At the same time, you should be highly skeptical of anyone encouraging you to make what might be the single largest purchase of your life without carefully working through the financials. Maybe your preferred option will cost you an extra $50,000 over the next decade and you decided to go with it anyway. That's totally fine as long as it is a conscious choice. If the difference is $500,000 then perhaps you should consider how strongly you actually care about renting vs. buying...