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Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I'd love to know where the houses you can afford on a $140K salary in DC are. Unless house here is loosely defined as a place where you live (apartments, condos), I'm certain this data is flawed.
It says "homes" and not "houses", so probably apartments and condos indeed
Reading is hard
It's gotta include condos....any condos. Like studio sized condo from the 60s in a dumpy building with neighbors that have 3 families living in a one bedroom
At min 5% down payment and 140k salary (lets say 100k after taxes), with 1k home expenses per month you'd clock in at max approval of up to $369,178 mortgage, clocking in at a max monthly mortgage of $1,654. Would require a down payment of $19,500
Feel free to check out this link below to see all the valid houses listed on the first realtor website that came up for me, filtered down to normal houses that are at that price point or lower, in DC area
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Washington_DC/type-single-family-home/beds-2/baths-1/pnd-hide/fc-hide/price-na-369178?view=map&pos=38.945953%2C-77.065614%2C38.80085%2C-76.854635%2C12.631499999999999&qdm=true
This one in particular is at the very top end of what you can afford, but I'd absolutely buy that house in an instant, decent location, looks gorgeous, etc etc.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/3907-Billings-Pl_Capitol-Heights_MD_20743_M61312-81306
Lmao. DC is one of the top HCOL cities in the country. I also don't think your calculation includes any of the taxes, insurance, etc you need for a house.
The first link you shared, literally all of the houses are east of the river. Talk to anyone in this area about recommendations on living in that area.
Second link is MD not DC.
Thanks for doing this research though.
Home expenses is just taxes, electricity/gas/water, maintenance.
Not Cost of Living.
HCOL areas make all of those things more expensive. $1000 for those costs per month is pure fantasy here.
Not really. No. Often they are much cheaper. Gas/electricity is a lot more expensive in low cost of living areas, due to transport costs.
$1000 or so is pretty normal in big cities for monthly house costs, most of which is utilities. If your utility bill is over a thousand dollars you either own a tesla, mine crypto, or grow hydroponics.
Or the other handful of expensive hobbies of course. Aquariums, 3d printing, so on and so forth.
Taxes usually are like 200-250.
Maint should be ~100/month if you got a proper inspection done and ensured there aren't any serious issues.
This doesn't include major maintenance not all houses need, like new roof, new water heater, new furnace, new AC, etc. Just general passive maintenance.
That number is purely "how much does the house cost to not get foreclosed" which is what banks care about.
Dude I live in DC. I'm telling you what the reality is here. $1000 will not cover those costs
DC rates atm are average of ~3.5k property taxes, quite low electric rate at 15 cents, gas at ~$1.50
DC's utility rates are extremely low and very affordable, and property taxes are a smidge on the high side but not that high (about $300/month)
So maybe closer to $1,100 instead of $1000
These are hard numbers a person can literally look up, so I have no idea wtf you are talking about, those numbers are very low for a city.
Assuming your numbers are correct, last I checked $1100 > $1000, isn't it? So a $1000 won't cover those costs here.
What is so hard to understand?
So do you think that an estimate going from $1000 to $1100 is definitely in the range of going from "reasonable" to "pure fantasy"?
Sorry mate but you are just out of your depth here. These are reasonable numbers and $1k was a rough estimate I made based on a fair bit of knowledge. The fact I actually was only 10% off from a pure eyeball estimate is pretty damn good imo.
$100 doesnt magically make or break any of what I said when you are dealing with the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We aren't talking about magical vague numbers here, all of this is stuff you can look up the formulas for and all the numbers are quite public info. Gas prices, electricity rates, tax rates, and entry level home prices are not hard to find.
My numbers in my original post are maybe off by a few % tops. You said it was "pure fantasy" but now we have unequivocally demonstrated my estimates were actually pretty dang close to reality.
These are just straight up numbers you can just plug in and work out, there's nothing really else to it. It doesnt matter where you live, the formulas are the same across pretty much all of Canada, US, the UK, etc.
Banks solved this shit a long time ago, it aint that hard to go find a calculator and work it out.
Again, I live in DC. I don't need to look it up. I literally pay this shit every month.