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

Is buying a home a good idea?
The New York Times offer a remarkably detailed Buy vs Rent calculator.  You enter - From all of this, it advises the break-even rent, when monetarily, it's equal.  I'd suggest you keep a few things in mind when using such a tool. Logic, common sense, and a Nobel prize winner named Robert Shiller all indicate that housing will follow inflation over the long term. Short term, even 20 years, the graphs will hint at something else, but the real long term, the cost of housing can't exceed inflation.  The other major point I'd add is that I see you wrote "We rent a nice house." Most often, people are looking to buy what they feel they can't easily rent. Whether it's the yard, room number or sizes, etc. This also leads to the purchase of too big a house. You can find that you can afford the extra bedroom, family room in addition to living room, etc, and then buy a house 50% bigger than what you need or planned on. In my opinion, getting the smallest house you can imagine living in, no bigger than what you live in now, and plan to get on a faster than 30 year repayment. Even with transaction costs, in 10 years, you'll have saved enough to make the bump up to a larger house if you wish.