I've launched BuyVsRent.co.uk, a simple calculator to help you figure out whether buying or renting makes more financial sense.
The motivation behind this came from a pretty simple problem: there are a lot of property calculators out there, but most of them are either incomplete, misleading or don't give much flexibility in the investment comparisons. When I was trying to work through the numbers myself, I realised I needed something that actually accounted for investment returns on the money I'd save by renting. It felt weird that most calculators just ignored this entirely - if you're not buying a house, you're presumably investing that down payment somewhere.
So I built this calculator to do a proper year-by-year financial simulation. You input your local market data - house prices, rental costs, mortgage rates, property taxes, that sort of thing - and it compares what your net worth would look like over the course of the mortgage term if you bought versus if you rented. The clever bit is that it assumes any monthly difference between buying and renting costs gets invested, and it tracks those investment returns alongside your home equity. It also includes real investment options: Bitcoin, Ethereum, stocks, bonds, and gold with live data where available.
The calculator comes pre-configured with market defaults for the UK and New Zealand, pulling data from official sources like the UK Land Registry and NZ's MBIE. But you can override every single input if you want to model your own scenario. The results include an interactive chart showing wealth accumulation over time, so you can actually see when one option becomes financially superior to the other.
On the technical side, it's a lightweight static site built with Python and Jinja2, vanilla JavaScript for the calculations and Tailwind CSS for the styling. No backend required - everything runs in the browser and builds to a flat set of files that deploy to Netlify.
If you're thinking about property decisions - whether you're in the UK, New Zealand, or anywhere else - check it out and plug in your own numbers. I'd genuinely love to hear if it helps clarify things, or if you spot anything that could be better. You can reach me on Telegram or X.