You can use the Home Investment Calculator below to estimate the pre-tax rate of return you earn by buying and living in a home. Just enter the your inputs and click the Calculate button.
If you have questions? No problem. Detailed instructions and additional information appear below the calculations.
Collect Home Investment Analyzer Inputs
Forecasted Cash Flows
| Year | Rent | Expenses | Mortgage | Cash Flow |
|---|
Internal Rate of Return on Home
Note: The Cash Flow column shows the down payment including closing costs as a cash outflow at the start of the investment timeframe. The Cash Flow column adds the net sales proceeds after adjusting for mortgage balance to the tenth year’s cash flows.
Additional Information and Instructions
The Home Investment Analyuzer calculator calculates a pre-tax internal rate of return, which is equivalent to a geometric average return and to a compound annual growth rate. With example inputs like those that initually show, you can compare the calculated return to other pre-tax rates of returns. Note that some homeowers such as those who use the current standard deduction amount and who qualify for tax-free gain due to the Internal Revenue Code’s Section 121 exclusion may enjoy an after-tax rate of return equal to the pre-tax rate of return. In other words, regularly with homeownership, the homeowner pays no income taxes on her or his profits.
A key component of this analysis: The calculator assumes that if you own a home, you don’t have to pay rent for the home. Thus, the calculator imputes rental income if you buy a particular home rather than rent that home. (Buying the home intead of renting, of course, also burdens the home owner with the operating costs of the home and with, presumably, carrying a mortgage.)
The calculator makes a number of simplifying assumptions in order to limit the number of inputs required. For example, the calculator assumes that the home value, rent and expenses all increase annually by the inflation rate. The Home Investment Calculator assumes a taxpayer will use a 30-year mortgage and sell the property after ten years. Rather than use detailed schedules of operating expenses and selling expenses, the calculator assumes that the property’s maintenance costs, property taxes and insurance equal a steady percentage year after year. Further, the calculator assumes the selling costs (real esate agent commission, escrow costs, transfer taxes and so on) can be expressed as a percentage of the sales price too.
And a Caution
The Home Investment Calculator won’t prove that home ownership always works as an investment. Or that it always fails. The point here, really: You want to do the calculations. Sometimes home ownership generates attractive tax-free returns. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Other Resources You Might Be Interested In
Are Houses Investments (a blog post we wrote a while back to try and explain in words why homes can be investments)
Lessons from the Rate of Return of Everything paper (an academic research paper about what home ownership returns have historically looked like).
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870 to 2015 (the actual working paper.)