People wondering if they should buy or rent right now may find this spreadsheet I made useful. It compares $ investment value of home ownership vs. renting based on a lot of assumptions that you can play around with. Key user inputs (yellow cells) and outputs (gray + green cells) and instructions are all visible in the top few rows. You don’t need to look further unless you want to understand or QA/QC the spreadsheet. It assumes that when renting you just invest your down payment into stocks and compares the difference in cumulative rental vs. homeownership cost over time.
In green at the top it breaks out how long you must stay in a purchased home for it to be better than renting. This is the primary question this spreadsheet aims to answer.
You can play around with a bunch of what ifs – what if there is a stock/real estate crash, what if rental price growth or home value growth is explosive. In general, the results surprise me how justified it is to buy vs. rent, as long as you’re sure you’re staying for a fairly short while before selling. It’s easy to forget about principal payoff through mortgage payments, but they make a huge difference in your investment value.
Care to give it a spin?
You will need to copy or download to use, and probably on actual computer – the spreadsheet was not made to be mobile friendly. This public link only has viewing access enabled, but you can copy it to make edits.