In many places, homes available to rent are not and will never be comparable in quality to homes available to purchase.
I was renting a place for $950/month starting in 2011, then for 2012 it went up to $1,050, then for 2013 the landlord wanted $1,350/month to renew. Meanwhile home prices were still low (30% of inventory still short sales in my area) and mortgage interest rates were under 4%. No-brainer. I now pay less in principal and interest than I paid in rent, for a much larger, nicer house compared to the apartment I lived in. And my mortgage payment is never going to go up. (My property tax bill might go up, but that just means my investment is appreciating.)
Funny you say that: I'm strongly considering buying, and my landlord elected to not offer a "heat pump renewal" when the A/C went out. Hello window units, goodbye rental hell. Rental markets are not all alike, and this one's not too healthy.
1) The majority of your net worth is probably in that building so you're badly diversified across asset classes, 3) You are massively leveraged on that one position. 2) You are holding an extremely illiquid investment that could take months or even years to sell. This will probably be worst when when you want to sell the most.
All three of those are marks of a questionable investment.
This matters because the payments on a fixed-rate mortgage do stay flat; they don't adjust with inflation.
I just refinanced to 4.5%. Long-run inflation is 3% so my actual cost to borrow is 1.5%. With the mortgage deduction it is just over 1.1%--nearly free money, in other words.
It's true that I pay property taxes. In my jurisdiction they are just over 1%, so now my actual cost to own is maybe about 2.2%.
Maintenance is a bit of a red herring...most straight maintenance is inexpensive (cleaning, painting) or optional (fancy landscaping).
Most expensive "maintenance" is actually improvements. For example last year I replaced both my A/C unit and furnace. It was a substantial cash outlay, but the new units are far more performant and efficient than the old ones. If I stay in the house another 5 years I will completely recoup that investment in lower monthly energy payments. And if I don't, the modern new appliances will allow me to set a higher asking price in a sale.
LOL the political reported rate is what the .gov is willing to provide in COLA increases. It has nothing to do with actual costs. You're budgeting based on made up numbers provided for someone elses "pay" rate increases.
Look at say... gas prices. Double in a decade. Thats about 7% per year. Or the price of food, or medical insurance, or tuition, or price of cars, etc. Think of what real people actually spend money on.
You can get better numbers from shadowstats. Somewhere toward the low end of 6% to 10% is about right. We'll call it 7% long term average.
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.
Lets say J6P gets a 3% pay raise but the cost of everything else increased by 7%, for a generation or so. That means the money left over after food, car, etc aka the rent either directly for land or indirectly for money to buy land, will drop by about 4% per year. For awhile you can mask that by lowering interest rates, but once you reach "basically zero" like now, problems develop.
Finally the mortgage interest deduction doesn't work like that. If you pay more interest to the bank than the standard deduction fraction then you don't have to pay income tax on the fraction above that. Basically you need low income, high interest payments, and then all you save is taxes on the portion above the standard level. You're still out the same money, just not out the income tax on a small sliver of the total interest over a certain limit. I've paid enough of my mortgage off that I no longer get a mortgage interest deduction. Oh, I could file it anyway, but I'd have to pay more in taxes than just taking the std deduction. Eventually you reach AMT range and then things get weird.
Actually you end up inflation poor, not house poor. Your house payment stays mostly fixed. In your scenario of much higher inflation than reported, rents are also likely going up. In such a case the renter will be worse off than the home owner.
Also, s/each money/each month/g
On the other hand, I'm now paying ~3.4% interest on a place that would rent for, again, about 6% of the purchase price per year. Even including other costs, I'm coming out decently ahead.
Of course there are other reasons to own rather than rent (or vice versa) aside from just which costs more, like stability, or freedom to move. But it is not a slam dunk easy decision as to which option costs less, even after accounting for the potential equity you build when owning with a mortgage.