What is the size of the “median” home in each area? Single family, or townhome, or condo?
Given that this appears to be a median average, this graphic does not account for the extremely wide variance depending on the cases above. A two bedroom condo and a five bedroom single family home could easily have a $2000/mo variance in the mortgage cost.
The other item that would perhaps be useful would be to call out what the down payment requirement is for each of these areas; ie, you can only achieve a $3000/mo mortgage if you’ve also put down $140,000, which is unachievable for over 90% of the country.
From the Bay Area, $1.5M will get you a two bed one bath or three bed 1.5 bath home built in 1925 or so. You can buy in a lower end neighborhood for a little less or a higher end one for a bit more, but the standard is going to be a craftsman home from 1906 with a driveway if you’re lucky.
I think the graphic also used a 20% down payment and a slightly over 6% mortgage in the calculation.
I just want to retire and move someplace cheap, like NYC or London.
That’s insane to me. I live in Tulsa, OK and bought a nice 2400sq ft home with 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, dining room, 2 full baths and garage and in a cul-de-sac for 120k. But the downside is I’m living in Oklahoma…so… Yeah.
I feel that. I got a cute little almost 4 bed, 1.5 bath farm house in a smallish town in Wisconsin for 120k a couple of years ago. When I first moved here I was a shut in and the trade-off of not really having stuff to do out of the house was fine, but now I’m wanting to go enjoy the nightlife, have a good meal that isn’t a bar burger (I can get some damn good bar burgers, but still) and also drive less so we’re looking at moving to a bigger city in the nearish future.
On the upside thanks to the hyperinflation we’ve been able to get a chunk of equity that’ll help us a lot when we do move
Well the good thing about Tulsa is it’s still a fairly large city and there’s tons of shit to do here. Tons of great restaurants and great nightlife. And as far as Oklahoma goes, it’s extremely liberal here in the city. Which is crazy because historically not so much lol. This is home of the biggest race riot ever in the country. It’s not the best place in the world but it’s extremely cheap to live here and has everything I had when I lived in Dallas. Minus all the traffic lol.
Even in downtown San Jose you’re talking about seven figures for an ancient craftsman with outdated electric and plumbing. Willow Glen, Los Gatos, Cupertino, you’re pushing $2M.
If you’re willing to commute from way up in the east bay, you can do a bit better, you’re right, but if you’re commuting to a South Bay company you’re paying for it in travel time and stress.
And tbh, I was stationed for a bit near Dublin. I can’t swear to what the prices are like now, but man, now that I’m out of that line of work I’d choose to live in East SJ or the peninsula instead.
But those are super reasonable prices, I will happily admit, and if you work in SF the commute might be worth it. We just need much more mass transit.
There is no way that this graphic isn’t including the entire metro area. The city I currently live in is on the list and so is the city that I am planning to relocate to. Prices shown do not accurately reflect the prices of houses/condos that I would consider “in the city”.
Barely scrape by in “luxury cities” where non-millionaires are an afterthought. But at least you’ll have an easier time meeting fellow “undesirables”.
Have slightly more money that will mostly just go to paying for a car to traverse car-dependent hell…but you have to have vapid neo-nazis for neighbors.
Using the median home price is severely underestimating the cost of a decent home in an okay neighborhood.
With these salaries, you can afford a house that needs severe repairs or in either an unsafe or really inconvenient area.
I bought a house in one of these cities in 2017 with slightly more than what they say is the required salary. It was 195k with 4.5%. The school district reassessed the house from the sale, my taxes skyrocketed, and my mortgage increased $600 a month. I ended up selling the house after 3 years to move in my parents with 25k in credit card debt.
Today, that house would cost at least 300k and interest rates are around 8%. I’ve almost tripled my salary since then and my budget is probably max 330k.
At current interest rates, 5% down, and an 800 credit score, you’re monthly piti is still like 2,700. Assuming you make that 92k/yr, and are traded at 22%, you’re monthly take home is 5900. That’s 45 percent of your monthly income. “Affordability” is for dinner heavy lifting here
Now that insurances against natural disasters start costing a fortune in places like Florida, and you probably have to have such an insurance to get a mortgage there, it, the costs for housing down there will probably skyrocket soon.
My husband and I recently bought a house here in Portland. We’re on two software engineers’ salaries with no kids so we can very much afford it, but it would have been a squeeze without an inheritance from my grandparents. It’s times like these where I truly appreciate the ubiquity of privilege. If they had been your average Black citizen, they would not have been given the opportunities to accumulate the wealth that I then inherited.
My dumbass had a nice 3 bed 2 bath home in NM that I was paying a measley $600 a month as a first time buyer. I then sold it and moved to the Boston area.
It’s funny because living on the West Coast, we tell people the same thing to scare them away, but when you say it about the Midwest, I suspect you’re actually being truthful.
Median price homes aren’t affordable, start home and median price home are mutually exclusive.
Median price home literally is going to be about the halfway point between a starter home and a fucking mansion
It boils my blood everytime I see these info dumps starting off with average or medium house prices.
That’s not a fucking starter home price.
It’s like looking at the median price of a car and then trying to say that cars aren’t affordable for your first car.
You don’t spend 20k to 30k in your first car, you buy near the bottom percentile as your starter. Your first car is like a fraction of the cost of the median.
Not sure what you are talking about. Starter homes are still the same. Basic features, unfinished basement, no garage, 2-3 beds, 1-2 baths, likely 20-30 years old and requires some repairs.
Typically will be farther out of the city. It will be a longer commute but still within city limits. It will have some amenities nearby but not exactly on main street, but enough to suffice.
For most large cities I have looked at, usually is in the range of 150k to 250k. Totally affordable for someone making a decent wage of 50k+ to save up the down payment of 7.5k to 12.5k over the course of 1-2 years.
Where I’m at even manufactured homes are being built and starting at 100-200k. Shoot, my 50yo house was 400 and is now estimated to go for 500k which is wild to me after living here for a while.
I wish I was closer to where you’re at 😂
Edit: my house isn’t too crazy either. 1 car garage, 1 1/2 bath, 1300sq ft
Exactly. The median purchase price for new cars is ~$45k or something, yet I’d never spend that much despite making more than median salary. Things don’t scale like that.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
$1000 for those costs per month is pure fantasy here.
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.
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
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