Yes, the mortgage payment may be cheaper than renting but when people live in a house for two years and start talking about releasing the equity, you're gonna have a bad time. Plus, it's hard to visualise the costs of homeownership beyond just the mortgage, and Phil has the executive functioning of a methed out squirrel. I don't know if you can do this in the US but in other places you can just pay on the interest, rather than the principal, for years at a time, building no equity at all. Plus, I am assuming Phil has an interest rate of 6.3 million percent, as, I rather doubt he was savvy and got multiple offers of mortgage.