Renting is Throwing Money Away, Right? (2015)
This is one of the most annoyingly formatted and written articles. So antagonistic and condescending, with not-as-funny-as-you-think jokes and images inbetween, half a dozen single sentence, hell, single line paragraphs with white space inbetween, constant repetition and using up half my screen width.<p>As for content, meh. The point of the story is: it depends. Renting isn't throwing away money in every situation, fair enough. But it begs the question, what reasonable assumptions can be made for your situation. And here the author mostly fails to deliver, as it builds on a tens of assumptions without rooting them in evidence, or only partially.<p>So the author will happily use a timeframe of multiple decades to show interest rates are historically quite high, and thus a 5% rate is warranted, but then disregards a historical timeframe of a few decades and just assumes houses will appreciate 2% per year (!) and inflation is also 2% a year, aka houses haven't appreciated in real terms at all. Despite the fact the timeframe she uses for interest rates, shows housing prices vastly outpace inflation.<p>In short, awfully written, with a very basic point: it depends on assumptions, and then pulls assumptions out of thin air (no surprise, as the story ends with the buyer/renter being exactly as well off, indicating the author picked assumptions accordingly) without evidence, which often aren't even realistic in the first place.<p>But yes, agreed, renting certainly isn't always throwing away money. And dropping out of school certainly isn't always a bad thing. And amputating your leg certainly isn't in every single case bad for you, it can sometimes be good, like when you have gangrene. But all of that is silly without seriously talking about assumptions, taking 10 pages of antagonistic writing to tell someone to run their own numbers is beyond me.