Rentvesting means renting where you want to live while buying investment property where the data supports it. This free calculator compares rentvesting against buying your home over 5 to 30 years - modelling your full borrowing power, not just 2 properties - with both growth rates deliberately equal by default.
In a capital city, the home you can afford is rarely the home you want. Buying it maxes out your borrowing power on a compromise.
The alternative: rent the home you actually want, and let that same borrowing power build wealth behind you. 5 inputs, 1 honest comparison.
Both growth rates default to the same 6% deliberately - so the comparison tests the structure (borrowing power), not an assumption that investments grow faster. Disagree? Move the sliders.
Rentvesting is the strategy of renting where you actually want to live, and pointing your borrowing power at investment property somewhere the data supports it. In an expensive capital city, the home you can afford to buy is almost never the home you want - the compromise usually means a smaller place in a further-out suburb, on a mortgage that swallows most of your capacity.
Rentvesters flip that: rent the good home now, at 3 to 4 per cent of its value a year, and use the freed-up borrowing capacity to buy investment stock in markets that the data actually favours. You end up controlling more assets, usually across more markets, without giving up the lifestyle in the meantime. It isn't for everyone - it needs discipline and a bit of paperwork tolerance - but the maths, on structure alone, is hard to argue with in the big cities.
Rentvesting isn't universally better. In a smaller city or a regional market where the home you'd buy is also a defensible investment on its own fundamentals, buying it does two jobs at once - lifestyle and growth - and the two paths tie or the home wins outright. Long holds help buying, too: the owner-occupier CGT exemption on your principal residence is one of the biggest tax breaks in Australia, and it's untouched by the 2027 reforms.
Buying also wins when the emotional cost of renting is real for you - moving every 12 months, landlords selling from under you, not being able to change a wall colour. That's a genuine cost even if it doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. Move the growth sliders equal and the calculator will tell you whether structure or lifestyle should decide.
The quietest advantage of rentvesting is whose dollars pay the interest. Interest on your own home is paid from your salary after tax - every dollar of interest is a dollar and a bit of gross wages. On an investment property, the tenant covers most of the running costs; you only carry the delta, and even that delta is often tax-effective (depending on your property type after July 2027, and your marginal rate).
Same debt, different weight. This is why the rentvesting curve tends to pull away from buying-your-home over 15+ year timeframes even at equal growth assumptions - not because investments grow faster, but because the funding mix is more efficient. It's a structural point, and it survives whatever the property market does next.