Buy vs Rent Calculator
An interactive model that weighs the true long-term cost of buying against renting.
Most rent-vs-buy calculators answer the wrong question. They compare a mortgage payment to rent and call it a day, which makes buying look obvious. The real question is what your money does over time, and that's the one I wanted to model honestly.
This tool accounts for the things that actually move the answer: the opportunity cost of locking capital into a deposit, appreciation, maintenance, and the slow drag of transaction costs. It surfaces a real breakeven point rather than a feel-good monthly comparison.
I scoped it tight on purpose. A handful of honest inputs, one clear breakeven chart, and nothing else. The discipline was deciding what to leave out, because a calculator that asks for thirty variables is one nobody finishes.
It started as a tool for my own decision about buying in Chamonix. Building it forced me to get precise about the assumptions I was hand-waving past, which is the whole point of modeling a decision instead of just feeling it out.
