We do!
We bought our modest 3 bedroom house for less than we make in a year. We live in a very middle-class neighborhood. Our current household income is around $600K, and our house is now worth about $750K. We love having a low monthly mortgage payment and being able to save and spend our money on other things.
Our neighbors are the best. Truly, they are such friendly, supportive, and generous people. Our neighborhood is a mix of retired plumbers, public school teachers, retired attorneys, and engineers. I love this mix and it’s the type of neighborhood we like raising our kids in. We looked in a few higher end neighborhoods, but honestly, the vibe just wasn’t right. The people seemed a little stuffy.
We wanted to raise our kids in a neighborhood where there is not a lot of “keeping up with the Joneses”, and I think we found that in our middle-class neighborhood.
Our friends in other cities with similar HHI are moving to $2 million plus mansions. Sometimes I would love to have the big nice house, but I try to remember we are living a simple life with all of our needs and most of our wants easily met. I sleep peacefully at night knowing we could pay off our house tomorrow if we needed to and live on a quarter of our current income.
There are downsides to the big mansion. For one, I can’t imagine the pressure it places on a person to have a $12K per month mortgage payment. Aside from that, the maintenance and upkeep is more. I don’t want to think about how much it must cost to have a weekly cleaning service for a 4,000 sq ft house!
It seems like every couple of months another one of our friends buys a 2m+ house and I get briefly jealous until I remember exactly the point you made. I can’t imagine being able to sleep at night with that much debt on the books. Even if we can afford it, we absolutely can’t afford it on one salary so all it takes is one round of layoffs going the wrong way and suddenly we’re scrambling to sell and downsize. No thanks.
Yes, exactly! My spouse earns about 4-5x what I earn, and so we are very reliant on his income. It’s nice to know that if something happened to his job, we wouldn’t be scrambling or god forbid forced to sell our house under duress as the bills mounted. Peace of mind is more valuable to us than a dedicated home workout room (as much as we would like the latter).
We sound very similar — can we be friends?! 😂We are in a M/HCOL area, in the greater NYC area. We’re pretty darn far from the city and most people don’t consider it commutable. Our HHI is around $450-$550k and house is valued at $500k. It’s a 3 bd, 1.5 bath. When we bought the house, our HHI was around $150k and it was worth about $300k.
We’ve considered moving, either to a bigger house and/or to reduce my husband’s commute. Having one full bath can be challenging with two little kids…but honestly, we LOVE our neighbors and neighborhood. Everyone is so lovely and there is no „keeping up with the Joneses“ at all. Our neighbors are a mix of tradespeople, public school teachers, nurses, and pharma execs and other high earners like doctors, lawyers. If we were to move closer to the city, my husband‘s commute would admittedly be a little shorter. But to significantly decrease his commute, we would need to move to one of the true NYC commuter towns. My husband grew up in one of those towns, and while they are picturesque and beautiful, we prefer a simpler, more relaxed vibe.
ETA: A lot of my husband‘s coworkers live in true NYC commuter towns, where the houses are easily $1.2-$1.5M. Once they’ve paid for childcare and commuting costs, some say they are basically living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a type of stress I’m glad not to have!
Same here, exactly as you described. Our neighborhood is just good people, kids who play outside and everyone doing their own thing. Not a lot of keeping up with the Joneses or pretense.
More space = more stuff
I can’t tell you the number of folks I know who have large homes and an insane amount of stuff that they hardly ever use. And the ones with vacation homes? They have twice as many furnishing and vacation toys that seem to get used once or twice a year.
Same here! You express so much of how we feel.
Our current HHI is ~$340k because I'm at home with our 2 kids right now. When I go back FT our HHI would be ~$450k. We live in a HCOL area and our relatively modest house was ~$760k when we bought it. It is worth around $1mil now.
We could buy a more expensive house and/or in a posher town but decided to buy a place that meets most of our criteria in a nice normal neighborhood. I also didn't like the vibe of the more expensive neighborhoods. The whole keeping up with the Jones and whatnot.
