You are surprisingly comfortable condescending to people when you’re incredibly wrong and clearly have no idea how any of this works.

• A mortgage doesn’t get added to your expenses, a mortgage replaces some of them. Specifically, it replaces rent, most peoples’ largest expense;
• Mortgage payments repay some interest and the rest goes straight into equity;
• If your home gains market value, you don’t pay more mortgage, but you do get more equity;
• A fixed rate mortgage means your housing costs stay the same for the term of the mortgage.

Seriously, if you’re in the US you can get a fixed rate mortgage for a term of 30 years. There’s literally no way to lose that one. Rates go up? Haha fuck my bank I pay the same mortgage. Rates go down? Haha fuck my bank I refinance so now I pay less even if rates go back up again.

Buying property as soon as I was able was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I was not able to buy it particularly early. My head hurts a little bit whenever I think about how much money I’ve burned on rent in my life. And that phrasing is deliberate, I may as well have set the money on fucking fire for all the future good it bought me.

Edit: By the way:

Yes, she gets an asset (which she could sell at any point) but it’s going to be more expensive.

It’s going to be more expensive than what? Renting it? If someone rents something, they don’t get an asset. You only get assets when you buy them, because they have to be legally yours to call them an asset. So no, buying isn’t a more expensive way to get the same asset. It’s the only way to make it your asset.