Let's say you find an area in which there are apartments available for both sale or rent. You can buy the place for $650 000 or rent it for $600 per week.

Now let's look at this over 5 years.

Renting at $600 per week

• Annual Cost: $31,200
• 5-Year Cost: $156,000

Buying at $650,000 (Principal & Interest Loan at 6.4%)

• Annual Interest Paid: $41,600
• Other Costs (Rates, Insurance, Maintenance): ~$9,700 per year
• Total Annual Cost: $51,300
• 5-Year Cost: $256,500
• Capital Repaid in 5 Years: $35,947 (amount paid towards owning the property)

That saying, rent money is dead money... You are paying more in interest every year for a very long time. $10 000 more. You are only paying off $7000 in capital every year.

On top of that, there's an extra $10 000 per year of additional expenses such as strata, insurance and maintenance. There's people paying $6000 per year on strata alone .

If you were diligent enough to invest that saved $20 000 into ETFs, wouldn't you get further ahead? And those assets would be much more liquid compared to a whole apartment.

Let me put it this way. If I ended up investing in ETFs and put in everything I saved from not buying for 5 years, I'd have at least $100 000 in ETFs. Whereas if I bought the place, I'd only have $35 000 paid off and an enormous mortgage over my head.

Apartments don't appreciate at any decent rate especially nowadays so... why buy?