Rent or buy
Should I rent or buy this year?
The only calculator here where the astrology is explicitly the second layer and is not allowed to overturn the first. A real amortisation schedule works out the year buying overtakes renting; your chart then says something narrower and true to its own tradition about when to sign.
Why most rent-or-buy calculators say buy
Three omissions, and they are usually the same three. They leave out the cost of selling — six percent of the sale price, paid at the far end, and enough on its own to move the crossover by years. They leave out what your deposit would have earned if you had invested it instead of putting it into a floor. And they charge maintenance at nothing, or at a number no homeowner recognises.
All three are charged here, and all three are editable, because a calculator whose assumptions you cannot see is a sales tool wearing a spreadsheet.
The crossover year is the whole answer
Buying is a large fixed cost paid at both ends and a slow accumulation in the middle. There is a year at which the accumulation overtakes the costs, and whether you should buy is very nearly the single question of whether you will still be there when it arrives.
Which makes “how long do you expect to stay” the most decisive input on the page — more than the rate, more than the price. It is also the one people answer optimistically, and the number worth being honest about.
What the tradition is allowed to say
BaZi has a great deal to say about committing to something long and irreversible in a clashing year, and nothing whatsoever to say about mortgage rates. So the timing layer here can turn “buy” into “buy, but the tradition would not rush the date”, and it can break a genuine tie when the arithmetic is level.
It cannot turn “renting is cheaper for the next eleven years” into “buy”. That rule lives in the engine, not in this paragraph — the function that combines the two layers refuses it outright, and a test asserts that it refuses it.