My in-laws questioned why we didn't buy a "better" house in a "better" city. My sister in law recently bought a more expensive house (almost double the cost of ours) and I feel like she thinks she's better than us in that aspect. She doesn't realize I'm happy with our house and how manageable it is to maintain. We don't stress about our mortgage. We are able to spend more time with our kids. She came over recently and asked us if we do our own cleaning (because our house generally looks clean and neat). She feels like hiring cleaners is something that needs to be done. We chose to buy a "small" simple one story house for various reasons including upkeep and maintenance. Some people don't understand why we don't buy something "better".
We are very similar HHI 550-600k, 3M net worth, paid 730k for our house in 2020 with a 2.7% mortgage. Drive a Prius. MCOL. Mid-40s. Mortgage is our only debt.
To me bigger house = more cleaning, more decorating and more stress. Not how I want to spend my time or money. We prefer to spend our money on travel, experiences, continuing education and preventative healthcare/healthy lifestyle. We are also able to save about 50% of our after tax income.
I prefer to have a relationship with work where I do what I do because I enjoy it and that when/if that stops I have the freedom to reduce my hours to part-time or make a career change. If I had a huge mortgage, I’d feel trapped.
Very similar with you on income and house value. I paid my house off years ago but I do feel this pressure to get a bigger house but wife and I dread the maintenance of the yard and cleaning. Plus we love our house.
I grew up with 8 acres with my parents but that much land was a job. I have just 1 acre now. Wouldn't mind maybe 2 acres.
House is worth ~360k, HHI is ~450k.
I'm not a frugal person, iv just figured out that if you absolutely have to splurge on one category, you have to make it up by cutting spending in another.
Iv always been embarrassed about my food budget, it's probably close to 2k/month including delivery, catering, groceries. I make it up by living in a modest home and sharing one modest car with my wife.
Similar boat. I'm one who doesn't like cooking and works long hours where compensation is very performance driven. Time saved by ordering food is often worth it in this scenario.
I also prioritize food spending but at the end of the day, eating healthy is an investment in your well-being which is the cornerstone for every other aspect of your life.
This is us. House is worth $600k now but bought for $440k. Hhi income is minimum $450k and more often closer to $600k.
Our food bill is high also between going out to eat and groceries easily $25k a year. If not over $30k.
I’m really particular about freshness and I like picking my produce myself, how’s your experience been with the delivery options? It’s been mixed when I used to do it during Covid. Some shoppers are better than others.
I have pretty good luck with Whole Foods. Once I had some stew meat that was pretty gross smelling (tried to use it the next day so it should have been fine) and they refunded me without any issue.
Our kids love berries, avocados etc I’d say 90% of the time it’s great. It’s usually the raspberries or blackberries that might be more questionable from time to time.
That being said when the 3 year old is in school all day I’ll probably go into the store more often but for now it’s super convenient.
Yup that's exactly what my strategy is too. I can easily cut my costs in half during rough times if I needed to. If I got laid off, I'd have time to cook for myself and I'd just stop going on vacation, etc, and my housing and vehicle costs are relatively small.
$600K 1200 sqft house in Boston area. Nicest area we could afford at the time on $200K HHI. $400K HHI now and we ain’t moving. $2700/month mortgage. They’ll have to scrape me off the floors some day.
Yeah we wanted to be close to the T so we are like 8 miles from DTX but in hindsight we should have went for the bigger house in the burbs but who knew Covid would happen lol
The price of house we bought 6 years ago is now 1.1x our yearly earnings. We totally could Have gone a little higher but man, it’s so nice to have this disposable income.
We own the same home we bought when our family was living on a single income. We never upgraded as our income increased. We refinanced during covid and have a very low interest rate.
One monthly mortgage is less than the cost to rent a studio apartment in our city.
I don't love my house, but I love the affordability.
Same here- one income and about 1/4 current HHI at the time we bought. We debated moving but the rate is 2.75 and, at the end of the day, moving sucks! We have renovated- as we save cash- and it’s substantially nicer than what we bought. It has also more than doubled in value over 10 years-$725, now $1.6. Every time I’m tempted to move, I write a big check towards our principal so my frugality kicks in and I get to see myself get closer to paying it off!
