Chris Parnin¹ recently pointed me to the NY Times buy vs. rent calculator

I do like the fact that it allows you to take a lot of factors into account - tax rate, inflation, appreciation, rent increase, return on investment, you name it. It also allows you to interactively modify the settings - move a slider and see how it affects you.

What I didn’t like is the fact that the underlying methodology and formulas are only explained vaguely. Especially at rather extreme values, it returns unintuitive results. I can explain the results to myself if I assume a certain methodology, but I’d feel much better if I knew the underlying formulas.

Anyways - it’s yet another tool in the real estate buying toolbox.

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