I'm a guy in his early 30s. I am single but I'd like to have a relationship and maybe a small family some day. I have a relatively high paying job in technology earning a bit over $100k and I'm very good about saving enough, although I've never had a 401k match. On the whole I am in a really good place, and I'm probably a few decades ahead of my peers in terms of savings, on top of having a good income. Things are going well.
However, recently I've started to feel silly renting, so I started to look into the cost of buying. I've come to realize that I simply cannot afford to own the kind of place I want to live within an acceptable commuting distance of the places where I can find work.
It's important to me to be relatively close to work and to the city. I hate long commutes and driving. If I buy something I want it to be a place I actually like that I plan to live in indefinitely. I would want that to be a modest sized single family home (possibly a duplex), with room for a garden and a garage where I can set up a home gym. This very modest dream would cost me over 5 times my annual salary and more than twice what I pay in rent for a decent apartment. I've run this experiment in several other areas that I might live, just to check that it isn't just my city. It seems to be the case everywhere that I could find a job.
Even if I lower my expectations a bit, and look at some 2 bedroom condos in the same areas, they are on average 3-4 times my annual salary for the same space I have now renting. My rule of thumb has always been stay under 2x your salary. When you include HOA fees and taxes (together account for around ~$700-900), it is definitely more affordable to rent in every metro area where I want to live.
So am I crazy for telling my friends and family I "can't afford a home"? I really have been trying to find a place where I could have the quality of life I want at a price that is affordable and I simply cannot find anything. Should I just save up money and hope that the market fixes itself in the future or abandon this idea entirely?
Submitted May 07, 2017 at 08:05AM by SeverianTheSleeper http://ift.tt/2pTqIz9
