There are many different scenarios that we have to determine the most productive way of deploying capital, such as: buying versus leasing a car, buying insurance whole life versus term, and of course buying versus renting a home.

The goal of this project is to create a spreadsheet that tracks and compare the cash flows on a monthly basis for two scenarios 1) purchasing a home and 2) renting a home and investing the down payment for approximately a 10 year period. The question is which turns out to be a better scenario to build wealth.

The scenario is as follows:

Pick a house from Zillow, Realtors.com, or any other website that sold during the period of 2009 to 2013. Include a print of the page. Assume you sell the property today based on current price estimate.

Assume that the house was bought with an 80% mortgage with an 3.5% interest rate and 30 year amortization. Taxes and insurance in the first year were 2.2% of the purchase price. Rent may be found in Zillow as a current estimate. Dont forget that if you have current rent, it has increased over the hold period by lets say an inflation rate.

The investment can be anything you like, S&P Index, is probably the easiest to deal with but you can use investments that you like. Bitcoin, Home Depot Stock, gold, etc (if you pick specific stocks, a stock cannot be more than 25% of your total portfolio). If you use a specific stock, you must track price, splits and dividends.

Lay out the monthly cash flows for the two scenarios 1) purchase of the home the houses over time and compare that to the cash flows that you would have received had you not bought a house but rented a home and invested instead. Essentially, the scenario that provides you the greatest wealth at the end of the period is theoretically the better strategy. What is the return for each scenario?

Amount to invest 1000000