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[quote=Anonymous]Really depends on your preferences. You have a pretty nice budget so you should be able to get a larger TH or a smaller SFH with that (if you want to live close to DC/walkable areas like N Arlington, WOTP, or Bethesda). Just depends on if you want to be close to everything or not. If you dont care, technically you could spend at the lower end of your budget and still get a nicely size (ie 3-4k sq ft SFH) but further out like Vienna.

Really depends on you, I would say don't get at the max of your budget, but also don't get at the low end of it either (as you may regret it later on/need more space, and god knows what is going to happen in housing prices in the next 5 years/how much higher they will be, or if rates will come back down to earth or not). Aim for the middle ground I guess.

We had a similar predicament (but much lower budget than yours, our max was $1m) and ended up settling for a 900k TH. We don't have kids yet but we bought since we are planning on having kids soon, and did not want to raise them in a 1br+den rental. But at same time wanted to have decent-good elementary and middle school, while still being walkable to places (we are 30 afterall so still like to go out and etc). A part of me regrets not trying to go to $1m or even higher, but would have been financially irresponsible to do so in our case (our HHI is only 300k, and since we are immigrants we dont have family in the US that can easily come to watch future kids/help with childcare).

Last, before you decide, carefully calculate your monthly costs outside of housing (so childcare, going out, any other debt you have, food, etc) and track it carefully over the next few months to get an idea of what, on average, you spend. Based on that then see what would be the max you can reasonably afford (by reasonably i mean, after all costs, income tax, 401k contributions and etc, do you have anything left over or not, ideally you will still have at least 3k-4k left to cover emergencies and etc) [/quote]

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