You should be able to afford a home that’s 3 or 4x your salary. We easily afforded our 1m home on 250k. We had a large downpayment of 20% because this wasn’t our first home.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Out first house cost 500k and we lived in it for 11 years. You need a starter home.

Starter homes in DC are <$1M. Not everyone is willing to have a 2 car, 1 hour commute lifestyle. And you have to go REALLY far out for prices to get lower than one mil.

I see plenty of condos in the 600k range in nice neighborhoods. Find a partner with a job and buy as Dual income couple.

You need two jobs making about $300k total. Which is doable. And you can get a house less than $1M. But yes. The buying power has really degraded. Not enough hikes are being built either in the places people want to live.

Bought a townhouse, lived there 10 years, leveraged up to an older SFH that is now worth $1m but wasn't when we bought it (and is a money sink). I commute to DC from outside the Beltway, which is less fun every year.

I like the control and security of owning, but renting would give us more flexibility on, e.g., schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Out first house cost 500k and we lived in it for 11 years. You need a starter home.

Starter homes in DC are <$1M. Not everyone is willing to have a 2 car, 1 hour commute lifestyle. And you have to go REALLY far out for prices to get lower than one mil.

Oops meant >$1M obvs.

Anonymous wrote:Out first house cost 500k and we lived in it for 11 years. You need a starter home.

Starter homes in DC are <$1M. Not everyone is willing to have a 2 car, 1 hour commute lifestyle. And you have to go REALLY far out for prices to get lower than one mil.

It's not all about salary. Do you have a decent down-payment? Do you have an investment account?
You can lose your job. Harder to lose cash in the bank.

You don't need a million dollar home, OP.

My first home was a tiny old studio condo. i paid it off within <10 years. My monthly payment + condo fee were low enough to allow me to save a considerable amount.

Once paid off, I bought a $700k townhome. I used the cash from my condo sale to put down a sizable down payment keeping my monthly payments very approachable.

The problem is, you probably want to go from renting to a SFH. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. You're going to have to make some sacrifices. Smaller place, older place, and then work your way up.

You can buy a starter condo, build equity and sell after 15 years, that’s 600k toward your next home down and you are barely 40-45 years old.

You can buy a home for less than 1 Million.

Out first house cost 500k and we lived in it for 11 years. You need a starter home.

we are replacing our own children with cheap disposable foreign labor. our kids are not able to afford health insurance, let along buy a house.

The post features a graph showing the percentage of U.S. 30-year-olds who are both married and homeowners dropping from around 50% in 1950 to 15% in 2025, drawing on Census Bureau and Pew Research data that confirm declining marriage rates (from 90% in 1962 to 52% in 2019) and young adult homeownership (from 42% in 1982 to 29% in 2021).

this is the result of letting the investor class drive immigration to their benefit.

OP, we couldn’t afford a house that met our needs, so we moved to another metro area. I’m so glad we lived in the DMV because it’s a great place for dating. I wouldn’t have met a wonderful person like my spouse in a small town. Lots and lots of young people get their start here. But you’ll notice a trend over time that people marry, have a baby, then move away. That’s the financial reality of this area.

You don’t need to make $500k to buy a million dollar house. Our house is $860k and we bought with a HHI of $175k. No family $ or help. We had saved a $100k down payment over about 3 years. Our take home was about $11k a month, and our PITI is about $5k. So yeah, a huge chunk of our money, but that’s life.

With higher interest rates now (this was a couple years ago) your PITI would be more like $6500. But that’s still doable with a $200k or $250k salary.

You just need to accept that a huge chunk of your take home pay will go to your mortgage.

I don’t know anyone who has bought in the last 5-10 years in this area whose house cost only double their income. Around here, it’s more like 4x.

You need to pay $1 million for any homes in the DC area, so you need a salary of like $500k to afford that. No one can make that much. I don’t know how anyone gets those jobs when I can’t even get accepted into the army as an officer