You get there by refinancing to extend the loan and lower interest. It's not deceptive at all.

Yeah, I've owned a house for fifteen years. I know how this works. Saying your house is worth $1.1M now and you only have to pay a mortgage of 2500 a month completely ignores that you purchased it at a different price, or at least have put a substantial amount of capital into it so that your mortgage is certainly not covering $1.1M worth of principal.

I'm saying this is deceptive because that is not what people think of when they are comparing renting with buying. You're comparing renting today versus buying over a decade ago and getting lucky about the property value going up and being lucky about being able to afford to get a mortgage in the first place.

It's just not a nice thing to argue. I pay a lower "rent" than my friends who rent. At first I was paying much more than my peers, now I'm paying half as much. But most of them would happily go back in time and do the same versus paying rent now, that's just not possible, not to mention that they're often too young for it to have been financially possible for them to do it when I bought my house.

It is really unreasonable to suggest that someone now magically get themselves into a long term mortgage taken out a decade prior as if that's merely a $500 monthly premium. It's time travel or luck.

If you did this today, you have to refinance at a higher interest rate in the future. That's why it's deceptive.

But extending the period of the loan also reduces monthly payments. You don't necessarily need lower interest rates.