House Math 2.0

I found a great website about buying a house:

http://www.housemath.us/

We're currently renting, so I figured I'd look into whether or not it would make sense for us to buy a condo. Even in the current recession, house prices in the San Francisco Bay Area are rather astronomical.

I input the price of a condo about the size of our apartment in our area (I found it using zillow.com), the length of time we would likely stay in the house (5 years), the expected bank interest rate, expected appreciation etc. The web site then computed what price we could rent at instead to be in the same financial situation in 5 years after selling the condo. Based on that, it was pretty clear that we shouldn't buy right now - in fact, that we shouldn't buy unless we were planning on being in the area for 10 years. My life hasn't been that predictable so far, so I figure it's not worth the risk.

If you're trying to decide whether to rent or buy, this site is a pretty good resource. Check it out!