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Comment by wooster | Hacker News Reader

From the buy/rent calculator:

    RETURN ON SAVINGS: We assume the money you have saved
    generates a return of 2%/year.
    INFLATION: We assume a general rate of inflation on 
    your income and expenses of 2%/year.

This seems unrealistic. What is the basis for these numbers? It seems to bias the buy/rent calculator pretty heavily towards buying.

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Which part? Expected return on savings or expected inflation? Relevant to inflation expectations: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/is-our-economist...

we're working on giving users the flexibility to change these assumptions. Obviously viewpoints differ and we want you to be able to make the best decision based on your view. That said, all default or base case values are what we consider to be 'consensus' estimates.

It would also be good to be able to change the 'expenses' field for ownership.

For example, if you live in NYC there's pretty much no chance you'll find a place which doesn't have (at least) a few grand/month in "coop fees" or "condo fees".

Also, there's "how much will you spend on maintenance", which you don't need to worry about when renting. Replacing a roof, hot water heater, etc. I'm sure you built in some numbers for that, but it would be good to be able to set.

And, as other comments have said, the 30 year mark seems to just be broken. I filled in some random numbers (100k, 60k) and I get 339k expenses in year 29, and -125k in year 30.

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