Are YOU able to keep your housing expenses at or below 28% of your gross pay?

[Anonymous]

No. We have a low income but high assets, which is an atypical situation. The house is very expensive for our income, but very cheap in proportion to our total net worth. Anyway, it's going to be paid off next year, so moot point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel many posting here were traumatized about the real estate crash and definitely bought for less than what they qualified for. I know we did.

We weren’t just traumatized, we were cleaned out. Took a bath on the sale if our first place and had to start over to save for down payment on second one.

So you sold your house at the wrong time. If you'd held on to it, the value would be significantly more now than even before the real estate crash.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Y’all must’ve bought your homes when Methuselah was an infant.

Nope, we just bought what we could afford. I bought in 2023, PITI is 21% of our income and we're not DCUM rich.

[Anonymous]

We’re at 10% and bought our current house 5 years ago. We didn’t want to be house poor, which has allowed us freedom to do other things with that money. Also, I was definitely traumatized by 2008. We don’t have a fancy house but we also don't stress about the mortgage. We do stress about kid expenses, but that's a whole other thread, ha!

[Anonymous]

We’re at 7%. Our salaries have increased significant in the 12 years since we bought.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HHI is a little over $1m/yr; mortgage is $3800/mo. So about 8% but obviously percentage has decreased over time as HHI has quadrupled and we haven’t upgraded housing. Therein the key to building net worth

Your math is off.

[Anonymous]

310k HHI, 5900/mo PITI

So about 25% gross income, 38% of take home

Tight but we make it work. Borrowed well over a million dollars with no money down on a VA loan at 2.25% interest. Painful now, but will be a nice bit of family wealth in the future

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:310k HHI, 5900/mo PITI

So about 25% gross income, 38% of take home

Tight but we make it work. Borrowed well over a million dollars with no money down on a VA loan at 2.25% interest. Painful now, but will be a nice bit of family wealth in the future

Just did the math on assuming 2% appreciation and the amortization on the mortgage. House is adding about 50k to networth a year right now. It's inside the beltway zoned to a great school zone and near metro

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes. Make decent money and don't have to compensate for my insecurities by buying a giant house.

That’s such a dumb take.

Not the pp you quote, but I agree with them. The trend of 3-4 people living in 5-7k sf houses that they can barely use screams insecurity.

DP
Maybe.... I just consider them "house people", not necessarily insecure people. Some people are car or fashion people; I don't judge. Personally, I'm a vacation and real estate person, meaning I take expensive vacations and buy investment real estate. My home is big-ish (4200), I drive an old Toyota (10+ yrs) and wear clothes for 10+ years. Seriously, I don't really have a need to impress anyone

[Anonymous]

Half the income going to the mortgage. It was same when we were renting 4 years ago. Middle class income.
By the way the rent was in PG county MD not somewhere very expensive.

[Anonymous]

Yes. Gross income is around 40k a month and piti is 4k.

We bought our house when we were earning less money. Felt like a stretch then, but fortunately it’s very comfortable now. We had a large down payment and refinanced during Covid.

We recently contemplating buying and renovating a larger home in a nicer part of our neighborhood, but i don’t want to give up our very affordable mortgage.

[Anonymous]

10% for us. Not sure I could sleep at night if it was 28%. We rent in NYC, and to buy here or surrounding areas with good school districts would 2x the housing costs at least. I definitely feel like we missed the boat on getting a good deal on buying, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Percentage is not the best way to do this, although it is a starting point. The problem is that ultimately it is the amount of extra cash that is available after fixed expenses every month that matters.

Our AGI is extremely high after decades of doing very well and now we have multi million passive income annually. Our housing expense for our primary and vacation home are about $250k per year. But that is around 5-6% of our gross last year and due to a particularly good year, it was below 2% of our gross 3 years ago). But even if we were spending 30%, We’d still have $3M available annually after housing expenses.

OK, so you make enough money that it's completely irrelevant what percentage of your income you devote to housing expenses. Congratulations! That's great for you. That is not, as you may have gathered from the rest of the thread, the reality that most other people experience — even most other people on DCUM, a message board full of people who earn far more than the median household income for the area. For many of us, percentage is a perfectly useful metric here.

[Anonymous]

Gross monthly w2 income of 48K (excluding rental income and dividens), but we only see MAYBE 40% of that due to various direct deposit buckets out of payroll.

However our primary PITI is 2K

Our total PITI with real estate investments is $4600, so yea way under 28% even if we were dealing with vacancies. Even if you factor in utilities we would still be well under that.

God bless 2021 rates. Never moving.

[Anonymous]

Nope. We’re currently at a HHI of $16K/mo and our house expenses are over $5K/mo. Things are definitely tight.