Counting utilities, heating fuel etc. we spend about 27%. I think Banks use something like 30% or 35% for your mortgage payment only, so if you do go house shopping and get pre-approved for something definitely don't look at anything more expensive than what you're pre-approved for and look to end-up with something $100K or more, less than your preapproval.
We spend about 17% on our 2 br apartment but are hoping to buy soon and are also not sure how much we should spend! I heard that 30% and under is considered "fine" but I'm not sure I would want to go as high as 30%...
Wow, after doing this math I am shocked that we are only at 11%, because I feel like we constantly have no money. This is our first year living together (this time around--we lived together about 6 years ago when I was in college), but we are determined to pay cash for our wedding, with not much help from family. This peaked my interest so I crunched a few more numbers. We put 30% of our take home pay towards wedding expenses each month.
This has me thinking about how we budget and our plans for a new house. I'm thinking wedding expenses should just be put away as baby expenses after we get married. Does anyone else save for baby already?
We have a beefy savings account with the intentions of being able to use it for hospital bills/mat leave. We did pay off all student loan debt in our first year of marriage. The payment would have been 2/3 of what we would expect for daycare. Now we make that payment to a savings account.
Post by LadyNymeria on Jan 22, 2015 10:52:35 GMT -5
We spend about 20%, and that includes mortgage, PMI (for now), property taxes, and homeowners insurance.
Both those silly online calculators and the bank when we were pre-approved for a mortgage told us we could spend $150K more than we ended up spending, and what we ended up spending was the high end of what we wanted to spend.
Post by morgand323 on Jan 22, 2015 10:56:57 GMT -5
Unfortunately, we are closer to 50% right now because we are carrying 2 houses (DH's old house and the rental we are currently living in). We're working on fixing his old house up to sell it and are in a short term leas/rental at another house while we do that work.
When we go to buy a house, we're looking at prices that would put us in the 20% range...right now the expenses are ridiculous!
I don't remember exactly. I know when we were approved for both of our home loans, we were approved for a laughably high amount that could get anyone with our income bracket into trouble.
Our rule of thumb is that any monthly bills/payments we have should be coverable by just one of our incomes. That way, if one of us lost our jobs, we would be able to survive until things straightened out again.
I know that's not very helpful - because that includes our bills and cars and stuff... But that's how we try to roll.
Just under 20%. We are in a high cost of living area but live in a very modest home because daycare costs us another 20% of take home pay.
So crazy yet true. Whenever I feel down about TTC, I just remind myself, "hey, here's another extra month to save up for the insane costs of daycare!" Once we do have a baby, daycare + rent will easily account for 50% of what we take home. Luckily our other expenses aren't too high, but COME ON.
This for us essentially. I only work part time now instead of daycare so our rent right now is 50% - and it's the cheapest apartment in a safe area we could find. *cringe* but we're only living here another 2 years and it's just not worth buying a house. When DH graduates and gets a good job we'll buy a small house.
Post by GoBigOrGoGnome on Jan 22, 2015 12:09:06 GMT -5
We are at 21.5% including taxes and insurance but not including utilities. That is for an 1800 sqft home with 5 acres, a barn, and a shop, but we are in a pretty cheap housing area. We got approved for the loan on just my income and I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay the mortgage by myself. I don't know why banks lend so much more than they should.
For our mortgage payment (including taxes and insurance escrow) we pay just over 25% of our joint take home (after taxes, retirement, health insurance, etc.). If you include utilities (and I lump cell phones and cable into this category) we are at about 35%.
ETA: We are in a 4 bed/2.5 bath with a finished basement (about 2,500 square feet) in a medium cost of living area on about .25 acre.
Wow, after doing this math I am shocked that we are only at 11%, because I feel like we constantly have no money. This is our first year living together (this time around--we lived together about 6 years ago when I was in college), but we are determined to pay cash for our wedding, with not much help from family. This peaked my interest so I crunched a few more numbers. We put 30% of our take home pay towards wedding expenses each month.
This has me thinking about how we budget and our plans for a new house. I'm thinking wedding expenses should just be put away as baby expenses after we get married. Does anyone else save for baby already?
Right now we don't have a specific "baby fund" but between our regular savings, our emergency fund (last resort) and cutting back on our vacation fund and personal fun money we will be able to cover the birth expenses and day care if I decide to go back to work.
I highly recommend budgeting and tracking expenses. It really does open your eyes up to where your money is going.
