mortgage or rent?  

I don't think it is ever wrong to rent a house, if that is what makes you comfortable. There are many people that prefer to rent because then they are not responsible for repairs and things. There are a lot of people who prefer to own because they want a place to call their own.

My father was in the Marine Corp so we moved a lot while I was little. Even after he retired from the military, we never lived in one place more then 3-4 years the whole time I was growing up. While growing up we moved at least 16 times and I went to 9 different schools.

When I first moved out on my own and got married we moved a lot too. Once my kids became school age I became a little crazy about buying a house and staying in one place. I am happy to say that both my children have attended the same elementary school from kindergarten to 5th grade.,my son has completed Middle School in one school, and my daughter will go to the same Middle School next year. We have no future plans to move before the kids are both through high school.

If I would rent a house. Reason is, if the house was to be burned down and I didn't have insurance on it, I do not share the entire damages but only a part of it as opposed to personal liability owning my own house.

The first house that me and my husband purchased was a rowhouse. It was so small and we got it through Pag-Ibig housing loan. I was your age then. Three years after, we found a house and lot which we got through NHA Housing loan. We sold the first house and cleared our loan with pag-ibig. We have been staying in our house for almost five years and we ahve made some renovations. It is better to get a loan for your house because you are sure that at the end of your payment period, the house is yours.

I guess it just depends if you can afford it. You don't want to get into something that would make you get weighed down too much. It's no fun to be living in a place for a few years, and then you have to leave because you can no longer afford to live there. You just have to make sure you can handle whatever you've committed yourself to.

I've never rented, so I can't give an opinion on that perspective. I bought my first home at 18, sold it at 21 at a really nice profit to buy a nicer home, then bought another at 24 and another at 27. I'm 28 now and still own those last three I bought.

I charge other people rent to live in my houses. I live in one of them myself. It's sometimes hard for me to watch my tenants going to work for five days every week in jobs they hate to pay off my mortgage for me. But they don't want to buy anything. They think they can't afford it.

I'm a single mom with a 4 year old daughter and I work from home. My mother taught me as a teenager that if I buy a small, cheap home while I'm young, that will teach me responsibility for my finances, my income and my budgeting. She was right.

Think about these two simple ideas:

If you buy a house, then when you pay it off your payments go down. You own an asset. It's yours. Sell it. Keep it. Rent it out. It's yours.

If you rent a house, then your landlord will keep putting your payments up. Imagine what you'll be paying for rent in 10 years. If the landlord sells, you have to find something else. If the landlord doesn't like you, you have to move.