How much did you pay for your house in relation to your income?

house/income ratio

  • Less than .25%

  • .26% - .50%

  • .51% - 1.0%

  • 1.1 - 1.5%

  • 1.6 - 2.0%

  • 2.1 -2.75%

  • 2.8 - 3.25%

  • 3.26% - 3.5%

  • Over 3.5%

  • Other?


Results are only viewable after voting.

Liberty Belle

<font color=green>I was going to reply, but I see
Joined
Aug 23, 2006
So if your house cost $300,000, and your income is $100,000, your answer would be 3.

If your house cost $150,000 and your income is $100,000, your answer would be 1.5.

Forgive me, I'm not a mathematician, but this makes sense to me.

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Unfortunately I bought at the peak of the housing market in early 2006 and will probably never be able to sell for what I paid.
 
In relation to what our household income (one salary) is today, they're equivalent. I don't remember what our salaries were when we bought the house, though.
 


At the time we closed, we borrowed roughly 1.75 times our annual gross income.

What we “paid” is a little tougher to nail down as we purchased the land 5 year earlier with a mobile home on it which was sold at the time we closed on the new home we had built. By this time, we owed very little on the land.

But, if I include the original purchase price of the land plus the construction cost of the new home, that price in total would be roughly 2.25X our annual gross salary at that time.
 
We had combined GROSS income of $30,000 when we bought our $101,000 house. So 3.375 using your scale.
Our payment was exactly half of our monthly take home pay.
When we refinanced 5 years later, with the SAME bank, the loan officer disputed that we paid $101,000 for the house because "you couldn't have qualified for that much of a mortgage with that little income" Then he pulled our old loan papers from storage (this was in 1987 before everything was in a computer) and just looked at us and said "how did our bank every approve this mortgage?"
But we were the first in our families to buy a house over $100,000, the first to have a mortgage, everyone else paid cash. But my parents first home was literally a $2,000 1 bedroom 1 bath shack that over 10 years they added onto until it was was 3 bedroom, 2 bath home. My FIL was career Air Force, so always had free housing, and when he retired, he bought a $15,000 house in Texas with cash.
 


Let's see, what was my salary in 1987? I'm guessing between DH and I it was probably even, house maybe a little more than our combined salaries.
 
Tough to say - we did contract for deed. The original price was 1.1. When we actually bought it outright, it was .89... according to how you have it set up above.
 
When we started looking we were looking at about the 1.5 mark but could not find anything that worked for us, we ended up in a house that was about 2.25 times dh's salary. Luckily we bought right at the beginning of the housing boom.
 
We made around 50k and paid 125k for our house so 2.5 x our salary. Those were some lean years at first, yikes. I knew we should be looking at houses in the 85k-100k range but we couldn't find any we liked and of course you always like the one that is more expensive. All's well its paid off and we're free!!
 
We paid 3X DH's salary for the house. We knew that my income would fluctuate between 0 and full time, but we had my full time salary when we were getting the down payment.

At the time we bought, we understood that 3X your annual salary was kind of the norm - and that was at a time when interest rates were still high. Many people I know did more to get into their homes. I guess it makes sense that it totally depends on the market where you live. I live in a pricey market so it's really hard for me to even imagine people getting a house for their annual income or less unless they are quite wealthy. In some markets, I'd guess it takes more than that.

Our house is paid off now, but with it's value right now we'd be short of affording it if we based it on 3X DH's salary now.
 
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At the time we closed our house was about 3 times our income but our mortgage was about equal to our income. We had a ton of equity in the house we sold.
 
I suppose ours was around 2x our annual salary at the time I remember being freaked out shortly after we bought our house though because my husband took a 20k/year paycut to move into management. Thankfully that only lasted a few years before he moved up the management ranks.
 
Our house was about 60% of our household income in the year we bought. The one before that was a more conventional situation, and we spend just a bit less than 3X our household income.
 
Just moved to a state where housing costs more than the state we left- purchase price and property taxes. DH got a nice raise, but we have a much bigger mortgage payment.

Our house in NC was about twice our annual income at the time, but we only put about 15% down. Property taxes were about 10% of our monthly payment. The new house in PA is 2.7 times our income, but we were able to put down over 30%. Property tax is the real killer- it accounts for about 30% of the monthly payment.
 

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