Compare renting, buying now, buying later, or starting smaller — with your take-home pay, debts, childcare, and expected life changes in the plan. See the cash each option needs, the monthly budget it leaves, and how the paths compare over 30 years.
Free to build — all eight steps, no account, nothing leaves your browser. $59, once, plus sales tax where it applies, to see what it projects: the cash-ready date, the thirty-year comparison and the printable record. Twelve months, no renewal.
Renting and buying are usually compared on price and rent alone. That leaves out the things that decide whether a purchase fits: what actually reaches your account each month, what you already owe, what childcare will cost from the year it starts, and what happens to your pay when someone takes leave. This model puts those in the comparison.
Because they disagree. The path that ends with the most money is often the one with the thinnest months in between, and a home you can afford to close on can still leave you short every month after. Seeing the three together is the point: you find out where a path wins and where it costs you, and you make the call.
A short check usually asks for a price, a rent and a rate, and answers on those alone. That is a useful starting point and this site has one. What it cannot show is how the purchase sits alongside the rest of your household — deductions already coming out of your pay, loans you are still repaying, childcare from the year it begins, a car to replace, a period of leave. The right column lists what the full plan asks for instead.
Skip the single-answer trap. The free calculator runs three paths — Buy now; Rent, then buy; and Rent & invest — then answers the question you arrived with: renting against the best of the buying paths, on the same household. Ranking the top two would often compare two ways of buying, which is not the choice you are making. The full planner adds Starter home, then upgrade when you plan one, and shows them side by side.
Try the five-minute look →Whether a tool tells you what you can afford or whether buying beats renting, it can't see any of these. Each one changes whether the number is actually survivable.
Most calculators force a binary. Real households compromise. These are the four strategies the model evaluates simultaneously, using one shared set of assumptions about your income, taxes, kids, and retirement.
Assumes you keep renting and invest what you would have put into a deposit, plus the monthly difference, at the return you enter.
Buy at the start of the plan, at the deposit and rate you enter. Neither is filled in for you.
Rent for N years to build a larger cushion, then buy at the appreciated price. The path short calculators leave out.
Buy a modest starter at Y0. Sell and roll into a forever home a few years later. Two transactions, double the friction, often-overlooked tax mechanics.
An invented couple, so the figures can be shown in full. They take home $11,800 a month between them, spend $4,200 on living costs, pay $3,600 in rent and $450 a month on a student loan that clears in 2030. They have $95,000 in cash, $25,000 invested, and want to keep $30,000 untouched. The home they have in mind is $750,000, and they are thinking about buying in two years.
Too close to call: $265,931 separates rent & invest from rent, then buy after 30 years. Changing rent growth on its own moves the two apart by $1,204,891 — several times the gap itself — so the model says the comparison is too close to call rather than picking a winner. Buy now is left out of the comparison entirely, because on these figures the purchase does not fund itself.
That is the shape of most real answers: the long-run difference is often small and uncertain, while the near-term figures — whether the cash is there, what the reserve does, what is left each month — are easier to inspect, though they still rest on what you enter. Those are what the plan is for.
Every figure here is output from the planner for the inputs above. The description above leaves some assumptions unsaid, so they are said here: 20% down, a 6.5% mortgage rate, $5,000 of moving and setup costs, 1.8% property tax, $2,200 a year for insurance, no mortgage insurance and home prices growing 3% a year. Everything not named is what the planner starts you with, and every one of them is shown and editable in the plan itself — several of these fields start blank on purpose, because a guessed property tax is worse than an empty one. The household is invented so the numbers can be shown; yours will differ. Read their full report — the same one the pass produces.
A rent-versus-buy answer moves on the things a short calculator never asks about. These are the ones the plan lets you put in, each on the date it happens.
Your goal, income, accounts, spending and debts, home costs, life changes, assumptions, review. Your own figures are never filled in for you and a blank is never treated as zero. Where a starting assumption is needed — a growth rate, a closing-cost percentage — it is shown, labelled as an assumption, and yours to change. Tick what applies to you and the rest stays out of the way.
Five questions you can answer from memory — rent, the price you have in mind, savings, take-home pay, and what actually gets set aside. It runs the same engine as the full plan and lists every assumption it had to make for you.
Every entry the plan still needs, named and grouped by step, with a link straight to the field. Nothing is guessed at to fill a gap, and a figure you have not typed yet is never marked as an error.
A one-time setup takes the withholding and deductions from a real paycheck stub — federal, state and local tax withheld, HSA, FSA, employer benefits, retirement — instead of approximating them from your salary. It does not calculate your tax: it uses the figures your employer already worked out.
