Renting is not free, it is just structured differently
Every dollar of rent is a dollar that does not come back. That is the tradeoff for flexibility and no maintenance bill. Buying flips that structure, more of your payment goes toward something you eventually own, but it comes with real costs renting does not carry, maintenance, property tax, and the closing costs of buying and eventually selling.
This calculator assumes that whatever renting saves you each month, compared to owning, gets set aside rather than spent. That is the standard, and admittedly optimistic, assumption behind any rent versus buy comparison. If that money would actually get spent instead of saved, the buying side looks better than it already does here.
Time is the variable that changes the answer
Buying has real upfront cost, so it tends to lose to renting over a short horizon, a year or two, almost every time. The longer you hold, the more that upfront cost gets diluted across years of building equity and rising rent avoided. Somewhere in the middle is the point where buying pulls ahead, and where that point sits depends entirely on your specific numbers.
This is why the years you choose matter more than almost any other input here. Run your actual expected timeline, not just the default, before you trust the answer.
Appreciation is a real number, not a guaranteed one
Central Texas has seen real appreciation over time, but no market moves in a straight line every year, and past performance in one stretch of years does not promise the next stretch looks the same. The appreciation rate here is something you choose, and I would rather you test a conservative number alongside an optimistic one than anchor to just one.
The same goes for rent increases. If your landlord has raised rent aggressively the last few years, use that number instead of a generic default. The whole point of this tool is testing your actual situation, not a hypothetical one.
What this does not capture
This is a planning tool, not a forecast, and it leaves out real things that cut both ways, the tax treatment of mortgage interest, the transaction costs of eventually selling, the value of not having a landlord who can decide not to renew your lease. None of those are small, and none of them are the same for every household.
What this is genuinely good for is putting a real number next to a decision people often make on gut feeling alone. Bring me your actual numbers and we can go deeper than any calculator can on its own.
