The New York Times has just released an updated rent vs buy calculator that factors in estimates of how your home values and investment income would appreciate over time, in addition to a variety of other homeownership and renting costs. NYT created a previous version of this calculator back in 2007 and it became very popular. “This new version allows readers to make many more decisions than the old one did” said David Leonhardt, the managing editor of The Upshot, the Times’ data journalism site. There are number of other rent vs. buy calculators are available by top real estate search sites such as Trulia, realtor.com and Homes.com, and sites for lending like Freddie Mac and Bankrate. All these calculators work similarly as they make recommendations based on criteria like monthly rent, home price, planned length of stay, mortgage rates and property taxes.
