[user104658]

The even bigger issue here is that in many cases, it's not even a matter of money. Rental availability is shocking with often dozens, if not hundreds, "competing" for a place to stay... so money totally out of the equation... if your landlord decides to sell up/dies/something happens to your house like structural damage in a storm that they can't afford to fix... you might end up without a home for some amount of time EVEN IF you have plenty of money for rent. There might simply be nowhere to rent.

We wavered over whether to go ahead and buy or just continue renting but rent a bigger/nicer place for years, wondering if it would be better to keep the flexibility of being able to move around that you have (or SHOULD have) with renting, but have now been looking to buy exclusively because after going for a couple of nice rentals in the area and failing to get them, we looked into it and found out that the last one we looked at and applied for had 108 applicants. One hundred and eight!! We're not even particularly close to the bigger population centres... it's mental.

And then we realised, if our current rental (which is too small anyway) was to unexpectedly fall through like for one of the reasons above... we'd be in a pretty bad situation, because it turns out, you can't just go and rent somewhere else any more.

Meanwhile house prices continue to drop and we have a massive deposit saved because our current rent is, to be fair, absolutely rock bottom - they haven't upped it a penny since 2014 . So it's a buyer's market I guess.