Enter a combined take-home figure, or add earners one at a time — each with their own pay, deductions, retirement contributions and dated career changes. A raise, a leave, a job change or a second income starting mid-plan are all entered against the person they belong to.
A below-market or stabilised rent now, and market rises from the month you move. A single rent-growth rate across thirty years is an assumption dressed as a neutral default, and it quietly decides the rent-versus-buy answer.
Four measured things, not a grade: housing as a share of take-home pay in the first full year owned, how many months of living costs the cash and investments left after buying would cover, what is left each month once housing, living costs, debts and saving are paid, and how many months in the projection cannot fund themselves. The 35% housing share is a common planning benchmark rather than a rule, and the review says so where it uses it.
For each path, the year the modelled portfolio could cover that path’s expenses without your salary. You can rerun it at a lower return to see how far the date moves.
The highest price your figures support on the leading ownership path, in today’s money and again at the month you would buy. When your target price is out of reach, it also lists the later months at which it comes into reach, so you can see whether the answer is “no” or “not yet”.
Every assumption the plan can vary on its own, moved by an amount that would not be surprising, with the whole plan re-run every time and the results ranked. Not by how much money they move — most lift every path at once and change nothing — but by how far they move the gap between the leading path and its nearest rival. No probabilities, no simulated futures: each row says exactly what was changed and by how much. A row that does not apply to your household — pay growth, when you have set it per earner — says so and is not counted as tested.
When cash would go negative the model sells investments to cover it, and charges the withdrawal tax rate you entered. When there is nothing left to sell, it does not quietly carry on: it records the worst month, the first month the plan cannot fund itself, and marks that path as not funded. No silent overdrafts.
Splits net worth into illiquid home equity vs. truly liquid (cash + brokerage). Two paths can show identical NW with wildly different sleep-at-night metrics.
Up to 6 dependents. Childcare phases (daycare → after-school → self-sufficient), age-banded kid costs, 529 contributions starting at birth, college-cost waves.
Up to 3 vehicle slots. Off / Buy New / Buy Used / Existing / Owned Outright / Lease, with per-path purchase timing. The Rent & invest path might keep an older car longer than the Buy now path.
Read a Rocket Money, Mint or bank CSV in your browser — the file is never uploaded — and it suggests a budget per category from your own rolling spend, setting aside anything already entered elsewhere so nothing is counted twice. Then record what your balances actually were, month by month, and watch them against what the plan said.
Optionally reset your mortgage rate mid-projection. Closing costs deduct from cash in the refi year. The "what if rates drop to 4.5%" what-if, modeled honestly.
A simple equity grant — shares vesting, or options valued at today’s spread — job loss, sabbatical, parental leave. Collapsed by default; expand only the ones that apply to you. No paying the complexity tax for features you don't use.
An automated suite runs before anything ships: hand-computed expectations rather than recordings of whatever the code happened to produce, frozen results from earlier engine versions that fail if a single projected figure moves, and browser checks that drive the real app end to end.
Every saved plan in one file, and a restore that adds what is missing without ever overwriting what is already there. Export a single plan to open on another machine. There is no account, so a backup is yours to keep — though a plan file is data, not the app: you need this site, or a copy of it, to open one again.
This isn't a 30-second answer machine. It's a serious model. Five minutes below will tell you whether it'll actually help you, or just frustrate you.
Building your plan is free — all eight steps, your real paystub, your children, your loans, saved and backed up, nothing uploaded. What you pay for is what the model projects from it: when you are cash-ready, what renting and buying do over thirty years, and which assumption the whole thing is hanging on.
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Read a complete sample report first — the real thing, for an example household. Full refund within fourteen days, for any reason — a refund withdraws the licence key and the paid features lock again, and everything you entered stays yours. One payment, covering twelve months of the paid features from the day you buy. It does not renew on its own and there is nothing to cancel. When the twelve months are up, everything you entered is still yours — nothing is locked away or deleted. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded and there is no account to make. Sold and licensed by Brooks Digital Ventures LLC. Payment is handled by Paddle, acting as the merchant of record, who collects and remits any sales tax or VAT that applies; where tax applies it is added to the price above at checkout. Educational modelling and decision support, not financial, investment, tax, legal, mortgage or real-estate advice.
You do not have to decide now. Build the whole plan in the free plan builder first, see how much of your situation it handles, and buy the Homebuying Pass at the point where you want the projections — or not at all, and keep what you entered.