Rent or Buy? Every Tenant should be asking themselves this question. The New York Times wrote that unless you are going to live in a home for more than 16 years you should rent. Actually a better question would be: At what point should a Renter stop saving and renting and buy property, if at all? Most Realtors, I suspect, will say as soon as you can afford to do so. This is not always the case.
Today I will not focus on the ‘why’ but rather this misleading NT Times article.
Most know it is better to own than rent a place to live. I was thinking on how to best explain why when I came across an article posted by the New York Times. The article was well written, it came with a buy-rent-calculator and left me dumbfounded. Had I taken the article at face value when it was posted in 2008, I would have lost $100,000 in a three-year period (Yes, during the recent recession) . I understand that it is extremely difficult to buy in NY and the US economy is different than here in Toronto Ontario but I cannot believe that the author actually claims that unless you are going to live in the same home for over 16 years that it is better to rent. Can the US economy be that messed up? Click the image below to go their calculator as I found it. I’ve captured it in order to make a point.
Click to visit the NY Times Actual Calculator
The calculator actually works really well. The problem (or great part as landlords would see it) is the numbers that were entered by the author. The First Image is what you see if you go directly to the page.
Now lets input the variables with what I would think would be more correct: You may find a slight difference. 
Have you ever heard the term GIGO (read GI-Joe) and it stands for Garbage in –> Garbage out. Like I’ve stated, most people will intuitively believe the second graph even though they might not now why. I wish that 16 years ago I had bought as much property (even at well above asking) as I could get my hands on and rented it. Even if in the first years the rent would have been at a loss, today I would be a much wealthier person.
Any Questions?