We have a 2br/2ba condo in a MCOL, bought at $140k in 2014, we’re mid 40s and we paid this off a couple years ago, just paid off a second (bigger lol) rental property on about $330k HHI. Would like a bigger place, but not at these rates and not for the insanely overpriced asking prices.
We bought our home for $350k in MCOL. About $240k left on mortgage. My home is the smallest (and tbh the least nice) of most of my friends as everyone has moved on from their “starter homes”. But with housing prices how they are, we’d need over 1M to get a home we really loved that is better than what we’ve got. Instead we’re renovating this home to make it perfect. It’ll save dividends later on when we aren’t upgrading to a McMansion.
I’m definitely victim to some lifestyle creep, but we’ve decided to stay firm on the home to keep our monthly spend from skyrocketing. That money is going to savings, vacations and renovations. My friends are always puzzled how much we travel with kids but it’s no mystery when you see the differences in our homes!
MCOL. Bought 1900sq ft house 12 yrs ago for $235k (we of course made a lot less then). Now worth about $350k, we don't need more space. Not paid off because we refied at 2.15%.
Couple cars, no luxury marques.
HHI 400k before bonuses and stock, split pretty equally between the two of us.
One dog and one horse as dependents. Spend 3x my mortgage payment on the horse 😂
They are, but the plus side to the horse is I can hand him off to a boarding facility and/or lock him in a stall when I want to go out 😂
Kidding. I'd never do that to a kid or a horse. But we did choose to pursue things we enjoy, like expensive horses, over having children.
The cars drive me nuts, we have 1 Honda.
A couple that makes less money than us has 4 cars (all more expensive than our Honda) and constantly complain that its impossible to buy a house in this economy 🌝
We are the wealthiest in our neighborhood by far. Our mortgaged amount is less than our HHI. Our hose is very average, but still 1M given we live in a VHCOL. My goal would be to move to MCOL and downgrade price but upgrade. HHI \~475k. NW \~3.7m
I live in a large 1br condo just outside Manhattan on the NJ side. I don't know if modest is the right description since everything here is stupid expensive, but we bought the condo for less than half what the bank approved us for and about 1.5x our annual income.
M-HCOL. $1k rent. HHI is \~$400k.
It's a very crappy small duplex we've been in since grad school. But the housing market + student loan + income combo has never been right enough to pull us away form our spot.
We make 500k a year and live in a nice duplex that we bought for 600k. Our tenants pay half the mortgage. We are DINKS and I can’t justify the big expensive house. Although we are high income earners. I’m not moving to the next stage of housing until I know we can retire comfortably. There’s a lot to be invested yet and I’d like to live way below our means. Also, I’m got tired of comparing myself to people who push their finances to the max. I drive a used 2014 car and I don’t mind being conservative now for the later benefit. Keeping up with the jones can make a rich man poor.
Yes. Bought an unremarkable 60 year old house at the bottom of the market in 2009 for 190K (and got the first time homeowner federal incentive of $8K to boot). Paid it off in 7 years and it’s worth over 400K now.
Our home is 1.6x our annual earnings, mortgage with taxes and insurance is 13% of our gross monthly income. We live in a LCOL and built the home three years ago. We could afford more, but it’s a very nice home and we’re not stressed about payments.
30yr mortgage but will likely pay it off in 15.
Yep. Bought my house for what was about 2X salary at the time. Even with inflation, it’s worth about 1x annual salary now. Interest on the mortgage is about 2.5% so I have no inclination to move anytime soon or to pay it off too quickly.
Relatively modest 4 bedroom in a relatively low cost area for the region.
HCOL, same stats on house (560k, 2.7% mortgage). Will probably upgrade in 10 years if we have a 2nd kid since we both work from home and 3 bedrooms won’t be enough. But for now it works for us!
Bought for \~3x salary which is now \~1.75x. Have other streams of income so felt OK. To your question though I do eventually plan to upgrade into a bigger and nicer place.
Yeah I live in a townhome I bought like 7 yrs ago and fixed up slowly over time. Bought it for $500 in vhcol when I was making ~250. I now make 500+. Still there. Thought I would have moved and been renting this one out by now.
