Changing Gears: Is it OK to not buy a house by the time I'm 30?

Oh Andrew-from-one-week-ago, you beautiful naive bastard. Did you actually think FHA loans were affordable? hahahahahaha lololololol no. You dummy. For starters, you lose half of your 3.5% down payment to an FHA funding fee so you're basically setting a loan for 98.25% of the home value, instead of 96.5% (which, If we're being honest, is ridiculous either way). Second, you get your monthly payment blown up by mortgage insurance. That's a lot of fun. Third, you can't deduct said mortgage insurance payments come tax time. Three hugeeeee reasons to avoid FHA loans if you can. I might even be missing some more reasons but I'm pretty sure I blacked out when the loan officer was talking and If my head hadn't been stuck in a loop of perpetual nodding, we'd still be in his office.

He did introduce us to a more affordable type of loan if we could scrounge up a 5% down payment. I'll give you a brief, possibly inaccurate, description: the bank sets us up with a loan from Fannie Mae up to $417k, and gives us a second loan for the difference between the first loan and the total amount you need to borrow. Overall, the interest rate would be much higher than what FHA offered once the two loans combined, but since you're not paying the mortgage insurance, you're saving quite a bit AND you start off with 5% of the home value paid for. 

In an ideal world, we would buy a place we loved, live in it until we both finished up school (Summer 2015), and then move abroad for a year or two while renting the place out. Sadly, even though both of those loans would have technically put us in a house in the neighborhood we love, our monthly payments would have been about half of our take home pay. (Why do banks even let people borrow like that? Isn't that how we got into this whole recession in the first place?) Also, unless we can come up with a 20% down payment right now (impossible), we'd never be able to rent the house out for anywhere near our monthly payment to the bank. 

NEW PLAN: Avoid the wanton destruction of our bank account.

Step 1: Don't buy a house right now. We can't afford to buy a place in the area we want to live in and we would have a hard time renting a place in the areas that are cheaper. If we're serious about going abroad, and we are, then buying just doesn't make sense right now. It did get me to thinking about the fact I will be on the other side of 30 (we're both 27 right now) before I'll buy my first place. I'm not sure why this freaks me out but I always thought I'd have a place by 30 and I don't want to feel like I'm falling behind. 

Step 2: Continue renting our current apartment until we move abroad. Debtblag.com has a good post about the value of renting. and it makes me feel a little bit better about our situation. 

Step 3: Continue saving as much as we can for the eventual 20% down payment. This is pretty much never a bad idea. 

Step 4: Find a job overseas that doesn't set us back financially or stall either of our careers (which we believe is possible). I will definitely be posting more on the search for these jobs later!

Step 5: Come back and buy a home. We'd be 31 or 32, and ready to start a family. We'd also have enough in the bank for a down payment of 20% (hopefully). 

Well there it is, our 5-step plan in all it's glory. I feel like I should stamp this post with a big fat "subject to change" stamp. Any comments? Suggestions? OVERSEAS JOB OFFERS?!?