Anonymous wrote:We moved to an area with lower COL. You do have choices.

What are your occupations and salaries?

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Anonymous wrote:Feels impossible to buy a house with a 2 car driveway and a yard unless you have a stable 300k/yr income. I make around this much and am still holding off because I don’t feel secure in my position. I could pay the bills just fine but if income disappears tmrw I’m screwed and my industry is laying people off left and right

With that income you could buy a 500K house and pay it off in just 5 years or less.
If you say you couldn't, then you are wasting so much money somewhere.

100K income family should be able to pay off a 500K house in 15 years with no problem.

Assuming you can put 20% down on a house, a 420,000 loan at ~5.5% interest over 15 years is $3,400/month just on the principle. Add in another monthly $150 for insurance and $500 for taxes (which is a very low estimate in any locality that isn’t cheap) that is over 4k/month mortgage.

A family making 100k/year is bringing home maybe 7k/month tops after taxes and health premiums and very modest retirement contribution.

That generously leaves 3k for everything else. Oh but childcare is easily 2k/month per kid. Even if you have a SAHP, 3k wouldn’t allow for much of an emergency fund with today’s grocery and healthcare prices. Oh and then guess what, a new HVAC is 10-15k. Need new tires on your car (didn’t even factor in a monthly payment) but there is $800+ gone. Good luck putting together an emergency fund or sending kids to college.

For comparison, I bought a $900k house with a 2.75% loan now worth $1.3M and have a 4k mortgage. We moved up to this from our 500k starter home except that starter home in our old neighborhood is now $900k and now the starter home is most likely the home you’ll be in for a very long time.

Families just starting out today and in such a worse situation than I was as a newly wed/new mom a decade ago.

WHAT? LMAO!

DP. Where’s the lie? Childcare is extremely expensive these days and that doesn’t guarantee quality

It's only extremely expensive if you think it's low skilled unimportant work. People look down on it and think they should be making far more than the child care worker, and they don't. There isn't much of a gap between their take home pay and what goes out to pay for child care because the work is as important or more than what they are doing instead.

Imagine if our government subsidized childcare instead of spending $30 trillion on Israel caused wars, Ukraine, and banker bailouts

New Mexico is now offering free childcare for all children in the state regardless of income.

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Anonymous wrote:You should get a roof over your head if there is (and I don’t think there is) a Great Depression coming.

Why does it have to have a 2 car garage?

To do-
—Location and home you can live with.
—If you want specific things like a 2c garage, you’re going to have to sacrifice some other way (location, quality, yard you don’t like)
—figure out your FIXED/NEEDS. What keeps you in work? What keeps a roof over your head and utilities going? Groceries, not restaurants.
—above this number, put it all away. Try it one month and it will be so exciting. You have *everything you need.*

You have almost twice my household income, and I am a homeowner, and I am super comfortable and recognize I have everything I need too.

Stop wasting your hhi. What a gift, you should use it for a home.

Tired of people like this saying “my HHI is lower and I own a house no problem”. You’re old. Shut up.

Try buying a house in 2025 with no previous equity, no family help, or huge nest egg, on a 150k/yr salary in the DMV.

Yep. I’m so sick of hearing from people on here like this. And I’m saying that as someone who did buy in 2025 and does well but who realizes I shouldn’t have to make $600K to afford a 1400 sq Ft starter house and pay for daycare for 2 kids without family $.

We moved to an area with lower COL. You do have choices.

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Anonymous wrote:Feels impossible to buy a house with a 2 car driveway and a yard unless you have a stable 300k/yr income. I make around this much and am still holding off because I don’t feel secure in my position. I could pay the bills just fine but if income disappears tmrw I’m screwed and my industry is laying people off left and right

With that income you could buy a 500K house and pay it off in just 5 years or less.
If you say you couldn't, then you are wasting so much money somewhere.

100K income family should be able to pay off a 500K house in 15 years with no problem.

Assuming you can put 20% down on a house, a 420,000 loan at ~5.5% interest over 15 years is $3,400/month just on the principle. Add in another monthly $150 for insurance and $500 for taxes (which is a very low estimate in any locality that isn’t cheap) that is over 4k/month mortgage.

A family making 100k/year is bringing home maybe 7k/month tops after taxes and health premiums and very modest retirement contribution.

