It can be quite instructive to "excel pretend" that you're buying your house and renting it to yourself.
Buy a few landlording books and read through them, and then vigorously track everything that would be a "rental expense" if it were a rental property in your spreadsheet, then at anytime you can "back out" what you would have had to pay in rent assuming some % profit. Add that to rental comparables from your area and you can get quite a good idea as to the true cost of home ownership (and renting).
Or you can do a simple version of it by calculating what the IRS would allow you to deduct as depreciation and assume that's roughly the maintenance cost.
Buy a few landlording books and read through them, and then vigorously track everything that would be a "rental expense" if it were a rental property in your spreadsheet, then at anytime you can "back out" what you would have had to pay in rent assuming some % profit. Add that to rental comparables from your area and you can get quite a good idea as to the true cost of home ownership (and renting).
Or you can do a simple version of it by calculating what the IRS would allow you to deduct as depreciation and assume that's roughly the maintenance cost.