Money
·8 min read
·April 8, 2026
Seattle: What It Actually Costs to Buy Here
Jamie and Casey have the income, the savings, and the condo picked out. The math is more complicated than it looks.
Jamie and Casey have been in Seattle for three years, renting a two-bedroom in Capitol Hill for $3,200 a month while they figured out where they wanted to put down roots.
They have $130,000 saved, both work in tech, and they've watched home prices in the neighborhoods they like stay stubbornly out of reach for most of that time.
Last spring they found a condo in Queen Anne that changed the calculation. Parking spot, open kitchen, views of the Olympics on clear days.
At $650,000 it was at the top of what they'd been willing to consider, but with their savings and their combined income it wasn't out of reach.
The question is whether buying it actually makes financial sense for where they are in life.
What buying this condo actually costs per month
The mortgage payment is the number people plan around, but it's only part of what ownership costs. Property tax, home insurance, and maintenance are fixed parts of the picture for any buyer. For a condo, HOA dues are added on top, and in a building with amenities in Queen Anne, $900 a month is typical.
Maintenance is the cost that catches buyers off guard. A roof doesn't fail on a schedule. Neither does an HVAC system or a water heater. The 1 percent annual figure is just what those surprises average out to over the life of owning a home.
For Jamie and Casey, those costs stack on top of a $3,400 mortgage and bring the true monthly cost of ownership to around $5,500.
The inputs below are pre-filled with Jamie and Casey's numbers.
The Month 1 card at the bottom shows the full picture. If your situation looks different, adjust any input and the numbers update in real time.
Buying
The Property
The Loan
Ongoing Costs
Renting
Month 1 Cost Breakdown
True cost of each path in the first month
Buying
Renting
$2,283/mo more to buy than to rent in month 1
The forced savings argument, and when it actually kicks in
One of the most common cases for buying over renting is that a mortgage builds equity while rent builds nothing.
That's true over time... in the early years the picture is more complicated.
In month one of Jamie and Casey's mortgage, about $2,925 of their $3,400 payment goes to interest! The remaining $475 reduces what they owe on the loan, converting slowly into ownership while the rest covers the cost of borrowing the money.
It takes roughly 21 years before the principal portion of each payment overtakes the interest portion. The equity build accelerates meaningfully in the back half of the loan, not the front.
Where Your Mortgage Payment Goes
Interest vs. principal by year — $520K loan at 6.75%, 30-year fixed
5.5%
$542,902
total interest
6.75% ← Jamie & Casey
$694,178
total interest
8.0%
$853,605
total interest
At 6.75%, Jamie and Casey will pay around $694,000 in interest over 30 years on a $520,000 loan. At 5.5% that number drops to around $510,000. At 8% it exceeds $860,000. Small differences in the rate you lock in compound into enormous differences in what the home actually costs you over time.
What each path builds over twenty years
The amortization chart showed the cost side of buying. This step looks at the other side – what Jamie and Casey actually accumulate under each path over time.
If they buy, their $130,000 down payment converts into equity that grows as the loan pays down and the home appreciates. If they keep renting, that $130,000 goes into a portfolio instead, and the $2,300 they are not spending on the ownership premium gets reinvested alongside it every month.
Jamie & Casey: Home Equity vs. Renter Portfolio Over 20 Years
The renter portfolio leads throughout the 20-year window. At 3 percent annual appreciation, the $2,300 monthly gap reinvested consistently compounds into an advantage that takes more than a decade for buying to recover.
Condos generally appreciate more slowly than single-family homes, and Seattle's housing market has run unusually hot over the past decade. Assuming that pace continues would be optimistic.
The projection uses 3 percent annual home appreciation and assumes the renter's portfolio grows at 7 percent annually, roughly the inflation-adjusted average return of the S&P 500 over the past 100 years.
The apples-to-apples comparison
IRR (internal rate of return) is how the calculator reduces both paths to a single comparable number. It is the annualized return on the capital Jamie and Casey put in on day one, under each path.
Renting is the stronger financial path over 10 years.
Buyer IRR
10.0%
After-tax proceeds: $386,303
Renter IRR
13.1%
After-tax proceeds: $511,752
No one can predict where appreciation or market returns land over the next decade.
What you can do is run the scenario across a range of assumptions and see how often each path wins. In Jamie and Casey's case, renting comes out ahead across most of the grid.
How Sensitive Is This?
IRR advantage by home appreciation rate vs. market return rate, at a 10-year horizon
| Home Appreciation | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2% | 3% | 4% | 5% | 6% | |
| 5% | +3.9% rent | +1.5% rent | +0.7% buy | +2.7% buy | +4.6% buy |
| 6% | +4.7% rent | +2.3% rent | +0.1% rent | +1.9% buy | +3.7% buy |
| 7% | +5.6% rent | +3.1% rent | +0.9% rent | +1.1% buy | +2.9% buy |
| 8% | +6.4% rent | +4.0% rent | +1.8% rent | +0.2% buy | +2.0% buy |
| 9% | +7.3% rent | +4.9% rent | +2.7% rent | +0.7% rent | +1.2% buy |
Each cell reruns the full projection at that combination of rates. All other inputs are held constant.
Renting wins in the majority of the grid at realistic assumptions. The buying case depends on appreciation outpacing its recent cooling trend while market returns disappoint at the same time.
The math is clear. The life question isn't.
For Jamie and Casey, the math is not ambiguous. At 3 percent appreciation, renting and investing comes out ahead across nearly every scenario the grid can produce. That's the rational answer for their situation, at this price point, in this market.
What the math can't weigh is everything else: how much stability matters to them right now, whether they want the freedom to move, how they feel about taking on a mortgage at this stage of life. Those aren't irrational things to factor in. They're often the real reasons people choose one path over the other.
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