1 · Buy and live in it
The house is home
You buy it, you live in it, nobody pays you rent. Whatever cash the house didn't need stays invested.
—net worth at the horizon
Type in the cash you have. You'll see what each choice leaves you with, whether owning saves you any tax, and the year buying overtakes renting.
Disclaimer Educational estimate only. Not tax, legal, or financial advice.
Every number here comes from Your numbers. Change one there and press Update.
Drag it. Nothing is recalculated — the chart already runs thirty years, and this just reads a different point on it.
Every figure has a ? — open it and the sum is written out with your own numbers.
1 · Buy and live in it
You buy it, you live in it, nobody pays you rent. Whatever cash the house didn't need stays invested.
—net worth at the horizon
4 · Rent, and invest it all
Every dollar stays in the market. Each year you also invest whatever owning would have cost more than renting.
—net worth at the horizon
2 · Buy it, rent it out, rent elsewhere
The whole house is let from day one. You pay rent somewhere else. It's an investment property — with an investment property's tax.
—net worth at the horizon
3 · Live in one room, rent the others
You live in it and let the spare rooms — or the other half of a duplex. The rent covers part of the cost every month.
—net worth at the horizon
Read this once before trusting a number.
In each year, the dearer of buying and living in it or renting sets the budget; every scenario invests whatever it didn't spend, at the same return. The four differ only in where the money went, never in how much of it there was. That is the discipline most "payment versus rent" calculators skip, and it is why the renter can win here when a simpler tool says they can't.
Buying a home saves tax only if your mortgage interest and property tax beat the standard deduction — for most buyers they don't, and this tool says so rather than crediting a benefit that never arrives. A rental gets depreciation and the passive-loss rules, and gives up the home-sale exclusion. Rooms let in your own home can be treated either way, and the switch in the rail shows what each costs.
The phase-down of the SALT cap at very high incomes, other itemized deductions you may already have, state income tax on rental profit, the 3.8% net investment income tax, points, refinancing, and the cost of your own time as a landlord. Returns here are steady; real ones aren't.
Scenario 3 has a cost the arithmetic can't see: you'd be living with tenants. On the numbers alone house-hacking usually wins. Whether it's worth it is a different question, and only you can answer it.
Every rate here is nominal — appreciation, rent growth and the investment return are the same kind of number, so none of the four gets a hidden advantage. This is a model, not advice; the figures are for thinking with.
You are already paying for somewhere to live. Put the same money against a house instead — the whole of it, mortgage and property tax and insurance and upkeep — and this is the price it reaches.
Your numbers for this page
These are this page's own figures and change nothing on the other tabs. The loan is 30 years.
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Nothing about you changes down this column. Only the price of money does.
| Interest rate | House price | Mortgage | vs today |
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