Part of me thinks I am missing out on a good buying opportunity (~3% interest rates) and the other part of me wants to avoid insurance, taxes, home owners association fees etc.
I think there are a lot of situations where renting makes sense. Exceedingly expensive towns (Vancouver for example) or short term stay (only gonna stay in town for a few years? there are a lot of fees you won't recover when selling a house), are two examples.
But, avoiding insurance, taxes, and other fees aren't good reasons. Why? Because even though you aren't paying them directly, SOMEONE is paying them, and that means you pare paying them in your rent as well as paying someone to handle them for you.
When I was renting one of the things I did was build a spread sheet that looked at how much I was paying for rent, how much I'd be paying to own a home (all costs), expected returns from my investments, expected increase in value of house, etc. If was a very thorogh spread sheet. Only after I built my own did I find out that a simple google search for "Rent vs own calculator" would give me similar results ;)
What I found was that when I looked at the house prices I was considering, my income & spending, and my current and historic investment returns my magic number was seven years.
Basically, if I rented for $1000/month and a house would cost $2000 a month (afte rall my utilities, taxes, fees, etc) and I invested that $1000 difference while renting so long as I lived in that space for less than seven years I'd have done better than owning. Once I'd been in a house for seven years the equity in the house (including costs of selling the house) would surpass what even optimistic investments would return.
This will be different for every person, but what amazed me was what the difference in net worth was the longer I stayed in one house. Especially you invest your mortgage payments after the mortage is done (instead of spending that money on other stuff).
I highly recommend playing with some rent vs own calculators, and if you are handy with a spread sheet making your own. Every calculation you could want exists on the net, you just need to google them - and almost all of them are already built into Excel and LibreOffice Calc (Excel's free and awesome cousin).