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Jewish World Review How Stuff Works: How to know when to rent vs. buy By Marshall Brain http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) We make the rent vs. buy decision just about every day. It comes with big items like houses and cars, and also small items like DVDs. Should you rent a DVD for a night for a dollar or two, or spend $15 to buy it? That's the rent vs. buy decision in a nutshell. You can rent just about everything these days. People have been renting houses, cars and DVDs forever, but today the rental idea is really expanding. If you go to a rental store, you will find things like tools and construction equipment, wedding stuff, moving stuff, lawn care equipment, medical equipment, furniture, TVs, etc. NetFlix gave us a new, hassle-free way to rent DVDs, and now that model is expanding into things like books, tools and toys. You can even rent baby clothes and cribs, which automates the idea of hand-me-downs to save parents money. Sometimes the rent vs. buy decision is incredibly easy to make. But with other things, the decision isn't so obvious. One way to think about the decision is to consider the cost per use. Take a lawn mower. It costs $200 to buy a normal push-style lawn mower. Say it costs $25 to rent one for a day. Should you rent or buy? I've had my $200 lawn mower for five years. I use it about 20 times per year. There hasn't really been any maintenance costs to speak of. So the cost per use is $2 plus 50 cents for some gasoline. $2.50 is a lot less than $25 per use. In this case, it was better to buy. What about a lawn aerating machine? It costs $800 to buy, or $90 to rent for a day. But you only need it one day per year. The machine is pretty big, so it takes up a lot of space in the garage. And after 10 years it would certainly need some maintenance. In this case, you might be able to make a "buy" argument, but the cost per use would probably be lower to rent, and you free up the space in your garage to boot. On the other hand, if you can buy a used one for $100 at a garage sale, it might be something to consider. Now imagine that you want to pour a concrete patio. A cement mixing machine costs $500 to buy, or you can rent one for $45 for a day. You will never need that cement mixing machine again. Here it makes a more sense to rent, because $45 is a lot less than $500. Right now there is a big discussion about renting vs. buying a house (or an apartment) to live in. Does it make more sense to rent or buy? This is an interesting question because it depends on how long you will be living in the house and what will happen to the economy during that time (both of which may be hard to predict). The thing about a house is that, over the long haul, maintenance can be pretty expensive. You have to paint the house every five years or so, replace things like the furnace, the water heater and appliances every 10 to 20 years, replace the roof every 25 years or so, etc. Not to mention things like carpet, interior paint, and so on. Then there are the little things like cracked tiles, plumbing leaks, bugs and lawn care. You also have to pay for property taxes, garbage collection, sewer lines. ... When you add it all up, it is expensive to own and maintain a home. And then when you sell it the Realtor gets a big chunk of money. The only way that all of those expenses make sense is if the value of the home is appreciating at a decent clip. But as we've seen in 2008 and 2009, houses sometimes lose value instead of gaining value. You will want to spend some quality time with your calculator/spreadsheet before making a big investment in a house. The full cost per day of buying a house might surprise you, even if it is appreciating. The next time you are thinking about buying something, you may want to check on the Web and see if you can rent it instead. You can decide whether to rent or to buy by looking at the cost per use. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Previously: How swine flu works How a kidney dialysis machine works How children die in hot cars How a trillion dollars works How electronic cigarettes work How chimpanzees work How in vitro fertilization works How supertankers work How poisons work How corn works How dog ID chips work How President Obama's limousine works How emergency power works How aircraft carriers work How antibiotics and vaccines work How mucus works How iron and steel work How aspirin works How igloos work How the Predator UAV works How retention ponds work How water absorbers work How melamine works How digital music works How coal mining works How an economic depression works How the liver works How 3D movies work How oil pipelines work How jet packs work How seismographs work How Olympic technology works How Personal Rapid Transit works How 3G works How the Global Position System (GPS) works How octane works How cruise missiles work How submarines work How miles work How octane works How food preservation works How beer works How holding your breath works How smoke detectors work How heat pumps work How your night vision works How concentrating solar collectors work How your key fob works How the common cold works How the Large Hadron Collider Works How making a TV show works How dry cleaning works How exoskeletons work How an oil refinery works How landfills work How the Orion spacecraft works The cutting edge in HDTV Redefining the CD How the HDMI cable scam works How glow-in-the-dark toys work How the subprime mortgage crisis works How gift cards work How Tasers work How giant TV screens work How foreclosure works How Air Force One works How wildfire fighting works How vitamins work How ejection seats work How reattaching limbs works How hot air balloons work How paparazzi work How counterfeiting works How CDs work How the Edsel worked How Stinger missiles work How hybrid cars work How sharks work How mosquitoes work How diesel engines work How water towers work How the Dawn mission works How Kassam rockets work How the North American Eagle works Why aren't we flying to work? How tofu and soy milk work How Colony Collapse Disorder works How airbags work How the U.S. income tax works How gum works How caffeine works How Daylight Saving Time works How a cruise missile works How snow making works © 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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