Buy now or wait for rates to fall?

The argument this calculator exists to settle

"Rates are high, I will buy when they come down." It is the most common sentence in this market, and it hides three things that the arithmetic above puts side by side.

The rent does not come back. Two years at $2,600 a month is $62,400 that bought you somewhere to sleep and nothing else. It is the largest number in most of these comparisons and the one nobody writes down.

You can refinance a rate. You cannot refinance a price. If rates fall, they fall for the person who already bought too — and that person refinances a smaller balance on a house bought at the old price. That is the row most versions of this comparison leave out, and it usually decides it.

A lower rate on a higher price is not obviously cheaper. Whether waiting wins depends entirely on how fast prices move against how fast rates fall. Put your own two numbers in: at 0% appreciation waiting almost always wins, and at 4% it almost never does. The point is not which answer comes out. It is seeing how little it takes to flip it.

Where these numbers come from

Property tax uses the county's official millage from the Florida Department of Revenue with the homestead exemption applied; home insurance is scaled from the Florida average by the value of the dwelling. The mortgage payment is a standard 30-year amortisation. The refinance line assumes closing costs of 2% of the remaining balance, rolled into the new loan. Everything else on this page is an assumption you set — the rate path and the price path are not published figures and nobody has them.

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