Hi guys,
I'm looking for an apartment with my GF and not so sure if i'm overthinking or underthinking things. We live and work in the Bay Area, so rent is obviously very expensive here. I make about 55k/yr and my GF about 57K/yr. My gross monthly pay is around $4641/month. We also have a small dog and car as well but don't mind street parking as we're looking at apartments in good neighborhoods. I've been reading online about the 30% rent rule (which I hear is more a guideline), but i'm still conflicted over what we can afford.
We found a 1bd/1ba place that's 564 sqft for about $2223/month with W/D in unit, but not including utilities. It's about a 20mins drive to work as well. We haven't checked the place out yet, but trying to estimate the math, it would add up to:
2223 (rent) + 75 (pet fee) + 150 utilities (guestimate) = $2448 / 2 people = $1224/month.
This would make it 26% of my gross pay, but would be about 38% of my net pay. Is this too high? There's about $1976 leftover in net pay after paying rent+utilities and everything, so I think that should be enough for other expenses like bills, groceries, savings, fun money, etc right? I have almost 100k in savings, no debt at all, and live a pretty frugal lifestyle with the occasional eat outs, but I don't want to find myself saving pennies lol. I'm also worried about rent increases in the future as well. Anyways, any help would be really appreciated.
Submitted March 13, 2021 at 04:20AM by gswkillinit https://ift.tt/3tebHFb
