If You Converted Your Rent Payment Into a Mortgage Payment, How Much House 

Suppose you pay $1,500 in rent every month. If you bought a house whose monthly mortgage payment equaled $1,500, how much would the home loan be for? The calculator below answers that question. It’s based on equation (3.11) in The Calculus of Happiness. Enter the relevant data into the green cells to get the home loan amount whose mortgage payment equals the given rent payment.

Limitations

The calculator converts a rent payment to a mortgage payment, and then outputs the mortgage loan amount. This isn’t necessarily equal to how much house you can afford. That’s because there are other costs to owning a home that are not paid while you rent (e.g., property taxes); the Chapter 3 appendix of The Calculus of Happiness discusses how to obtain a more realistic estimate of the maximum house loan that incorporates additional costs.