this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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Actually Infuriating
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No, I'm being fair and doing my best to steelman your argument. I rounded up my rent to $1900 and I rounded down the purchase price from $530k to $500k and rounded associated interest payments down to $2900 and as you requested applied the same timeline to averaging 25 years of rentership compared to a 25 year mortgage even if in my timeline I expect to stay for 5, probably, and you know that less goes to principal at the start of a loan term than the end. My rent didn't even go up this year despite the legal maximum being 2.3%, which I used, I think our property manager is currently slightly worried about people moving out from cooling rents. I already said ownership of even a rowhome would either be 50% more expensive or I'd have to move much further out of the city.
I can understand why you'd be upset but even after looking at these numbers, there are undeniably benefits in my opinion it's still not as big of a deal as you think it is.
As a second anecdote, buddy of mine in Toronto bought a semi-detached house in Scarborough to live in with parents' help for $1.1m, prices now are 900k to 1m, he's paying $4400/mo after needing to refinance to a 30 yr mortgage. 45-50% (averaged over 30 years) of the payments are toward interest, though at this moment 95% of his payments are towards interest. He feels stuck there.
Buddy, you're trying to backpedal $10,800 of losses per year. Further, you didn't include the same percentage of appreciation on the market value of the house. Using your 2.3% figure (which is less than inflation, and thus absurdly conservative) that's another $11,500. By renting under the terms you described, you are pissing away $22,300 per year.
They say that the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Renting has a much worse ROI than the lottery. This is why I suggested an RV, or couch surfing, or even living in a car until you can afford an RV.
With the amount of value you are losing due to renting, you could literally buy a new car (albeit an economy car) each and every year. If you pulled a $50 bill out of your wallet each and every day, and just set it on fire, you would lose less than renting under the terms you described.
Sure. He's got a theoretical loss in value of $100-200k. He presumably put down $220,000, so worst case, he still has $20,000 of value in the house, plus the payments he's made against principal. What is that house going to be worth next year? In 5 years? What would have to happen for the value of that house to stay under $1.1m for the next 25 years? Even if he had bought at the height of the housing bubble in 2008, by 2012-2016, prices had dipped and rebounded.
Yeah, that sucks.
That sucks more. You know what sucks more than that? 100% of payments going towards "interest", and no equity. That situation is called "rent".