Most sage advice about buying vs. renting boils down to &quot;run the numbers but there are a lot of tradeoffs, many of them non-financial.&quot; The &quot;Don&#x27;t buy&quot; sentence is deliberately provocative I think. The rest of what he says boils down to don&#x27;t buy a house because you think you&#x27;re supposed to. Which sounds like very sensible advice to me.<p>I certainly held off buying for a fairly long time because I didn&#x27;t want to be locked down in that way. In retrospect I might have done things differently but hindsight is 20-20 and all that.