If you want to buy a 500K house, you still need to save a bit more to come up with 20% down. If you want to benefit from a lower interest rate, ideally you’d have enough money down or buy a lower cost house to take out a conforming loan. If you follow the advice of others, have 6 months of savings for loss of job or rainy day – at 4K savings per month, you’ve got a year and then some before you have the cash reserves to buy.
And don’t forget to budget the furniture costs and any work you may want to do on your house to make it livable. If you’re moving from an apartment, you’ll probably need to budget another 5K-10K for all the furniture and work you may want to do before moving in.
Like SD Realtor and many have suggested in other posts, before you make any real estate decision, sit down with a spreadsheet and model out the cash flow over the next few years to look at the impact of a home purchases, and how much you have left to enjoy life. What expenses will likely be incurred during that timeframe such as new car purchases / maintenance, medical expenses, etc. There’s nothing worse I can imagine than going to sleep at night worrying about whether you can make your monthly expenses. If you enjoy things like taking vacations and being able to eat out, make sure you can still do those things. I have known too many people who have strained their marriages due to overextending and stress of finances.
Also I hope you both love your jobs – making decisions like going to smaller companies or start-ups become much harder when you’ve got your mortgage as your ball and chain.
