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

[scrapquitler]

Our house cost approx 3/4 of one year of income.

 

[disneychrista]

My house cost 3.75 times my then income. Now it is 5.25 times my income. Due to job less / new job.

 

[MillauFr]

I still want to meet the people paying $1m around here for tear downs. I still can't figure out why my neighbors get paid so much.

 

[SirDuff]

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.

Your vote will not be publicly shown.

I assume that your numbers are off by a factor of 1,000? Or 10,000?

If you choose option 1 (less than 0.25%) then, if you made $100,000, your house would have to be less than $250. What did you mean there. If someone's salary was 100,000, what would their house have to have cost to choose that option? Less then $250,000 (which would be 250%)? Less then $25,000 (which would be 25%)? I assume the first (25%) with the highest being more than 350% (so $350,000 house on a $100,000 salary) but not sure how to vote since I don't get your numbers.

 

[Liberty Belle]

I assume that your numbers are off by a factor of 1,000? Or 10,000?

If you choose option 1 (less than 0.25%) then, if you made $100,000, your house would have to be less than $250. What did you mean there. If someone's salary was 100,000, what would their house have to have cost to choose that option? Less then $250,000 (which would be 250%)? Less then $25,000 (which would be 25%)? I assume the first (25%) with the highest being more than 350% (so $350,000 house on a $100,000 salary) but not sure how to vote since I don't get your numbers.

Heck, I don't know. It made sense to me at the time. I think your last sentence was in line with what I was thinking.

 

[princesspiglet]

We knew when we bought that we could "afford" 3x our salary and that was the norm, but neither DH or myself wanted a massive cookie cutter house or anything over what we truly needed. We only paid $50k over our annual income and it is almost paid off 14 years later. We are thankful we went this route as we can spend more money on travel!

 

[disykat]

I still want to meet the people paying $1m around here for tear downs. I still can't figure out why my neighbors get paid so much.

I keep thinking the same thing about this thread, but I'm telling myself that it's just a regional cost thing. The average house in my area is over 300K, so you'd have to make 100K a year to make the 3x your income guideline figure. So many people here are saying their house cost less than their annual income. I can't even imagine! Either houses are way less money or they make a lot of moola.

editing to add data. I just looked it up. The average home price (data from 2016) in my county was 379K and in the state (WA)was 404K. Seattle skews way higher.

 

[lovesmurfs]

2.35 - $60K salary - $141,000 house. We were so stupid. Had a VA loan, so 5.8% interest (1998) but no down payment needed.

We had no emergency fund. We were so stupid.

 

[mamacatnv]

DH had been unemployed following a layoff so we had to qualify on my income alone - we were right at 1.5
Now that DH is working again, we are in a comfort zone of about 1.0 and throwing lots of extra cash at the principal to get the house paid off before hubby gets to old to work.

 

[ronandannette]

I assume that your numbers are off by a factor of 1,000? Or 10,000?

If you choose option 1 (less than 0.25%) then, if you made $100,000, your house would have to be less than $250. What did you mean there. If someone's salary was 100,000, what would their house have to have cost to choose that option? Less then $250,000 (which would be 250%)? Less then $25,000 (which would be 25%)? I assume the first (25%) with the highest being more than 350% (so $350,000 house on a $100,000 salary) but not sure how to vote since I don't get your numbers.

I agree the poll was nonsense.

We paid about 3x (300% ) our combined annual gross incomes for our home. I wish we lived in a market where it didn’t have to be that way.

 

[okeydokey]

We paid about 3x our income about 12 years ago. Our income has doubled since then so we are comfortable with our mortgage and put extra on the principle each month.

 

[DLgal]

IF we could even afford a house here, it would be approximately 7x our GROSS annual income, at minimum.

Thus, why we rent. LOL.

 

[Liberty Belle]

I agree the poll was nonsense.

We paid about 3x (300% ) our combined annual gross incomes for our home. I wish we lived in a market where it didn’t have to be that way.

 

[smiths02]

We were somewhere in the 2.1-2.75x in 2011 when we bought our current house. if you count the house that we kept as a rental...the mortgages on all our houses were probably around 3x our annual salaries. DH's salary has more than doubled since then and we knew it was going to do that at the time so we felt comfortable with that arrangement. Might have done things differently if I knew my job was going to have cuts, and I was going to have twins. Oh well.

Now with both of our houses put together, we are sitting at 1.92x our income is owed, but they are "worth" 2.5x our annual income (or maybe more).

 

[DisneyHardin]

We paid about 1.75% of our annual income for our house.

 

[barkley]

just shy of 7x when we purchased BUT we paid 1/2 down and had a significant emergency fund in place. when interest rates dropped by 1/2 we refinanced and between that and increased income we paid off very early. it's not that we had huge income-it's just that we lived pretty simply to begin with and when we bought in a much lower cost of living area we had savings in other areas (property taxes, no state income tax and much lower auto/home insurance in particular).

I still want to meet the people paying $1m around here for tear downs. I still can't figure out why my neighbors get paid so much.

not sure where you are/what incomes are like but even before/after the crazy high housing market people paid insane prices for teardown houses in an area near where we lived-it was b/c of the cost of new construction permits and surveys and such. it was less expensive to overpay for a crappy teardown and take it down to the bare minimum that that city required to qualify as a remodel than to start from scratch.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

not sure where you are/what incomes are like but even before/after the crazy high housing market people paid insane prices for teardown houses in an area near where we lived-it was b/c of the cost of new construction permits and surveys and such. it was less expensive to overpay for a crappy teardown and take it down to the bare minimum that that city required to qualify as a remodel than to start from scratch.

A few years ago my mother-in-law wanted to remodel and add square footage to her mother's house that was built and primarily stayed the same since 1953.

The price tag was about 50K more than it would have cost at that time to just tear it down and build new even building new with the added square footage. New construction is expensive no doubt but their problem was partially permits (however that house is in a different county and the permits cost less than here in my county) but it was mostly bringing the house up to code. They can do things here and there but as soon as they open up walls the whole house has to be brought to current codes and that means $$$.

The buy house-tear down thing is something that has become more popular in my husband's grandmother's area in STL suburbs. It is barely here in my area but it is something that is spreading.

 

[jimmalru80]

Back in the day, combined income = price of the house.

 

[Liberty Belle]

Back in the day, combined income = price of the house.

That would be impossible here.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

That would be impossible here.

I'd hazard a guess and say that's the case generally speaking.

I'm sure places have pockets here and there where low low cost homes are available that equal your income and sometimes those are not the places you want to be in be that because it's too far from everything else or it's in a higher crime area or the school district isn't all that good, etc.