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One common misco...
One common misconception that makes people want to buy a home is that renting is "just throwing many away". Presumably, this is because the money is permanently consumed and can't be recovered via resale. However, the same thing applies to a large proportion of what you pay when you buy a place. For example, mortgage interest payments are not recoverable and do not contribute at all to your equity, so that too must be considered money that is thrown away when you compare renting and buying. Even if you pay for your place in cash and have no mortgage payments, you are still throwing money away because that $600K that you spent could be sitting in the bank earning you very substantial interest. And even if the property value is higher when you go to sell (a shaky assumption in Boston), the unrecoverable costs of owning can still outweigh the unrecoverable costs of renting. I've written a more thorough analysis.
Are you at MIT? If so, I would recommend taking 14.01 (intro to microeconomics). It will help you catch a lot of the things that are left out of the arguments presented by those who falsely assume that buying is always better than renting.
By the way, thanks for linking to my site. I found your journal from my referrer logs.
-- (August 29, 2005) on sunday, 2005-08-07 0140