I am really sick of renting, and would love the ability to renovate a few things, put nails in walls, do some fixes and updates, but the landlord doesn’t permit anything like that. I have to keep it exactly as is.

I would love to buy, but my job doesn’t pay enough to take on a $3300 per month P&I payment when renting is $2k per month. It’s just too prohibitively expensive to buy when rent is already in the upper range of my housing budget. And it’s just a basic 1,600 sq foot 3 bed, 2 bath townhouse. I’ve never been a homeowner, so I don’t know the specifics of the tax dollar benefits, but it’s not enough to overcome that much of a gap in cost is it? Buying would be over 50% more than the cost to rent.

It seems hard to take advantage of the tax benefits or any of that when it’s currently too expensive to buy instead of rent. If it were $2500 to buy vs $2000 to rent, that’s a different story. I could probably swing that.