Compare options including renting, buying now, buying later, or buying a starter home first — with your take-home pay, debts and the changes ahead in the plan: kids, college, a raise.
See how much cash each option needs up front, the monthly budget it leaves you, and where each one finishes after thirty years.
A lender tells you the most they will lend. An agent shows you what that buys. But what does each option leave your household — this month, and in thirty years?
Free to build — no account needed, and nothing leaves your browser. Just try it out.
$59 to see the results: when you will have the cash to buy, the thirty-year comparison and a printable report.
Sales tax is added where it applies. 14-day refund.
Most calculators force a binary — rent or buy — and focus on the short term. Real households compromise. All four paths run month by month, in parallel, on the same figures for your income, taxes, kids and retirement.
Keep renting, and invest what you would have locked into a down payment — plus whatever renting saves you each month.
Buy now, with the down payment and mortgage rate you enter.
Rent for a few years while you save, then buy the same home at what it costs by then. A path many calculators leave out.
Buy a smaller home first — now or in a month you choose — then sell it and move up to your main home later. It runs when you enter a starter home.
Renting and buying are usually compared on cost alone.
That leaves out the things that actually decide whether a purchase fits: what reaches your account each month after tax and deductions, what you already owe, what childcare costs from the year it starts, and what happens to your pay over time.
It also leaves out who is doing the arithmetic. Almost everyone else in the transaction is paid a share of the price, and the agent’s commission, the lender’s origination fee and the transfer taxes all scale with what you spend.
So The Housing Model works out what those leave out: the highest price your own figures support, when you will actually have the cash for it, and what is left each month once you own it.
To see the long-term impact of each path. A home you can afford to close on can still leave you short every month after it. You see where each path wins and where it costs you, and you make the call.
A quick calculator 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 raise or promotion on the way, a car to replace, a period of leave.
Skip the single-answer trap. The free calculator runs Rent & invest, Buy now and Rent, then buy on five numbers you know, then answers the question you arrived with: renting against the best way of buying. The full planner adds Starter home, then upgrade when you plan one.
Try the five-minute look →Whether a tool tells you what you can afford or whether buying beats renting, none of the following reaches it. Each one changes whether the number is actually survivable.
An invented couple, so every figure can be shown in full.
Buying wins on these figures, by 28.4% after 30 years.
The best of each is $5,265,242 for Buy now against $3,772,491 for Rent & invest, a difference of $1,492,751. The two highest-finishing paths are both ways of buying — $5,265,242 for Buy now against $4,801,835 for Rent, then buy, 8.8% apart — so when you buy moves the answer far less than whether you buy. Every figure here still rests on the assumptions you entered, and the panel on the Review step shows which of them the answer hangs on.
Changing home-price growth on its own moves the two apart by $312,085, which is less than the $463,406 between the two that finish highest, so no single ordinary assumption brings them level. None of the 14 assumptions the panel tests changes which path finishes first.
This household gets a clear answer. Many do not, and the model says so when that happens rather than ranking four numbers and letting you pick the biggest — a gap under 5% of the leading total is reported as too close to separate, because a single ordinary assumption moves it further than that. Either way the near-term figures above — whether the cash is there, what the reserve does, what is left each month — are the ones you can actually inspect. 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, rents rising 3.5% a year, home prices growing 3.5% a year and investments returning 6% 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 report the Housing Model Pass gives you for your own figures.
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 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 home equity you cannot spend and money you can — cash and investments. Two paths can show the same net worth with very different amounts you could actually reach in a bad month.
Each child with dated care and school stages — daycare, preschool, after-school — age-banded everyday costs, and a college fund that starts and stops in the months you choose.
A payment you are making now, a replacement in the month you expect it — financed or paid outright, with a trade-in — and a cycle that repeats it every few years. A car can belong to some paths and not others: a second car only if you move out to the suburbs.
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, with the refinance closing costs taken from cash in that year. The “what if rates drop to 4.5%?” question, with its costs counted.
Equity grants — shares vesting, or options valued at their spread, with a share-price growth you choose or none — and 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.
Build the whole plan free — nothing uploaded, no account. What you pay for is what the model projects from it: when you will have the cash to buy, what renting and buying do over thirty years, and which assumption the answer 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 Housing Model Pass at the point where you want the projections — or not at all, and keep what you entered.