27 karma · joined July 1, 2016
You seem to think everyone on HN agrees with each other.
Not necessarily, the less you put into the downpayment the more you pay in interest, the less the calculation makes sense.
I'm not disagreeing that there are many scenarios, likely including the 6k/mo example, that buying makes sense. What I take issue with, and I imagine other commenters did as well, is the idea that "When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later." This is far too simple, and there are many cases where the two are equivalent or renting comes out on top. It's easy to find such scenarios in the NYT calculator [0], even when you assume your house goes up in value.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Introduction-Engine... (Here is a much shorter document by the same authors written explicitly for non experts: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9809016)
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