If you stay long enough, buying is cheaper. But if you move after just a few years, you'll have mostly paid interests on your mortgage, you had closing tax, your house may even have lost value... So there are many cases it would have been cheaper to rent.
How long you need to stay to make your purchase worthwhile depends where you live.
Agreed. Over a decade ago, to try to overcome my fear to make such a large purchase, I did the math and decided to bake very conservative assumptions into my decision-making. My rent then was $1800 a month, so 5 years of that is $108k. If I kept a similar mortgage payment as my rent (in reality, my payment was actually more like $1450), I realized that all I had to do was stay there 5 years while having it lose ($108k minus property taxes paid) in value and I'd break even in terms of cash flow, whereas the upside, if it stayed flat or appreciated, was that I'd have built up substantial equity.
(In the end, the gamble paid off great - the condo appreciated by about 300k in those 5 years)
If you stay long enough, buying is cheaper. But if you move after just a few years, you'll have mostly paid interests on your mortgage, you had closing tax, your house may even have lost value... So there are many cases it would have been cheaper to rent.
How long you need to stay to make your purchase worthwhile depends where you live.