Because I do plan to buy at some point, I decided to make a rent/buy comparison spreadsheet. I know there are already a lot of these out on the internet (nytimes has a very nice one), but nothing that lets you see year-by-year calculations and/or modify any parameter you want. Plus I was bored. Because really, who doesn’t dick around in excel when they’re bored?

Anyway, it’s not too pretty, but it’s highly customizable and because it’s in excel you can add or get rid of any parameters you wish.

UPDATE: I made it a little prettier, changed the some of the decimal entries to percentage entries, and corrected calculation of rent deposit–I had the deposit as negative and the return of deposit as positive, but should be opposite since this is the value of buying a house—you don’t have to make a deposit and by the same token don’t get one back.

UPDATE 2: a couple more cosmetic changes, and I changed the property taxes so the the value on which they are calculated is based on annual 2% growth or annual nominal growth of the home price, whichever is smaller. This reflects California tax law (prop. 13). If you are using this for another state then you will have to make your own modifications.

It uses Net Present Value calculations, which means that anytime the orange box labeled “NPV Buying House” is positive, then buying a house is a good investment, and vice versa. Because I use NPV, the calculations are fairly sensitive to your required return, which is rate of return you expect to earn on your non-housing investments.

Finally, there’s a very good chance I made some errors when constructing this thing (besides it just looking hideous). Let me know if you see any, or if you have any good ideas for changes.

So, the first thing I read today was the front page story on the large scale law enforcement raid on a Glassell Park neighborhood yesterday.

Heavily armed police and federal agents stormed into a Glassell Park neighborhood Wednesday morning to wrest control away from a street gang — and loyalists with deep family ties to its members — that has in effect turned the sequestered swath of run-down apartments into rogue territory.

With a sweeping federal racketeering indictment, more than 500 agents, including 10 SWAT teams, arrested 28 people in an attempt to root out the Avenues gang members who have ruled the area with violence and near impunity.

Pretty intense. The targeted group is known as the Drew Street branch of the Avenues gang.  The odd part of the feature is that in the primary article the overall Avenues gang is described numerically as such: “The Avenues, which police estimate has about 400 members…” A sidebar the focuses on the Drew Street branch describes its numbers as “Estimated to be 500 strong, Drew Street clique members” (Unfortunately this sidebar is not available online, so you’ll have to pick up a hardcopy and turn to A16 if you want to see for yourself.)

So somehow the estimated numbers of the subgroup are larger than the parent, which by definition should include the subgroup. Odd. Couple ideas about what’s going on here.

• “clique members,” the language used to describe Drew Street, are different than gang members. Clique’s connotations don’t quite strike me as very suitable when describing a violent street organization, but who knows maybe it’s a new vocab development.
• The police are exaggerating the numbers of the gang (either the sub group or the parent or both), but got sloppy and forgot to subordinate their numbers to the basic demands of logic. Given that a different reporter (Rich Connell) wrote the sidebar than the main article (Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones, Molly Hennessy-Fiske), the two groups failed to coordinate and the relevant editor either missed the inconsistency or just didn’t care.

At any rate the whole thing is depressing, both as a measure of the Times’ quality control and LAPD’s integrity.