To Buy or Rent
 

Does it make more sense to buy or rent a home if you're going to be in an area for at least several years? Your thoughts please.

If you buy a home you are essentially giving yourself money, as it's an asset. If you are renting you are essentially throwing your money away. I would buy a home if I wasn't going to school right now.

It's somewhat like buying or leasing a brand new car, but multiply the money involved a couple times over. If you lease a new car for 4-5 years, basically you'll end up having to give it back and you'll have lost thousands of dollars. Same goes with a home/apartment. It really depends on your end-goal of a home that you're working towards.

The big difference between a car and a home is that a home generally doesn't depreciate in value, but rather increases in value. And any work you do on your house to make it better is basically adding more money to the "asset."

A car, on the other hand, very rapidly depreciates in value. For that very reason, I would never buy a brand-new car. You lose thousands of dollars just driving it off of the lot. This is why you can buy a car with ~6k miles on it for like half of the cost of the same car new. The only way a car will go up in value is if you pimp it out, and even then, you'll never get your money back on the investment fully.

EDIT: Some classic cars are exceptions too but that's really not the case most of the time. You might be able to stick a car in a garage for a few decades and take really good care of it and resell it for more down the road, but generally speaking, cars depreciate in value.