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.