Buy vs Rent — a calculator

Is it Better to Rent or to Buy you home?

Often, I hear that “renting is always bad for your finances because you’re essentially giving money away to the landlord, which could otherwise be used to build home equity.”

For many people, this thinking is wrong. The unintuitive truth is that renting is often cheaper than buying. Or, if it is indeed more expensive, it’s less so than people think.

To clarify the real costs of ownership and renting, and make them comparable, I built the calculators linked below. They are both in Google Sheets so that you can inspect the calculations being made and change them as you see fit. Feel free to share as well!

Both are heavily based on the calculator created by The New York Times.