is a great deal at the moment here so I'll keep making money by doing it.

Depends where you live though.