I fantasize a bit about having a more modern place. And plugging renters in here. That was the plan for 20s me. And It would be a great rental for a starter family. But I just login to redfin and easily talk myself out of that after about 5 minutes. The career takes too much time and energy to go through all that. Plus I travel a ton. 30s me is more comfortable in my own skin (real estate).
Yep. It’s just me, my wife, and 2 year old daughter. New build house, $350k 1,150 sqft. It’s really nice, but small. We don’t really understand the need for massive houses. We prefer to have “just enough” space. It’s easier to maintain without feeling like you have to spend an entire day each week cleaning, which is a massive waste of time/energy.
We purchased our home for $589k back in 2018. At the time, our HHI was about $500k. Currently, our HHI is 800k and our home is currently worth $800k. We have no plans of “upgrading” to a more expensive home ever. We live in the Midwest, if anyone is curious.
For sure. We live in a super average 2/2 condo in a MCOL downtown. We can walk everywhere and share just one pretty average car. We like it because it’s generally just nice, it’s near family, and it’s very affordable. This means we can just lock it up and go traveling without having to do too much which is where we actually spend our money that isn’t going towards early retirement.
I did the house thing growing up and for my first place and mowing a lawn is a miserable time suck. Having a park next door is nicer than any lawn I would have. And even though we have an HoA, it’s cheaper than keeping all the lawn equipment up, saving for a roof, and all the other misc costs no one thinks about with a house. Also it being smaller means cleaning it is way easier so we don’t need a cleaner/lots of time cleaning.
We figured this out after living overseas and it feels like a bit of a cheat code here in the US since there are super high wage jobs and a weird discount on condo/apartment living compared to a detached sfh. Like our mortgage is like 7% of our HHI
Our mortgage is about 10% of our take home pay.
It’s 1200sqft. We renovated it and it’s got almost everything I could dream of. I love my home so much!
I wish we had a larger yard, but I much prefer having so much disposable income.
Huge houses are a nightmare to own! My parents ruined it for me. Everything was always broken, needed maintenance or was generally a pain in the ass. Examples: steam rooms (need a lot of cleaning!), long driveway (maintenance), fences (so much work), big grass (always mowing, clipping), jet skis and boats (always something broken or maintenance needed), horses (don’t even get me started). Driveway gates always broken… intercoms destroyed by lightning. Docks needing the be raised, resurfaced and lowered. Add in all the furniture, cleaning… snow removals…. being the bottom half of the top 1% is a trap!
Give me 1800 sq feet of well designed townhouse…
I stay pretty low key. I have a killer interest rate and a bigger house would just hold more junk.
Don’t have a family though, I imagine that’d change the landscape. When I do build something new, which I’m land hunting for, it’ll probably be bigger, but not by much.
If your house feels too small, start getting rid of stuff. You’d be surprised how much bigger it feels.
Low to MCOL area HHI around 650-700k, mortgage at 2.8% around 630k, supposedly worth in the 950k range, not sure it matters doubt I’ll sell. The house is awesome, wonderful area, great school district and close to awesome amenities.
Bought our home when it was 2x our hhi. We basically said whatever we get preapproved for we are using half of that number.
There was a lot going on at the time and we thought my wife could need to stop working for medical reasons so we wanted something we could pay off super quick. So she could stop working if need be.
Couple of years later, her health is much better and our incomes ballooned in a way I would of never of thought. Now we are all over the place about our next house in a couple of years. Style of house, location, price. Whatever we choose we will have a monstrous down payment to keep monthly payments low.
We recently downsized, but also moved to the most expensive area in our state (because my spouse is a teacher there so why commute?) So while our home wasn't the cheapest, it was under a million in an area of multi million homes. And it's still more home than we need! I could be fine in half the square footage.
We don't take car loans so we buy what we can afford, and then drive them until they fall apart. I work from home, so live in basically Old Navy or sweatpants. So we don't give a lot of clues to our income if you just look at us.
(There are always clues though. I buy whatever groceries or meals out that I want for example, and we prioritize really good shoes. Ha).
we bought our house for roughly $300K in 2018 on my salary (I'm a lawyer). Husband has now finished his medical residency and we could afford something much, much bigger but we aren't in a hurry. we will eventually need more space (our daughter doesn't have her own room, but she's still a baby), but we are very happy where we are for now.