Roughly 31% for us when including homeowner's insurance, and real estate taxes. We live in a HCOL area with a 4 bedroom home that's over 2,000 sq. ft. We also don't have much additional debt, so it doesn't feel like we're spending too much and we're comfortable.
Wow, after doing this math I am shocked that we are only at 11%, because I feel like we constantly have no money. This is our first year living together (this time around--we lived together about 6 years ago when I was in college), but we are determined to pay cash for our wedding, with not much help from family. This peaked my interest so I crunched a few more numbers. We put 30% of our take home pay towards wedding expenses each month.
This has me thinking about how we budget and our plans for a new house. I'm thinking wedding expenses should just be put away as baby expenses after we get married. Does anyone else save for baby already?
I have a bunch of little savings accounts - a general one with my main bank (for quick access in a pinch), and then with another bank I have a general fund, a student loan fund, a vacation fund, and a "special expenses" fund. The last one is basically a baby fund, but I didn't want to go right out and call it that - back in my single days I called it my "splurge fund" and used it to buy silly things like fancy shoes and handbags and electronics. I put varying amounts in each one as an auto transfer each month - the most in general, then special expenses, then student loans (I have really low interest rates and on my current plan they'll be paid off in three years anyways), and then vacation. I try to put about 25% of my take home pay into savings.
We are in the 18% (13% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range with two incomes. When my DH becomes a SAHD, we will be in the 24% (18% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range. But after a year, we can get rid of PMI so that will help lower our payment a bit.
Edit: Added percent for just the mortgage. My original percents included homeowners insurance, PMI, taxes, and anything thing else that is auto added in when we get our mortgage bill
Post by Belcher_Ears on Jan 22, 2015 14:23:12 GMT -5
MH and I spend roughly 17% on our mortgage (includes taxes and insurance) for a 3800 sqft 4 bedroom 3 bathroom home. We would owe a higher percentage but we saved and put a lot down up front. We live in a lower to medium cost of living area. It's our only debt left so I will be glad when we get it paid off.
We spend about 20% on our 2br/2b condo. I am trying to stay there as long as possible cause housing costs are crazy high in our area unless we move way far out...
18%....we have a complicated situation where we haven't sold our previous primary residence and rent it out at a loss. If I were to add in the loss portion this number would jump to closer to 25%.
We were pleased that the realtor and mortgage company understand that although woe could have been approved for nearly double our mortgage, they didn't try to convince us to buy a more expensive house.
We specifically told our realtor what our budget was and that we were firm on not going above that.
She emailed me a few days later with ONE listing that was 15k more than we wanted to spend. She said our budget wasn't realistic and that was the closest thing she could find to what we wanted.
We dumped her and a month later bought a house that we love, with everything that we were looking for, for 10k BELOW our max budget.
I was so annoyed about the whole situation. I am glad we stuck to what we had originally planned.
Our monthly mortgage payment, which includes NJ taxes (which are ridiculously high) insurance & PMI, is 20% of our monthly take home pay. When we move into our new house, it will be about 32%, but the taxes are 17k/year in the town we're moving too (compared to 10k/year now) so that also contributes to the hike in monthly costs.
Wow, so much eye-opening info here. I can't believe how many of you guys own - that is great! And you are all making me feel crazy for living where I live. Interest rates might be low, but in my area, crappy little starter homes that were built in the 1920s and need serious work are going on the market for $700K+. And then selling for $100K over asking. And many of these homes are under 1000 sqft and are 2bd/1bath max. Even if we had the cash to buy something, I don't think I would want to buy one of those! And on top of that, daycare for infants here costs about $2K a month. We love living here, but as two working professionals who aren't actors or athletes or independently wealthy, I sometimes feel like we are on a neverending treadmill when it comes to the cost of living.
That sounds like a ridiculously expensive area to live in!
Post by shadesofgold on Jan 22, 2015 15:53:20 GMT -5
We spend about 18% of after-tax income on rent for our 1-bedroom walk-up in a major city. (I couldn't be bothered to factor in what goes toward our insurance and retirement funds - it would be a higher percentage if I factored those in.) We get a pretty great price but we want to upgrade to a 2-bedroom this year and our rent will probably increase by about one-third. I'm antsy to buy but DH is pretty firm on wanting to have a 15% down-payment saved, which will take a bit longer to accrue since the cost of property here is insane.
Currently 29% because DH doesn't have a job. But that's with property tax and homeowner's insurance. If it was just the mortgage itself it would be 16%.
