The housing market is ridiculous in the DC area; we were getting outbid by people paying cash last time we did some home shopping.
We are just outside of Boston. We live pretty comfortably (by my standards) on about 80k a year. We own a house - 2 bed, 1 bath. We have 1 car for the family. We are in a good school district. We have a lot of fun - museum memberships, travel, etc. but all done on a budget. We manage on about 80k a year and if we were at about 90k things would be perfect. Our lifestyle wouldn’t change at all, we would just have more to put away for the future. We could probably live the same lifestyle with a second child for 110k.
Lord, I know. To make matters worse, we both work outside of the city in opposite directions, leaving us with a pretty narrow band of places we can live without ending up with hell-commutes.
I’ve read most of the housing market ‘recovery’ is due to wealthy investors (foreign and domestic) buying up houses to rent as there aren’t many good investments yet.
So I don’t know if that is eventually going to dry up and if/when it does if housing prices will start falling again.
The rent is too damn high!
I sold my place in San Francisco last year. We got about 20 offers, and ignored the handful that weren’t for at least 20% above asking price, and for at least 40% cash down. House was sold in less than a week, and there were people waiting in line to buy it.
I’m not sure this is going to run dry anytime soon in major cities.
I like San Jose, though I wouldn’t call it one of the most beautiful places. It’s not bad at all, though, and the weather is nice and it’s within range of a lot of nice things. The job market is the main thing, though.
I have a 2-bed condo and live pretty modestly. Total monthly expenses are ~$2700, so say $4k pre-tax, or $48k/yr. That’s not including any luxuries or savings, though (and just for a single person). Scale as appropriate for your desired level of comfort.
I have a personal bias against San Jose. It reminds me too much of LA. Flat, sprawling, seemingly disorganized layouts of the city, and huge swathes of grids of streets that all look the same. The only reason it thrives is because of the local jobs - the geography itself is exceedingly boring.
Um, can you PM me? I cannot figure out where to look for an affordable little house.
PM sent.
That to me is surprising because I have found the management of rental property can often strip away your profits.
Our realtor kept going on and on about investors. From my experience, pretty much anything not in a flood plain and under $200,000 was bough by an investor for cash in the areas we were looking in. And the average home in that range would be on the market for less than 10 days. It was hard to believe. So, you could buy a home for less than 3 o 4 hundred thousand, as long as you had cash. Or you could live in a flood plain.
Viburnum, Missouri, population: ~1,000 depending on whom you ask. I am right smack in the middle of the Missouri Ozarks (more like, on top of them, since the Highest Point In Missouri is about a 30-minute drive), about 100 miles from St. Louis.
I rent a very nice (though not luxurious) 3-bedroom, 1-bath, ~1100sf house with a basement for $500 per month. I pay my own utilities: electricity is exactly $100 per month (level payment plan), water runs about $75 per month. My Dish Network™ package is $150/month, and my utterly crappy internet package is $78 per month. I use a pre-paid cell phone ($25 unlimited calls and texts, no data, because what’s the point?).
We eat reasonably well on a $400 per month food budget. The local grocery store is ridiculously overpriced, but they can get away with it because captive audience. The nearest Walmart is ~40 minutes away, and Mrs. Homie and I go there about once every three weeks. “Restaurant” food in this town is limited to Casey’s Pizza or the town’s utterly awful, crappy restaurant that basically just warms up what the Schwann’s man brings. We don’t have kids, so it would be a fool’s errand for me to try to calculate how much it would cost to feed them.
I don’t smoke, but my cursory glances at cigarette prices seem to suggest that Missouri cigarette prices are some of the lowest in the country (certainly lower than Illinois, where I used to live).
Mrs. Homie and I both work from home (no commuting costs), but gas in Missouri runs about $2.25 per gallon, and since jobs are scarce 'round here, most people who aren’t in business for themselves have a long commute to work.
Lacking kids, I can’t really speculate on the cost of feeding or educating them. Mrs. Homie and i would never let our kids see the inside of a public school, nor would make a 30-mile drive each day to the nearest private school, which would undoubtedly be a religious school that teaches that the Earth is 6,000 years old. We would have home-schooled.
Bottom line is that, in this town, you’re going to live like a king on 100k per year. Hell, you’d live like a king on 50k per year. Mrs. Homie and I are living fairly large on about $1,400 per month. Doesn’t leave us much wiggle room considering our expenses, but once she picks up another kid to babysit, and once my business grows to the point I hope it will, we’ll hardly be rich, but a trip to Disneyworld might be in the cards.
Same here. We’re at 75k/yr but feel like just barely making it. We have one car. But we also have a daughter and we got lucky in that we only have to pay 1k a month for daycare.
I think that this is going to vary wildly as to what living comfortably means to each individual, but you could live a good middle class lifestyle in New Mexico (except maybe in Santa Fe or some of the more exclusive towns or cities) for $50k a year, easily. The price for gas and food is pretty cheap, housing is definitely reasonable (at least compared to my experience on the east coast) and while entertainment isn’t up to the standards of a major city it’s not bad.
Yeah it’s nuts around here. I’m in NW DC and a 1-bedroom apartment near a metro stop will cost over $2k/mo. I’m paying $150/mo for a garage spot. Despite having been here for three years, I’m not around much and don’t really know enough about the area should I want to move.
Can you afford a trip to Branson and see some shows and go to Silver Dollar City?
Yeah, southern Missouri can be pretty cheap but Springfield is about average.
Family of four in the Chicago southwest suburbs (Plainfield-Joliet area). With ~$95k we keep the mortgage paid, lights on, food on the table and enough for eating out, taking long weekends or other non-lavish entertainment options. Cable, cell phones and other minor luxuries. We’re not living large but we’re comfortable.
Pm sent.
Not at the moment, no. Not that we would even if we could afford to. If we had money to take a weekend trip, it would be to St. Louis, or perhaps to Hermann for wine tasting.
My intermediate travel goal is a weekend trip to Denver. To, uh, see the Rocky Mountains - yeah, that’s it.
My long-term travel goal is Disneyworld.