What income is needed to live the american dream - close in DC area?
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Anonymous
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How much do you need to make for the following:
- Single family home within a 45 minute commute of downtown DC - 2 cars - Save for retirement at age 65 - Pay for college, 2-3 kids - 1 week domestic family vacation every year - No financial stress about all the regular, and unplanned, maintenance, repairs, etc |
Anonymous
| $250k |
Anonymous
This would be the absolute bare bones minimum with basically zero frills except the vacation and assumes no major debt to pay off (like student loans). Expenses + minimum savings required will be at least $14,500/mo. |
Anonymous
Nope. You forgot taxes. Take off $84k. Now try to do all that on $166k |
Anonymous
| $1M |
Anonymous
So PG county? |
Anonymous
This was definitely true around 2021 when you could lock in a 2.5% mortgage and before the explosion of house prices. Its probably around $300k now. |
Anonymous
Live the American Dream or live the northern VA “upper middle class“ dream? The American Dream, when it was coined, meant a 900-1800sq ft home with a linoleum floor in the kitchen, single paned windows, etc, in the suburbs with a car port or one car garage, one car, a few kids and a dog or whatever. It isn’t even legal to build the types of houses that filled the suburbs in that era due to code changes and even if you could build them nobody here would deign to buy such a house. In 2023 the median household income in Fairfax County was about $141k. The cutoff for the top third was ~$200k. If a household is making $250k they should be in the top 5th of households in the county and can easily afford most of the things people associate with middle class life here. What they likely can’t do is afford them all at once. Buying a home (or car) may require them to save… and even then they might not buy their dream home, but an interim solution that will allow them to trade up in 10 years. I am an older millennial. I remember asking these sorts of questions (with lower numbers, median income in Fairfax was $81k in 2003). I lived cheaply, saved money, bought a starter home… sold it 10 years later to buy my long term home. There were years when paying for childcare, mortgage, etc, made us feel poor and question how we would get ahead, but bit by bit things got easier. |
Anonymous
| $250k with public schools, in-state college, and 2 children. But you will be among the poors within your community. |
Anonymous
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When we hit 450, we felt like we had all those things comfortably. We also had a low interest mortgage. We are closer to the city though, so if we were 15-20 minutes farther out, maybe it would be ok on 375?
I don’t know, college costs in Virginia (in state) are insane. So that alone makes everything seem less secure |
Anonymous
| What are your house expectations? We don't have a big/fancy house and its very small but live very comfortably without worrying about money on under 180K. |
Anonymous
| If buying now, $300-$400k. |
Anonymous
Not the actual poors, but they would feel poor among the upper middle class. |
Anonymous
When did you buy it? |
Anonymous
We make about $300k in upper nw, but have made way less before. Our first house rented out now subsidizes our second house. We invested some inherited money (not a lot) well. We don’t feel poor, but exceptionally lucky. Public schools, one car, no maid service, landscaping or nanny. (Daycare when kids were young.) kids go to nice, but not extravagant camps/summer programs and have reasonable extracurriculars (the one in HS hasn’t had out of school ECs in a while). We have nice overseas vacations many years. |