House buying

yeah, i'm thinking of staying in this place 7-10 years. hopefully we make some good progress

also, i used www.redfin.com

 

That is exactly why I was thinking about just waiting until I settle down and stop living the bachelor life. Who knows, I may save up a bunch of money then have to dump all that money into a wedding (unlikely but you never know) I think with the cost of houses in the bay area, it may be too expensive for me to afford on my own; $1200 a month mortgage would be do-able but I'll have to do some searching to check current housing prices.

Is there a typical formula for figuring out how much a mortgage would be? I know it depends on different areas and stuff but in general, a 100k house would cost X amount of dollars a month, 200k house would cost Y amount of dollars a month etc.

 

There are lots of calculators online, I'll go check how accurate they are.

Just as an example, I'm at $235,000, 4.875% APR at 30 years and I pay $1,678/month.

 

Ok, the calculator I checked just gave me
$1,493.64

Monthly Payment

off by about $200..

 

That's not as bad as I thought. I take home about $2400-$2500 a month, I may not be ready quite yet

 

Also, expect to pay about double what your house is worth over the life of a 30 year mortgage. Where I am right now, I was looking at a $520,000 house, after 30 years it would have cost me over $1,080,000.00

 

My only suggestion (if it hasn't been mentioned already):

Figure out what you can comfortably afford on your income, and your income alone. This would be different if you were in a serious relationship (like my fiance and me), but you don't want to sign on a house under the assumption you'll have renters to help pay the mortgage. You might get lucky and get some great ones, but you don't want to be digging yourself into major debt if you don't. I also bought my first one at 23.

 

Don't forget also, you have to add property taxes and insurance into your monthly payment. Can easily add hundreds of dollars onto your payment.

But then, you get to write off property taxes and mortgage interest on your taxes.

 

Probably off because of insurance and property tax. I bought my house with my Gf and we just split everyrhing 50/50. its awesome I love owning. going on 3 years I pay 1100.00 in a great hood (utah is cheap!) Bought my house for 160,000. 2000 square foot 3 bedroom Have you thought about condos?

 

Thought about condos but I really want my own garage and no HOA. Not having neighbors breathing down my neck would be a plus as well. $1100 a month?!?! Shit you can't hardly find a 1 bedroom apartment for that low here in the bay area Houses that cheap will turn my 30min commute into an hour, which may be worth it.

 

I bought my first house at 22 years old. (Almost 26 now)

A few pointers based on my experience
-Buy the worst house in the best neighborhood
-There's a hell of a lot more to Home ownership than just paying a mortgage and utilities. Property taxes, insurance, shit breaks, you will want to start "modding" it (modding a house is much more expensive than a vehicle!). Fortunately for me, i'm a jack of all trades so I don't have to pay people to fix things. It amazes me at the money people spend to fix simple stuff in their houses. Like my neighbors paying me to fix stuff in their houses
-Don't buy more than you can afford (Housepoor) it sucks! Fortunately I'm making enough money to be comfortable now, I wasn't when I first bought, still don't know how I did it, but I did.
-DO NOT BUY A HOUSE THAT YOU CAN'T AFFORD BY YOURSELF!!
-I recommend not letting your mortgage payment (with taxes and insurance) exceed more than 25-30% of your TAKE HOME income. Mine is about 38% of my take home and I wish it was less. It used to be over 50% when I first bought (mortgage companies were giving away loans like candy back then)
-DO NOT BUY A HOUSE WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER (co-sign) Buy it in your own name. Fortunately I bought mine in my own name but me and my g/f at the time bought it "together" she paid me rent and split utilities. I thought we would get married (dated for 4 years)...But shit happens and people change and I was glad we didn't have to deal with the house when we split up, it made things a lot easier. All I had to do was buy about $2k worth of furniture from her that she bought but I wanted to keep. I have seen this happen to some friends and it was a nightmare for them.
-Now is a great time to buy! Do it! I wish I had waited 2-3 years. Unfortunately I bought at the top of the bubble and am about $30k upside down on my house now. But at the time I bought, the market was growing exponentially and I planned to be out in 2-3 years with enough equity to buy another house. It's now 4 years later Oh well...shit happens...I guess I will have to stay in it longer.

 

Shit man, what do you do for a living?! Haha!

 

Power Engineer, 130k/year pre OT, alot of people get over 230k with OT

But on the price on a house, thats a basic bottom of the barrel house where i'm from, housing starts at 520k haha that was the cheapest I could find. All i wanted was 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms minimum. Gotta have 2 bathrooms minimum. Stops all the bs of people showering and others gotta piss...

got a lil sidetracked..

back onto housing, I live in the canadian oil sands man, look up Real Estate in Fort Mcmurray, every place is priced like an Ocean view penthouse suite

 

Wow, at 23 years old? You are a very lucky man. I must've picked the wrong field of engineering. Haha.

 

What field of engineering are you in? I'm a mechanical engineering tech, just a wannabe engineer

 

thx haha

It's a local fuck up, everything in this city is so ridiculously inflated that the wages have to be super high so people can live. It's got it's pros and cons, when I travel everything seems dirt cheap to me. I work with people who go to vegas 6 times a year and mexico at xmas. but housing is super expensive, the city's overcrowded with people coming in for temp work all the time. its a dirty place cause few actually consider it their home so no one takes care of the place.

 

I'm a software engineer. I help make TurboTax...if you've heard of it

Not super glamorous work...but I love my job.

Damn...that's still pretty crazy. I could see the reasons for coming up for temp work. Hell if I could make 230K...gladly

 

haha my boss makes 400K man, he's got like a 130k pension and came back to work after retirement making 270k. money heres insane but it attracts alotta assholes... its a boom town, try growing up here

 

www.realtor.com usually has direct feeds from local MLS systems

 

In order to make buying easier, my brother said he'd go in on buying a place too. Figure we'll split the down payment, mortgage and bills and when it comes time to sell, split the profit in half. I don't have any issues with it, just need to get into something. Let's get this show on the road!