Nah, renting is not sooooo much cheaper. It might appear so in some markets, or if you're only looking at your month-to-month expenses . . . but if you consider the cost over your whole lifetime, the majority of us will do better owning a house.
My situation: We bought a house when we were married, and we paid extra on it every month. In eleven years, we paid off the mortgage. It was then OURS, and we could live in it for the rest of our lives, paying only maintenance, taxes, etc. We ended up selling and rolling the profit into the house where we live now, which has always been mortgage-free. I will probably be on this earth another 50 years, and I have to live somewhere. Because I've finished paying my mortgage, I am free to stay right here, paying only the "extra" costs of owning the home for the rest of my life. That's where the big benefit of owning comes into play.
The road not taken: If we'd rented for those eleven years, it would've cost a little less initially . . . but prices did go up in those years, and by the end rent would've cost more than our mortgage. And at the end of the eleven years, we'd have had nothing. We couldn't have bought this house mortgage-free, if we hadn't had the value of that first house available to us.
As for ALL the costs of owning your home, don't kid yourself: When you rent, you are paying maintenance, taxes, etc. You're just paying them indirectly through your landlord. Think this through: If renting a house were cheaper, why would anyone ever buy houses to rent? No one would purposefully buy houses and rent them out to others just so they could lose money every month.
It is true that you have more freedom when you rent, but -- for us -- owning has been profitable enough to give up the freedom to pick up and move anywhere we want.