Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:I know GROSS is what everyone looks at, but I think looking at NET is what you should be looking at if budgeting on a month to month basis. We NET $15K a month, mortgage + taxes and insurance is right at $5K. Our GROSS is probably closer to $30K but we max 401K plus catch up contributions, and we withhold "0".
Net though is highly dependent on personal choices as you kind of implied. My net changes a lot based on things like health, education and retirement accounts, tax issues, etc.
Gross in my opinion is far more easily comparable across households. For me PITI is 21% of gross.
In addition to this, about 30% of my compensation is either deferred or paid an irregular intervals, and so it doesn't factor into monthly cashflow, and we don't take it into account when figuring how much we can incur in monthly expenses. I know what our gross is, but it's a huge hassle to figure out net monthly income.
Yes but I think the majority of people have a pretty predictable monthly NET. I know what ours is from Jan-April, that's usually when DH maxes out the social security portion of his pay and his paycheck increases about by about $1000-$1200 a month for the rest of the year. He gets an annual bonus paid in March, but I don't include that in our budget. We just put as much of that away as possible.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:I know GROSS is what everyone looks at, but I think looking at NET is what you should be looking at if budgeting on a month to month basis. We NET $15K a month, mortgage + taxes and insurance is right at $5K. Our GROSS is probably closer to $30K but we max 401K plus catch up contributions, and we withhold "0".
Net though is highly dependent on personal choices as you kind of implied. My net changes a lot based on things like health, education and retirement accounts, tax issues, etc.
Gross in my opinion is far more easily comparable across households. For me PITI is 21% of gross.
In addition to this, about 30% of my compensation is either deferred or paid an irregular intervals, and so it doesn't factor into monthly cashflow, and we don't take it into account when figuring how much we can incur in monthly expenses. I know what our gross is, but it's a huge hassle to figure out net monthly income.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:HHI is around $390K and our monthly payment is around $8000 including mortgage, insurance, property tax, utilities excluding internet and phone.
That's insane.
Anonymous wrote:Ours is 5.4% but our income is pretty high. The mortgage is a bit under $1mm.
Anonymous wrote:HHI is around $390K and our monthly payment is around $8000 including mortgage, insurance, property tax, utilities excluding internet and phone.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:I know GROSS is what everyone looks at, but I think looking at NET is what you should be looking at if budgeting on a month to month basis. We NET $15K a month, mortgage + taxes and insurance is right at $5K. Our GROSS is probably closer to $30K but we max 401K plus catch up contributions, and we withhold "0".
Net though is highly dependent on personal choices as you kind of implied. My net changes a lot based on things like health, education and retirement accounts, tax issues, etc.
Gross in my opinion is far more easily comparable across households. For me PITI is 21% of gross.
Anonymous wrote:Our mortgage is 34% of our take home pay.
That would be manageable on its own, but the X factor is childcare. We pay 44% of our take home pay for childcare. We're in the thick of it (two kids in full time care) so this is the worst 18 months we'll ever have on this cost). But it means we have only 22% of our income left over for other expenses, so outside of mortgage and childcare, we live very, very frugally.