Housing & Mortgages

2 guides and tools on housing & mortgages.

Renting versus buying, what a deposit really needs to be, how mortgages are priced, and the costs that never appear in the asking price.

About this section

Housing is the largest line in most budgets and the largest single financial decision most people make, and it is surrounded by claims that do not survive examination.

“Rent is dead money” is the most common. In the early years of a repayment mortgage the majority of each payment is interest, which is paid to a bank and builds nothing — exactly as dead as rent. Only the capital portion creates equity, and it starts small. The honest comparison is rent against the total unrecoverable cost of owning: interest, maintenance, insurance, property tax and the five to eight per cent of value that disappears in transaction costs across a purchase and a sale.

That last figure is why short ownership periods usually lose. Under about five years, renting is frequently cheaper; over ten, buying usually wins. The crossover depends on local price-to-rent ratios more than on anything else.

These guides cover the rent-versus-buy arithmetic with the costs most comparisons omit, and how to think about a deposit — where the loan-to-value band boundaries matter more than the headline amount, because finding an extra few thousand to cross one can cut the rate for years. The affordability calculator shows what a three-point rate rise would do to the payment, which is the stress test worth applying to yourself rather than leaving to a lender.