Every few months I end up in the same loop: should I finally buy, or keep renting? The advice online is no help. Half of it says buying is always right, the other half swears renting and investing wins. So this time I sat down and did the maths myself.
The first thing that jumped out was how much "how long I'll stay" changes everything. Buying comes with stamp duty, legal fees and a survey. Those only pay for themselves if you're still there a few years later. For my numbers the break-even was somewhere around year five. Before that, renting came out ahead, just because of the moving costs.
Then the deposit. I could stretch to 5%, but the interest on a 95% mortgage pushed the break-even point out by a couple of years. A 15% deposit changed the whole answer. So "should I buy" turned out to depend a lot on how much I could actually put down.
The part I'd been ignoring was the city. I'd been looking at London prices, where a flat costs about twice Manchester and nearly three times Leeds — but the rents aren't three times higher. The same question gives a different answer depending on the postcode. Running my numbers for Manchester came out very different from London.
And then there's the quiet stuff that never makes the headline. Owning means maintenance, insurance, service charges on a flat. Renting means rent that keeps climbing. Neither is free. It came down to which set of costs I could actually live with.
I got tired of doing this in a spreadsheet, so I built a small calculator that runs the ten-year comparison properly — buying against renting and investing the deposit. It's at Rent vs Buy Calculator if you want to plug in your own numbers.
What I found, in short: if I'm staying put and can put down a real deposit, buying wins. If I might move again in a couple of years, renting and investing isn't a consolation prize, it's the better call. There's no universal answer — just your own numbers.
