Octavia
Ideal_Rock
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2007
- Messages
- 2,660
I also love the NYT rent-vs-buy calculator! It's not perfect in this kind of situation, though. The problem is that it assumes that the house you are thinking about buying is similar to the house/apartment you are renting, so you might have to do a couple different calculations and compare apples to oranges a bit. For example, in my situation, DH and I would never buy a property similar to the apartment we rent (1br/1ba/~700sf), we would "trade up" to a larger, multi-br, multi-ba home. If I put in our current stats and what the probable sales price of this unit would be, it says it would take 27 years for buying to be a better option. But if I put in the rental and purchase costs for a place similar to what we'd actually buy, it would be less than 4 years until the tipping point. HOWEVER, we're still saving a ton of money each month by staying in a smaller place and renting until we really need a bigger place, I just couldn't figure out how to calculate when the optimal time to purchase would be. I just wanted to mention this in case geckodani hasn't put in all the info yet, because even though it's super helpful for the larger picture, you might not be able to tailor it to your situation as much as you'd like...