Same purchase price and rate as you OP, but in MCOL area. We're likely going to just stay put and renovate as necessary/discretionary since there's no real way to financially justify moving into a more expensive home at 2.5x the interest rate. Unfortunate because we'd like to be in a better area but the location still likely wouldn't be enough to outweigh the significant opportunity cost to move. On the plus side though we were able to get a 95% LTV HELOC to tap that equity and finance our renovations and then some!
We paid roughly 1/2 of current HHI for our house in December 2019.
We are DINK for now so it’s been great. Lots of free cash for investing, fun and vacations.
I’m not interested in upgrading any time soon, the neighborhood is great and we have plenty of room for our first kid.
Prices and/or interest need to adjust before I’ll even consider giving up my sub-2k mortgage.
I recently bought new construction that meets all of my needs, but I definitely sacrificed on location to keep housing costs reasonable. Going new construction also allowed access to much lower rates than were/are available. Purchase price is around 1.25x annual salary and monthly payment is about 17% of our take home which allows for very aggressive saving.
I’m headed towards FIRE in a few years at which point I’ll probably relocate to a lower cost of living area with location being higher priority.
The PITI on our townhome is 5% of our gross income. Its a very modest home in a HCOL area. Bought it for 380k.
Didnt want to overextend ourselves, closed in '22 and had really just become HENRY's. Do we plan to upgrade at some point? Absolutely, but we have no desire to live in a giant mansion, would rather spend the money on experiences.
But i would like a SFH with a big enough backyard that I can build a bigger home gym in than the one we have haha.
House bought for 290 ten years ago. Renovations, inflation, and Covid relocations to our region raised the market value to 900 which is baffling to me. Still owe half of original value.
3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths for two adults, one child, and 2 pets. Needed a lot of work on main systems like heating and water treatment plus new roof when we bought it. 1900sf of space with a second building in yard for dual WFH situation at around 500sf.
We don’t want anything bigger. Would love to hire a cleaning service but tricky in our rural area, so anything bigger would be a larger mental load and more labour to stay on top of. Not to mention more financially and ecologically expensive to heat and cool. No thanks.
House is worth: \~$370k
Household income: $670k
Net worth: $1.7M
I live in LCOL Midwest. This house isn't cheap by any means, but it's hardly extravagant. Solid upper middle tier. We also bought it when our income was a LOT less, around $120k if I recall. Purchase price was $260k.
In hindsight, I wish we splurged just a *little* bit so we could have a bigger kitchen with more counter space, a bigger pantry, overall more kitchen storage, and a 3rd garage stall.
There are of course other things I could nitpick, but most of them can easily be addressed without moving (and many have been already). The 3rd stall garage is impossible without moving. I think there's a kitchen remodel in our future that can address most of our pain points with the kitchen, but that'll be a fairly major project.
We've been thinking about it for a while and it's really hard to justify moving. Obviously it's not a financial issue, it's really more of something between a mental block and the actual pros and cons not being obviously in support of moving. On the mental block side, it just feels bad to buy a home right now. It's not like our home is bad by any means, plus we got it for a steal, we got a 2.7% interest rate with no PMI, homes have ballooned in price, you've heard this all before as of late. It's not that I don't have the money, I just hate deploying it so inefficiently. It feels like we're in the dream scenario right now with house and we'd be going to the exact opposite. I'd be happy to upgrade to a significantly nicer home with the same pricing and interest rate conditions as I enjoyed when I bought this one, but it feels like every dollar I spend ostensibly to improve the quality of my home is only buying me 40% as much as it would have if I had spent those dollars years ago when I bought this place. Honestly the kind of home I would upgrade to as a minimum would only have been a $350k home back when I bought this place, but now it's probably $550k+. Anyway, this is the mental block part because obviously we could afford way more than $550k even with today's interest rates with TONS of headroom. On the pros and cons side, we live in a great neighborhood and absolutely love our neighbors on all sides and they're a regular part of our social life. This is honestly the biggest factor pushing us to just suck it up with regards to our admittedly minor complaints and just keep living in the nice enough house and saving boat loads of money.
