Should You Rent or Buy? A Calculator for People With Short Timelines
Conventional calculators assume the 2050s will exist. For readers who consider that
a bold macroeconomic assumption, we built our own.
By The Overshoot Staff · July 8, 2026 ·
8 min read, or 3 subjective centuries at post-AGI speeds
This calculator was last updated on July 8, 2026. Whether there will be future updates depends on the sliders below.
Whether to rent or buy a home is the largest financial decision most people
ever make, which is why most people make it based on a feeling they had in a stranger’s
kitchen during an open house. To help, newspapers publish careful interactive calculators
with inputs for mortgage rates, property taxes, and how long you plan to stay —
tools built on one radical assumption: that the next thirty years will
resemble the last thirty.
You do not believe that. You have read the documents. You have seen the graph
where the line for “length of task an AI can do” goes up and to the right, and the
graph where the line for “your continued economic relevance” is politely omitted.
You are not asking “can I afford the monthly payment”; you are asking
“what is the correct amount of leverage to carry into the singularity.”
This calculator is for you. It uses the same math as the famous ones —
amortization, opportunity cost, closing costs, the works — and then adjusts for the
variable no one else will print: when you personally believe the ordinary economy
stops making sense.
The basics
Home price, rent, financing and the opportunity cost of not becoming a homeowner.
The national median. In your metro area this buys a load-bearing rumor.
$430,000
$150,000$2,500,000
What the same square footage costs when someone else owns the water heater.
$2,600/mo
$700$9,000
20% is traditional. 3.5% is FHA. 0% is a belief system.
20%
0%50%
The market’s official estimate of how boring the next 30 years will be.
6.5%
3%10%
What your un-spent down payment earns instead. Historical average: 7%.
7%/yr
2%30%
What does the future hold?
Timeline, confidence and the variables that make the mortgage term feel unusually long.
The year the graphs converge and the economy becomes a historical reenactment.
2029
2027Never
Probability the trend lines mean what your group chat says they mean.
70%
0%100%
Conditional on AGI: probability things go badly enough that property law stops being enforced.
20%
0%95%
Probability your profession ends before your mortgage does.
85%
0%100%
Affects the equity analysis, the risk analysis, and our sympathy.
The reasoning
Four Futures, One Lease
Because reasonable people disagree about which apocalypse is scheduled, we ran the
numbers under the four leading worldviews. Your results may vary; under two of these, the concept
of “your results” does not.
The schedule holdsRent
Superhuman coders next year, the intelligence explosion shortly after. Your 30-year mortgage
has 348 payments that occur after the end of economic history. Renting month-to-month is the
only financial product with a duration that matches your worldview.
Slow takeoffBuy, nervously
AI transforms everything, but over 15 boring years, like electricity or plumbing. Wages get
weird before they get abolished. You may genuinely reach break-even — buy the house, keep
the go-bag. Consider a fixer-upper: the robots will finish the renovation cheaper by 2033.
“AI is normal technology”Buy
The professors were right: it’s a tool, diffusion is slow, and the 2050s arrive on
schedule and full of property taxes. In this world the boring calculator was correct all along
and you have spent four years of equity-building arguing about it online.
The bubble popsBuy the dip
Capex craters, the datacenters become extremely well-cooled storage units, and a famous
skeptic gets one entire week of being right. Housing near tech hubs corrects. You buy in the
crash, refinance in the recovery, and never speak of your old Substack again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t a 30-year fixed mortgage secretly the cheapest way to bet against AGI?
Backwards, actually — it’s the cheapest way to bet on it.
Economists have pointed out that if markets truly expected transformative AI, real interest rates
would soar. They haven’t. So a 6.5% fixed rate is the market politely telling you that your
timelines are wrong — and taking the loan is you taking the other side of the trade with the
most patient counterparty in finance. If you’re right, you win in every branch: in the good
futures your debt is a rounding error, and in the bad ones collections has other problems. The only
timeline where you make all 360 payments is the one where you were wrong. The bank is, in effect,
selling apocalypse insurance at boring-world prices, and almost no one on your feed has noticed
that the paperwork is available at any credit union.
Should I count my lab equity toward the down payment?
Your equity is illiquid, subject to tender-offer windows, and perfectly
correlated with the event you are trying to hedge. You are proposing to buy shelter from the storm
using shares in the storm. Underwriters have a term for this; unfortunately it is
“approved.”
What about buying land next to a datacenter?
You’d be betting that the most valuable real estate of the coming
decade is adjacent to the thing, which is like buying the parking lot outside the
Manhattan Project. Also, transmission lines hum, cooling towers loom, and your new neighbor
consumes a city’s worth of electricity and never brings anything to the block party.
My room in a Berkeley group house is $1,750 a month and someone in the garage is working on alignment. Rent or buy?
You already live at the center of your own light cone; there is nothing to
buy that improves your position. Rent, attend the house meetings, and remember that
“equity” in a group house means something spiritual and non-transferable.
Shouldn’t I skip the house and put the down payment into NVIDIA?
This publication is not licensed to give investment advice, and observes
only that (1) everyone you follow already did this, (2) several of them now describe a
single stock as “my emergency fund,” and (3) a house has never issued revised
guidance. Do what you will.
What about a bunker?
A bunker is a second home for people who don’t expect to keep the
first one. Note that the scenarios where a reinforced door helps are narrow: the AI that wants
your atoms is not deterred by a Costco pallet of beans, and the AI that doesn’t want your
atoms lets you stay in your regular house, which has windows. Billionaires build them anyway, for
the same reason they buy yachts: the yacht guy did.
What does the market think?
Prediction markets currently imply timelines that are somehow both shorter
than the bond market’s and longer than your group chat’s. The median forecaster has
moved their AGI date more times than you have moved apartments — which is, itself, an
argument for renting.
I have normal timelines and found this page by accident.
Welcome! You want the New York Times calculator.
It is genuinely excellent, and in its world, the 2050s exist and contain property taxes. Godspeed.
Methodology
Costs of buying include closing costs (4%), selling costs (6%), property tax (1.1%/yr),
maintenance (1%/yr), insurance (0.55%/yr), and the opportunity cost of capital. Home prices are
assumed to appreciate 3% annually; rents to grow 3% annually; both series are assumed to remain
denominated in dollars, and dollars are assumed to remain a thing.
The model treats post-AGI dollars as either infinite or meaningless. Our sensitivity analysis
found the verdict robust to which.
“Break-even” is the first year in which the buyer’s net worth exceeds the
renter’s, assuming the renter invests the down payment and any monthly savings in equities,
rather than — as is empirically observed — in a friend’s AI agent startup.
We model three branches: doom, transformation, and “the ordinary world,” weighted by
your inputs. We do not model the branch in which you are wrong but never update; research shows it
changes no one’s behavior.
This page uses no AI. It is 40 kilobytes of hand-written arithmetic, a fact we mention
because it is now the most futuristic thing about it.