Should I rent or buy a home?

This decision gets argued in slogans — "rent is dead money," "your home is your best investment" — and both are wrong often enough to be dangerous. The honest answer depends on your numbers, your timeline, and what you would do with the money either way.

The real cost of buying (it's not just the mortgage)

Buyers underestimate the ongoing costs that never build equity:

• Interest — especially heavy in the early years of a mortgage.
• Property tax, insurance, maintenance — budget ~1% of the home's value a year for upkeep alone.
• Transaction costs — buying and selling can eat 5–10% of the price, which is why short stays rarely pay off.
• The opportunity cost of your deposit — that lump sum could have been invested.

The real cost of renting

Renting isn't "throwing money away" — you're buying flexibility and offloading maintenance and market risk to the landlord. The genuine downsides:

• No equity — your payments don't build an owned asset.
• Exposure to rent increases over time.
• Less control over the space and less security of tenure.

The comparison that actually matters

The fair test isn't "mortgage vs rent." It's:

• Buying path: deposit + all ownership costs, minus the equity and price growth you build.
• Renting path: rent, plus what your un-spent deposit earns if you invest it.

Run both over the number of years you'll realistically stay. A short horizon with high transaction costs usually favours renting; a long horizon with stable costs usually favours buying — but only your figures settle it.

Model both as scenarios

This is a projection problem, not a debate. In Dispono you can build "rent" and "buy" as separate scenarios and compare their long-run effect on your cashflow and net worth — including the opportunity cost of tying up a deposit instead of investing it. Then you decide with numbers, not slogans.