Rentvesting Calculator

The weekly comparison shows expenses rather than total repayments: loan interest, council rates and insurance on whichever property is owned, plus, on the investment, the letting and management fees and an allowance for the weeks it earns nothing, less the rent it collects. The rentvesting side also pays rent to live somewhere.

Loan principal builds equity, so it is excluded from the weekly expense figure. It still has to be paid: the long-term comparison includes principal repayments when giving both paths the same annual cash budget.

Both paths start with the same available deposit and receive the same cash budget each year, sufficient to cover the more expensive path’s repayments and net costs. Any remainder pays down that path’s loan at year-end, reducing interest in later years. Cash left after repayment, including an unused deposit, earns no assumed return. Repayments and interest are modelled annually, not as a lender’s monthly schedule. The growth rate of the investment is then solved until property value less debt plus cash is equal on both sides. That growth gap is a threshold, not a forecast.

Both loans run for 30 years, at 6.2% for the home and 6.4% for the investment. Home growth is 5% a year; the reported investment growth gap is relative to that assumption. Rents rise 4% and other costs 3% a year. These are model inputs, not forecasts.

Investment gross rental yield is 3.4%, vacancy 3.3%, management 7.5% of collected rent, and letting 1 week of rent each year. Starting annual rates and insurance are $2349.64 for the home and $3589.64 for the investment. Maintenance, transaction costs and tax are excluded, so actual results will differ.

A reader who rentvests becomes a landlord, and Havella is paid to manage landlords’ properties. That is a real interest in one of the two answers, and it should be considered when reading this comparison.

What can be checked rather than trusted: where a default was a judgement call it took the value that makes rentvesting look worse, including a vacancy allowance at the pre-COVID decade average rather than the much tighter figure of today, the letting fee charged, and management charged at the market rate. There is no share return assumed on the spare cash, which is the usual way a tool of this kind is tilted. There is no income field, so no personal tax position can be produced. There is no sign-up gate.

Capital gains tax is not modelled. An eligible main residence can be exempt while an investment can attract tax, so leaving it out flatters rentvesting, and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026 makes that omission larger. From 1 July 2027 the fifty per cent discount is replaced by indexation of the cost base, with a thirty per cent minimum tax rate on net capital gains. A new dwelling or affordable housing can elect to keep the discount instead. An established investment, which is what the figures above assume, cannot.

Negative gearing is not modelled either. For a residential dwelling acquired after 7.30pm on 12 May 2026 it has largely gone: from 1 July 2027 those losses can be set against eligible residential income and residential capital gains rather than salary, with unused quarantined losses carried forward. A newly built dwelling is exempt, and a dwelling acquired before that moment keeps the deduction. The effect depends on the property, timing and personal tax position.

Also absent, each favouring rentvesting: transfer duty concessions and deposit schemes that only an owner-occupier can use, land tax on the investment, the cost of moving when a lease ends, and the plain security of not being asked to leave. Absent in the other direction: whether a lender would advance the larger loan at all, which is assessed with a three point buffer on top of the rate.