Yeah you're totally right about taxes — it does make a big difference. We had to make simplifications somewhere, and taxes are quite country-specific so we didn't want to be too prescriptive. We hoped you could increase "Annual Costs" as a very rough proxy for taxes.
Cashflow is a really good point, and something we hadn't considered much. You can get a rough idea of cashflow in the "Net monthly earnings" section of the output, but it probably deserves more focus for sure.
Operational headache is interesting to account for haha — we'll add these things to the model explanation :)
Given you're positioning this app and article as a means to answer the question on buying a home and renting it out, you should disclose these items (liabilities) to the reader and let them figure out the scenario for their local market, rather than hoping for the reader to do something.
Property tax is a large expense, and insurance is also a required expense if you have a mortgage (in the US). Finally, income you generate from the house (Rental Income) is taxed at your effective tax rate, and this will be a Large Liability at the end of each year.
Although there may be deductions you can take to minimize some of the expenses (in the US), you will be required to pay taxes on the income you generate and I suspect that's the case across all countries.
You should probably default the Annual Costs to something like 5%, and let people bump it back down if they need to.
Anything that draws attention to that field, as 1% doesn’t draw attention.
In my case, taxes are roughly 2.5% alone. Then while a given year maintenance doesn’t feel like 5%, over 30 years you have to peanut butter the big expenses such as roof replacement, or kitchen renovation, and those really do add up.
By and large, all fields should be a bit pessimistic, let people bias them back down, or simply add a “risk” field that can fold in pessimistic outliers into the simulations.
Yeah you're totally right about taxes — it does make a big difference. We had to make simplifications somewhere, and taxes are quite country-specific so we didn't want to be too prescriptive. We hoped you could increase "Annual Costs" as a very rough proxy for taxes.
Cashflow is a really good point, and something we hadn't considered much. You can get a rough idea of cashflow in the "Net monthly earnings" section of the output, but it probably deserves more focus for sure.
Operational headache is interesting to account for haha — we'll add these things to the model explanation :)