Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

How can home buying be considered a sound investment with all of that interest that needs to be paid?
The flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming that renting a house is easy and automatic. Who is going to manage the property? Your parents? What are you going to do if the tenants burn the place down, start having drug parties there, or secretly have 6 cats who piss everywhere so noone will ever want to rent it again? What are you going to do when the house goes unrented for a year and you have to pay a year's worth of mortgage payments with no rental income? What are you going to do when some deadbeat decides to stop paying the rent, but won't move out, and when you try to evict him, he goes to court to stop you? You going to fly to NJ to make the court appearances? Unless you sell your existing house, or your parents buy you out, then you need to stay. You should not attempt to own two houses at once with one of the houses located not where you are at. That will not turn out well. Also, just as an aside, 30-year mortgages are not an "investment"; they are a way to lose money. Usually people get them because they want a big beautiful house that they cannot afford, so they borrow the money. That is not "investing", that is wasting money to live in luxurious circumstances. If you want to become wealthy, buy a property you can afford, not something that you have to string out payments for 30 years.