Hi,
My wife and I are wondering how realistic it is to buy a home in the semi-near future.
We live in the east bay.
We currently pay about $2700/month in rent (all inclusive, all utilities, etc).
Savings 25k liquid investments 60k Cash
Debt 40k student debt
Income 170k Gross between the 2 of us. (185k or so after bonuses)
The reason I'm asking is because I'm wondering how worthwile it would be to save for a house vs just paying off the student debt (it's 6.25%, around 4.5% effective interest after tax-write offs).
The only reason I haven't paid it off is because the market is so good right now, I've been making much more money in the market.
Our parents would help with a down-payment, but I'm just wondering how realistic it would be to buy a house....Any worthwile house is in the 700-900k range....even if we get a 10 or 20% downpayment, we would still be looking at a hefty mortgage. It seems our monthly payments would jump, but I'm not too worried about the long term since both of our jobs are high growth (we have gotten about 10-12% raises every year for the last 3 years. In 2 years we'll be about 200k-215k after bonus gross income).
Anyway, I know this isn't a lot of information, but a lot of other threads I have read, people are saying limit a house to price, generally speaking, to 3x your annual salary. That doesn't seem realistic in the bay area.
We are getting to a point in our lives where we just need to do something with our cash. Pay off the loans, save for a downpayment, or invest to beat the effective rate.
I'm a CPA so I'm not totally daft when it comes to finance, but in the last year I've been trying to figure out what the best decision would be. I was waiting for the election to see the possibility of easy student loan refinancing, but that looks incredibly bleak now...
Submitted November 09, 2017 at 02:48AM by Acoconutting http://ift.tt/2AuAKcL