That generously leaves 3k for everything else. Oh but childcare is easily 2k/month per kid. Even if you have a SAHP, 3k wouldn’t allow for much of an emergency fund with today’s grocery and healthcare prices. Oh and then guess what, a new HVAC is 10-15k. Need new tires on your car (didn’t even factor in a monthly payment) but there is $800+ gone. Good luck putting together an emergency fund or sending kids to college.

For comparison, I bought a $900k house with a 2.75% loan now worth $1.3M and have a 4k mortgage. We moved up to this from our 500k starter home except that starter home in our old neighborhood is now $900k and now the starter home is most likely the home you’ll be in for a very long time.

Families just starting out today and in such a worse situation than I was as a newly wed/new mom a decade ago.

WHAT? LMAO!

DP. Where’s the lie? Childcare is extremely expensive these days and that doesn’t guarantee quality

It's only extremely expensive if you think it's low skilled unimportant work. People look down on it and think they should be making far more than the child care worker, and they don't. There isn't much of a gap between their take home pay and what goes out to pay for child care because the work is as important or more than what they are doing instead.

Imagine if our government subsidized childcare instead of spending $30 trillion on Israel caused wars, Ukraine, and banker bailouts

Anonymous wrote:You should get a roof over your head if there is (and I don’t think there is) a Great Depression coming.

Why does it have to have a 2 car garage?

To do-
—Location and home you can live with.
—If you want specific things like a 2c garage, you’re going to have to sacrifice some other way (location, quality, yard you don’t like)
—figure out your FIXED/NEEDS. What keeps you in work? What keeps a roof over your head and utilities going? Groceries, not restaurants.
—above this number, put it all away. Try it one month and it will be so exciting. You have *everything you need.*

You have almost twice my household income, and I am a homeowner, and I am super comfortable and recognize I have everything I need too.

Stop wasting your hhi. What a gift, you should use it for a home.

Tired of people like this saying “my HHI is lower and I own a house no problem”. You’re old. Shut up.

Try buying a house in 2025 with no previous equity, no family help, or huge nest egg, on a 150k/yr salary in the DMV.

Anonymous wrote:Good single family homes in this area are now over 1.5 M. You need a lot more than 300k per year to afford a house and start a family.

In prime areas yes. You can buy good houses in the 800-1M range outside the beltway. That’s why I said 300k is the minimum, not ideal. If you want to buy in McLean you need a lot more obviously

Anonymous wrote:If your job security is uncertain, I would still get on the property ladder with a townhouse. You have to pay rent to live somewhere, if you are not taking advantage of building equity then you are missing out on growing your money.

agree. even with this current downturn (according to Zillow estimates), i stand by my decision to buy my townhouse and not put random offers into detached SFHs when the market was crazy in 2021, rife with love letters and such. the wife was more apprehensive, but when she looks at the dent we've been making on the mortgage and how that reflects into home equity, she becomes more supportive of the whole purchase. you need to have the ability to think in decades. a lot of people sadly live in the moment and cant imagine planning 5 years 10 years let alone 30 years which is the length of the mortgage. so many people recast their mortgages, endlessly lining the bank's pockets. you need an escape hatch from debt and wageslavery.

No. There's a perfectly fine $700K SFH in Fairfax not far from me.

Childcare is optional and not needed. It is a luxury.

I say that as back in college I worked at Mastercard. As you know Credit Cards are a 24/7 business. In fact New Years Eve at Midnight in Credit Card world was super busy. Just like Thanksgiving weekend for shopping. My Mastercard location was right by Citigroup credit card location.

We had three shifts as were open 24/7 and weekends were rounded off by OT or part time people.

I noticed several married couples working at MasterCard or at Citigroup next door. I worked first shift for a while. My boss was in her 30s married with kids. Her husband worked a different shift at Citigroup next door. They had zero child care as someone always home. She liked it, she got kids on the bus in morning, as her shift started at 8am to 4 pm. Her husband worked midnight to 8am and he would go home in morning and go to bed and be up for when kids got off bus. They both were home with kids every night.

Anonymous wrote:We bought our house in McLean in 2019 for 1.25 mil, our income at that time was 300k, we are paying 2.65% interest and it’s easily manageable. Our income has increased over the years but even at 300k our mortgage was not a problem. I cannot believe how much homeownership landscape has changed in the last 6-7 years.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind prices stabilizing or even coming down somewhat, current situation is not sustainable for young people. We had no down payment help from parents but the current situation only favors people with sizable family help.

