We've been spoiled in renting a cheap place that our rent is only 10% of our take home pay. In the process of buying a house we're planning on spending 20-ish% of our take home on mortgage + property taxes + insurance.
I know that's still pretty conservative but it just seems like such a big jump to us (particularly my H).
What is your % of take home on your home? Do you feel comfortable with that %?
23.99% of take home and it is a little higer then I would like. Our property taxes took a pretty good leap so that made our payments higher then I would prefer.
Post by yellowbrkrd on Aug 7, 2012 10:21:03 GMT -5
I am currently unemployed so it's 19% of our take home. Obviously, when I finally get a job it will be less. We live off of DH's salary so we are comfortable with it.
Post by beachdweller on Aug 7, 2012 10:24:03 GMT -5
Mine is 33%. Freaks me out a little sometimes, but we have no other debt and a high income so it works out fine. We live in a HCOL area (at least for housing) and are in our forever home, so I am ok with it. Plus, the take home is less fully funded 401ks, so that impacts it as well. I don't think 20% would be bad at all, especially if you don't have a lot of other debt.
We're HCOL and we're at 39%. We don't have other debt and have a decent salary so yes it's comfortable enough. With Student Loans or car payments I could see how it would suck.
We are around 28% of net. We are totally fine with it- we actually were at 47% of net when we first bought. But we've re-fi'd and got a bunch of big raises since then.
Ours was about 20% when we both had stable incomes. My DH's income is now variable, so it could be anywhere from 15-35% depending on the month. While 15% is more fun, we are comfortable anywhere in that range.
29%, used to be 22%, but we refied into a 15 year mortgage a year ago(HCOL). It is higher than I would like, but I am excited about having our home paid off in 14 years.
Post by njohnson1972 on Aug 7, 2012 10:47:14 GMT -5
Question about what we do with our extra cash:
Well, we are doing fertility treatments. And trying to build up our savings more. We probably spend too freely and don't budget as well as we should. And we both work, so I calculated it on our combined net pay.
Post by sillygoosegirl on Aug 7, 2012 10:51:12 GMT -5
Our rent is currently 9% of our take home. But once we buy our house and I become a SAHM, our PITI will be right around 28% of take home. Plus we're adding utility and maintenance expenses we don't have in our rental. I alternate between being okay with it, and completely freaking out. At least we won't need to save for a house anymore (which is where the majority of our money goes now), and it's a location where we should never need a second car.
ETA: for those who are 20% or less, what do you do with all the extra money? I wish we had that available...
We are at less than 20% right now because DH was promoted a year after buying the house. His income practically doubled. We were house poor in the beginning but now we are more than comfortable.
Unfortunately we were not smart with our money in the beginning and racked up a lot of debt so we are in the process of paying that all off. We are making payments toward the debt that is more than our house payment but it will be a good feeling once it is gone. We also like to travel and do a lot of other activities (baseball games / football games etc which is expensive).
With our extra right now, we're paying off the last of our 6%+ interest rate student loans (next month we'll have those taken care of) and saving the rest for either the down payment, future renovation or just general savings.