Our monthly mortgage payment, which includes NJ taxes (which are ridiculously high) insurance & PMI, is 20% of our monthly take home pay. When we move into our new house, it will be about 32%, but the taxes are 17k/year in the town we're moving too (compared to 10k/year now) so that also contributes to the hike in monthly costs.
That's a lot of taxes! I think where I'm at there is a 1% of your property value max. When we bought our house we had it reappraised lower to limit our taxes (we bought in the crash).
We're spending 19% and change on our mortgage, which includes insurance and property tax. Utilities vary widely throughout the year (our furnace runs on propane, and the bill is hideous in winter but nonexistent in the summer), but on average they probably bump us up to the 24-25% range. We do have a new car, which was an expensive splurge but something DH insisted on (the specific car; I did agree that he needed a new one when we bought it).
We've also been putting an amount roughly equal to the average cost of daycare in our area into a special account savings every month for the last nine months, and I'm glad that if and when we have that expense in the future, it won't come as a shock to our finances.
Wow, after doing this math I am shocked that we are only at 11%, because I feel like we constantly have no money. This is our first year living together (this time around--we lived together about 6 years ago when I was in college), but we are determined to pay cash for our wedding, with not much help from family. This peaked my interest so I crunched a few more numbers. We put 30% of our take home pay towards wedding expenses each month.
This has me thinking about how we budget and our plans for a new house. I'm thinking wedding expenses should just be put away as baby expenses after we get married. Does anyone else save for baby already?
We have savings but it's not necessarily for baby. If you have any debts (student loans, cars, etc besides the house) I would recommend using the money to pay those off first. It's amazing how easy it is to save with no debt! We followed the Dave Ramsey plan.
This is what we're doing too. We have an emergency fund of 3 months of one of our incomes (they're roughly the same) and now we're focusing on paying stuff off. Thanks to a few unexpected bonuses from work early last year and the rental income we were getting from one of H's coworkers renting our spare bedroom for the last 2 years, we've been able to pay down close to $20k in student loans, another $5k in credit card debt and we saved up enough to put new carpets and laminate flooring in the house.
Is the Dave Ramsey plan the one where you pay off your biggest liability first, then the littler ones? Or is it the plan where you pay off the highest interest rate?
We are in the 18% (13% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range with two incomes. When my DH becomes a SAHD, we will be in the 24% (18% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range. But after a year, we can get rid of PMI so that will help lower our payment a bit.
Edit: Added percent for just the mortgage. My original percents included homeowners insurance, PMI, taxes, and anything thing else that is auto added in when we get our mortgage bill
I'm not super financially savvy. How do you "get rid of" PMI?
We are in the 18% (13% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range with two incomes. When my DH becomes a SAHD, we will be in the 24% (18% if we are just looking at mortgage alone) range. But after a year, we can get rid of PMI so that will help lower our payment a bit.
Edit: Added percent for just the mortgage. My original percents included homeowners insurance, PMI, taxes, and anything thing else that is auto added in when we get our mortgage bill
I'm not super financially savvy. How do you "get rid of" PMI?
From my understanding, you pay off 20% of your loan (including your down payment). We are close to that.
18%....we have a complicated situation where we haven't sold our previous primary residence and rent it out at a loss. If I were to add in the loss portion this number would jump to closer to 25%.
We were pleased that the realtor and mortgage company understand that although woe could have been approved for nearly double our mortgage, they didn't try to convince us to buy a more expensive house.
We specifically told our realtor what our budget was and that we were firm on not going above that.
She emailed me a few days later with ONE listing that was 15k more than we wanted to spend. She said our budget wasn't realistic and that was the closest thing she could find to what we wanted.
We dumped her and a month later bought a house that we love, with everything that we were looking for, for 10k BELOW our max budget.
I was so annoyed about the whole situation. I am glad we stuck to what we had originally planned.
Yep. We fired our first realtor because she refused to bring us houses in our price range. She kept pushing us $30-40k higher than we had said was our limit. It wasn't even that it was hard to find what we wanted in our price range. She just didn't want to deal with short sales and foreclosures, or the smaller, fixer upper types of houses.
We ended up with a great realtor who was honest with us that probably half the houses in our price range would be fixer uppers and most of the rest would be short sales or foreclosures. In the end, H got a job a few months after we started looking, so we eased our limit up a little higher and found a great place that the owners were looking to unload quickly because they couldn't afford the mortgage on it and their new house.
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