It’s not in our interest to create a society of haves and have nots.

The bolded. There has always been a bifurcated system for first time house buyers based on this, but now it's even more pronounced.

Also, how much money people have from parents makes a big difference. A 20% down payment on an 850k home is 170k. Even for people making 300k, who presumably haven't been making 300k for the last decade, that's a huge chunk of cash to put together. So the difference between people with parents who can kick in 20k (which used to be a massive boost) and those who can contribute 60-100k, is massive.

We bought our condo with no help from parents while most of our peers bought houses with parental assistance. And then that benefit compounds, because those SFHs have appreciated way, way more than our condo over the same time. So our peers who got a 40k boost from parents to buy their first home now have several hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity more than we do, even though we bought around the same time and had similar incomes at the time.

At least we were still able to buy something. We bought at a 3% rate and were able to put down just 15%. Now the rate would be more than double and with higher prices... I just don't know if we could swing it in today's market without parent help. I think we'd have just kept renting. I would have been willing to move to a lower COL area or live far out, but I know my spouse would not have (we discussed it at the time, it was a hard no for him). So we'd likely have continue to rent and save, but our savings would not have kept pace with housing costs, so we'd probably still be renting now. Ugh.

Anonymous wrote:If your job security is uncertain, I would still get on the property ladder with a townhouse. You have to pay rent to live somewhere, if you are not taking advantage of building equity then you are missing out on growing your money.

Yep. Everyone who has ever bought a home in the DC area in the past 25 yrs has thought they drastically overpaid and housing prices couldn't possibly go up. You just need to take the leap and own something. My first place was a 1BR condo. The problem is thinking your first home is going to be a SFH with a 2-car garage. By the time most people get there it might be their 3rd or 4th home and they have been rolling equity into their next home for multiple home purchases over 15 yrs.

If your job security is uncertain, I would still get on the property ladder with a townhouse. You have to pay rent to live somewhere, if you are not taking advantage of building equity then you are missing out on growing your money.

How many years have you been making $300k?
Did you save $100k a year for down payment the last 5 years? If not, why not?
I could easily live on $80k to get ready to buy.
Forget about the income. That can disappear. Down payment doesn't disappear if in savings account.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Feels impossible to buy a house with a 2 car driveway and a yard unless you have a stable 300k/yr income. I make around this much and am still holding off because I don’t feel secure in my position. I could pay the bills just fine but if income disappears tmrw I’m screwed and my industry is laying people off left and right

With that income you could buy a 500K house and pay it off in just 5 years or less.
If you say you couldn't, then you are wasting so much money somewhere.

100K income family should be able to pay off a 500K house in 15 years with no problem.

Assuming you can put 20% down on a house, a 420,000 loan at ~5.5% interest over 15 years is $3,400/month just on the principle. Add in another monthly $150 for insurance and $500 for taxes (which is a very low estimate in any locality that isn’t cheap) that is over 4k/month mortgage.

A family making 100k/year is bringing home maybe 7k/month tops after taxes and health premiums and very modest retirement contribution.

That generously leaves 3k for everything else. Oh but childcare is easily 2k/month per kid. Even if you have a SAHP, 3k wouldn’t allow for much of an emergency fund with today’s grocery and healthcare prices. Oh and then guess what, a new HVAC is 10-15k. Need new tires on your car (didn’t even factor in a monthly payment) but there is $800+ gone. Good luck putting together an emergency fund or sending kids to college.

For comparison, I bought a $900k house with a 2.75% loan now worth $1.3M and have a 4k mortgage. We moved up to this from our 500k starter home except that starter home in our old neighborhood is now $900k and now the starter home is most likely the home you’ll be in for a very long time.

Families just starting out today and in such a worse situation than I was as a newly wed/new mom a decade ago.

WHAT? LMAO!

DP. Where’s the lie? Childcare is extremely expensive these days and that doesn’t guarantee quality

It's only extremely expensive if you think it's low skilled unimportant work. People look down on it and think they should be making far more than the child care worker, and they don't. There isn't much of a gap between their take home pay and what goes out to pay for child care because the work is as important or more than what they are doing instead.