Home Buying
The decisions that come before the mortgage: whether to buy at all, how much a lender will approve versus how much you should borrow, and what the transaction costs of getting in and back out actually add up to. Every comparison here counts property tax, insurance, and maintenance, which is where most affordability estimates go wrong.
The 28/36 Rule Says You Can Borrow $406,000. The Real Number Is $300,000.
Most affordability calculators quietly forget that property tax and insurance come out of the same 28% as your mortgage payment. On a $110,000 income, that omission overstates your budget by six figures.
May 28, 2026 · 10 min readRenting Won This $400,000 Comparison by $12,705, and It Was Close
Buying is not automatically better than 'throwing money away on rent'. We ran a full five-year comparison including maintenance, selling costs, and what a renter does with the down payment. The result depends on three assumptions, and one of them dominates everything.