Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited.

Should we buy a house, or wait?
Advantages of buying: With every mortgage payment you build equity, while with rent, once you sign the check the money is gone. Eventually you will own the house and can live there for free. You can redecorate or remodel to your own liking, rather than being stuck with what the landlord decides is attractive, cost-effective, etc. Here in the U.S. there are tax breaks for homeowners. I'm not sure if that's true in U.K. Advantages of renting: If you decide to move, you may be stuck paying out a lease, but the financial penalty is small. With a house, you may find it difficult to sell. You may be stuck accepting a big loss or having to pay a mortgage on the empty house while you are also paying for your new place. When there are maintenance issues, you call the landlord and it's up to him to fix it. You don't have to come up with the money to pay for repairs. You usually have less maintenance work to do: with a house you have to mow the lawn, clear snow from the driveway, etc. With a rental, usually the landlord does that for you. (Not always, depends on type of rental, but.) You can often buy a house for less than it would cost to rent an equivalent property, but this can be misleading. When you buy, you have to pay property taxes and pay for maintenance; when you rent, these things are included in the rent. How expensive a house you can afford to buy is not a question that can be answered objectively. Banks have formulas that limit how much they will loan you, but in my experience that's always been a rather high upper bound, much more than I would actually be comfortable borrowing. The biggest issue really is, How important is it to you to have a nice house? If your life-long dream is to have a big, luxurious, expensive house, then maybe it's worth it to you to pour every spare penny you have into the mortgage. Other people might prefer to spend less on their house so that they have spare cash for a nice car, concert tickets, video games, cocaine, whatever. Bear in mind that if you get a mortgage that you can just barely afford, what do you do if something goes wrong and you can't afford it any more? What if you lose your job and have to take a lower-paying job? What if some disaster strikes and you have some other huge expense? Etc. On the flip side, the burden of a mortgage usually goes down over time. Most people find that their incomes go up over time, between inflation and growing experience. But the amount of a mortgage is fixed, or if it varies it varies with interest rates, probably bouncing up and down rather than going steadily up like inflation. So it's likely -- not at all certain, but likely -- that if you can just barely afford the payment now, that in 5 or 10 years it won't be as big a burden.