7, dude, don’t you know anything about numbers? Seriously though, there is no right number and I never indicated otherwise.

All I _said_ was that people would do well to understand what their time horizon was and include that in their evaluation process. The longer the time horizon, the easier it is to get the buy numbers to work. Simple stuff.

And please stop with the notion that I’m agreeing with you regarding rent/buy. Among other things, I’ve uttered it myself as far back as 3 years; I wasn’t aware you’re the resident piggington “rent/buy” guy; wasn’t what I was talking about here; and finally, while a good rule of thumb, again, at an individual level, one has be honest with themselves with regard to what their plans are. Finally finally, never forget that life and the world throw wrenches into the works at times. Not a bad idea to run a few of the more likely scenarios. And that brings me to…

Well, weberlin’s got a scenario here that you’ve tried to model a bit. You’ve factored in a potential increase in his rental income, but you’ve neglected to consider the increases in property tax (straight 2% there), HOA (hard to believe it can go up from $330, but probably will in 5 years), loss of tax benefit (admit I’m a little out of my element here, but pretty sure it’s a hit), and any gap in occupancy. And even without that, I’m pretty sure he’d shelling out a few dollars every month (P&I $1,572, property taxe $300, HOA $330 = $2202). Hope the fridge doesn’t break.

weberlin, while I know this isn’t what you want to hear, remember that it could turn out differently and/or I might have something wrong. The big thing I’d recommend to you is that if you seriously have any plans of becoming a landlord, I’d get educated about all that well in advance.

For what it’s worth, I owned a house that was worth less than I paid for it for a good 8 years, but in the end, it all worked out just fine.