For people of a certain age, who remember taking out a home mortgage at or above 15%, the astonishingly low rates that banks are charging today are a little hard to believe. Mortgage rates have been historically low for years, and they have been trending lower ever since the bottom fell out of the real estate market. This has created a strange but not unusual market situation: people who remember the housing market collapse are nervous about buying right at the time when they can buy more house for less money than ever before in their lifetime, and finance at rates we may never see again. Our instincts tell us the opposite: buy when the markets are booming and prices are high, and to stay on the sidelines when the markets are offering us bargains.
The economic case for purchasing a home vs. renting has always been a bit sketchy. The real estate site Trulia has calculated that the breakeven between the two comes when you can buy for 15 times your yearly rental costs. By that formula, if you’re paying $20,000 a year in rent, you might think twice about purchasing a comparable home that costs more than $300,000. But that formula has some embedded assumptions about mortgage rates. If you were to buy that $300,000 house and finance it at 18.45%–the average national mortgage rate back in October 1981–then your $4,631 monthly payments would amount to $55,572 a year–more than two and a half times the rental rate you’re paying now. This might not be the ideal tradeoff. But at 3.55%–the average national rate in July–the payments are $1,355 a month, or $16,260. At those rates, even if you factor in maintenance and property taxes, buying might actually cost less per month than renting.
In general, you should avoid committing too much of your cash flow to the place you live; annual housing costs should be less than a third of your gross annual income. And you probably shouldn’t count on your home appreciating in value immediately. A recent report by Fitch Investors Services says that in many markets, housing prices won’t have completely bottomed out until late next year. This is not a market for flipping homes. But with the combination of low rates and distressed prices, it may be the best time to buy that many of us have seen in a long, long time.