This article was written by Steve Adcock, who writes at Think Save Retire, a blog about early retirement and Financial Independence. Steve and his wife retired in their mid-thirties to travel full time in an Airstream trailer. For more info, check out their YouTube channel.

One of the most deeply-embedded pieces of the “American Dream” is the desire for a large, spacious home with lots of sitting rooms, corners, nooks, and crannies. Large dining rooms and other entertainment spaces! Wrap-around porches! Two- or three-stall garages and one heck of a master suite!

To many of us, a large home is a mark of success. A big house indicate status, and the more space we’re able to call our own, the more successful we look and feel.

I've been a homeowner for 24 of the last 25 years. Based on this, you might think I'm an advocate of homeownership over renting. That's not the case. The older I get, the more I appreciate there's no correct answer in the perennial "is it better to rent or buy?" debate. Sometimes buying a home makes the most sense. Sometimes renting is the smarter choice.

In an editorial in the June 2007 issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Knight Kiplinger wrote, "It often costs less to rent. The annual cost of owning a property, be it a house or a condo, is usually greater than the cost of renting, after taxes." I agree.

Today, let's look at a handful of ways to evaluate the rent versus buy decision from a financial perspective.

This week, Kim and I hired a contractor for what we hope will be the last major project on the "country cottage" we bought last summer. We're replacing our rotting back deck and installing a hot tub. It's an expensive (and extensive) project.

The cost hurts all the more because we've already poured nearly $100,000 into performing needed repairs on this property. (In fact, as you may remember, we considered forgoing the deck replacement altogether.)

While visiting Raleigh earlier this month, I spent a morning with my pal Justin (from the excellent Root of Good blog) and his wife. As we sipped our coffee and nibbled our bagels, the conversation turned to cost of living. (Money nerds will be money nerds, after all.)

"Things are cheaper here in North Carolina than they are in Portland," I said. "Food is cheaper. Beer is cheaper. Hotel rooms are cheaper. Your homes are cheaper too. Last night, as I was walking through the neighborhood next to my hotel, I pulled up the housing prices. I was shocked at how low they are!"

"Yeah, housing costs are lower here than in many parts of the country," Justin said.

Kim and I moved to our new home in West Linn on July 1st. Although we're only 8.5 miles (and about twenty minutes) from the condo we owned in Portland, I haven't been back to our former neighborhood since we moved. Yesterday, I decided to spend a few hours hanging out at some of my old haunts.

I stopped at the "pot shop" to pick up some sleeping aids. I bought Tally new chew sticks from the pet store. I spent half an hour browsing at the used book store for sci-fi classics. And I stopped to drink a glass of wine at the bottle shop. It was fun to be back in Sellwood once again, if only for a few hours.

While I was sipping my pinot noir, a friend came in. "It's good to see you," she said. "How's life in the new house? Do you miss Sellwood?"

Kim and I have spent the past couple of weeks hunting for a new house. While it's true that we love many things about our current place -- great neighbors, great neighborhood, great views, great walkability -- we've come to realize that it no longer fits our lifestyle and goals.

When I bought this condo in 2013, I was newly divorced and newly dating. It seemed like a sweet bachelor pad. When Kim moved in, things weren't perfect but we made do because the condo still mostly reflected our values. But something happened during our 15-month RV tour of the United States. When we arrived home, we realized that we had changed.

Over the weekend, Kim and I began our hunt for a new home. We spent several hours combing local listings on Zillow and Redfin. We flagged the homes that looked interesting to us. Because I'm a total nerd, I compiled a spreadsheet of our absolute faves, listing important stats like price, home size, lot size, and -- perhaps most important of all -- walk score.

In the olden days, I picked my homes based on emotion. When my ex-wife and I bought our old farmhouse in 2004, that decision was rushed and irrational. I liked the idea of the place. I liked the large yard (two-thirds of an acre close in to Portland), the hundred-year-old house, and the cute hobbit-hole window in the living room. I didn't consider the massive amount of lawnmowing and yardwork. And I didn't pay attention to the fact that I'd have to drive almost anywhere I wanted to go.

During the past decade, I've learned to love travel. The old J.D. was too timid to explore the world. He was afraid of everything -- flight delays! terrorists! foreign languages! weird food! -- and so stayed home and dreamed of exploring the world instead of actually doing it.

Since 2007, however, I've visited forty-two states and twenty different countries (many more than once). I've camped high in the mountains of Bolivia, ridden a scooter through rural Turkey, and eaten fried grubs in Zimbabwe. I've been to Cape Horn off of southern Chile and the Cape of Good Hope off the tip of South Africa. I've strolled through glaciers in Alaska, climbed mountains in Peru, and snorkeled in the Galapagos.

I've spent ten years making up for the time I sat on the sidelines doing nothing. And I've only barely scratched the surface of what this amazing planet has to offer. It'd take several lifetimes to see it all.

While browsing Reddit yesterday, I happened upon a post about how "millennial home ownership shrinks as student debt grows". When I first saw it, the post was near the top of Reddit's front page. When I took the screen cap below, it had 13,700 upvotes and nearly 3600 comments. I wouldn't be surprised if it's over 15,000 upvotes by now.

The source article -- written by "Fred" at Financeography.com -- makes the following argument:

Millennials are weird. I should know; I am one. For years, our unorthodox lifestyle choices and money habits have been confusing to our elders. And perhaps the most unprecedented millennial-ish move we've been making is the avoidance of home ownership.

With home-buying at an all-time low according to the Census Bureau, the finger is easily pointed at us as a likely cause. But instead of leveling the typical charges that we're lazy and stuck in wanderlust as the root of why we still live at home, perhaps it's because we're just trying to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Consider what we've witnessed: As millennials, we lived through the late '90s and early '00s, we've seen our parents go through tech bubbles bursting and the entire housing market crashing. We saw firsthand what can happen if you buy a home when you can't afford it or if your job just suddenly vanishes.