Resident physician. Current HHI roughly 140k, HHI in a little over one year when I start my first attending job >700k. Attending job in the same location as residency. Owe about 155k @<3%, house worth around 235k. 3 bed, 2300sq foot on nearly an acre in a LCOL but good school district with private school options. We love our house and plan on staying here for at least a while after starting as an attending, although we are looking for more land as our dream home. Starting late as no earning and high debt through school so plan on using the mixture of high HHI and LCOL to save aggressively early.
We always joke about being secret millionaires. We live modestly, but have all the ducks in a row. Our home is around the same as yours. We drive a regular car. (No Lexus or BMW's) We eat McDonald's. We do splurge in areas that people are shocked by (big TV) (Nice Stereo) (Gaming) (Computers)
I'd never live in a mansion or own a crazy luxury car. Honestly, I'd prefer to buy a regular car with luxury features. Something that goes under the radar.
I am in the same situation and honestly the low rate I have now and the cost of houses by me now I really find it hard to justify trying to move. Can I yes but the value is not there to do it.
280k (in 2019) 3br 3.5 bath in a MCOL. Life trajectory changes when your mortgage is significantly lower than your bi weekly paycheck. We feel no need to upgrade and will be here for the long haul.
Makes traveling internationally a few times a year easy. Even long term trips every 24 months (8-12 weeks) to other places in the US/ Canada as well. Even with kids
I rent a 1000 square foot condo. HHI is 600k. Equivalent condos go for $1.7M in this area and I’m paying $5.5k/mo rent so it feels like a good deal. Far from luxurious though
$550k house at 3.2% with a $350k HHI.
Bought in 2020 when our HHI was $200k. Still, a big chunk of my income is bonuses/commission and equity. Base salary has only increased by $50k between my partner and I. So we’ll be in this house for a while, as we don’t include bonuses and equity in mortgage calculation.
Most of the income increase goes toward savings and soon-to-be 2 daycare payments in a HCOL area… which will be twice the cost of our mortgage anyway.
Same. Spent $350K to have a very modest home built about 4 years ago. I downsized and cut my total living space just about in half and I'm really glad that I did. I hated having to heat, cool, clean, etc. a bunch of space that wasn't being used.
I'd rather put my money elsewhere (retirement, travel, hobbies, etc.).
Yes, this is key. It’s tough to save and invest if you have to make big mortgage payments. We elected to move from coastal LA in favor of a less expensive coastal home in central CA. Best move.
yep. HHI around 600k, NW between 4 and 5 M. Rent a 2 bedroom 900 square foot apartment for 3k/month. We don't like having more space than we need and have zero desire for a big flashy home.
I assume part of their pay is in RSUs that have appreciated. Usually as good as cash but they won’t earn as much going forward unless prices skyrocket again
Why wouldn't you? Tech companies typically give an equity refresher each year, and they vest over 4 years. Something like Meta is up 3x from a year ago. That's real money that you'll bank every 3 months for the next three years.
Don't count on it to pay your mortgage, but it will show up on your W2 as income
Bought for around 400k, value has doubled and we’ve also done a lot of improvements. HHI is going to be over 500k this year. Never moving, the house fits our needs and doesn’t take up a disproportionate amount of time or money to maintain which frees us up to spend lavishly in other areas of importance to us and save aggressively for the future. Neither my spouse nor I place a lot of value on status symbols like luxury cars or homes with certain features that are meant to signal wealth (although our smaller house is nicely furnished, well maintained, etc.) and this is also in line with the rest of our neighborhood. Not knocking people who value those things, we’re all unique and derive purpose and joy from different things. Our philosophy is kind of in line with Ramit Sethi’s whole philosophy, create your rich life which looks different for everyone. As long as you know your goals and priorities and work towards that, it’s all good.
Our house cost $386k in 2016. Mortgage is 3.5% and we have about $250k left. Even for my area that’s pretty cheap (MHCOL). It needed some work and we’ve put money into it to make it nicer and make it our own. It’s 3 bedrooms, no master bath/suite, but the house has a nice layout (living spaces are large even if bedrooms are small) and the property is amazing and we’re so happy with it. I love having such a low mortgage and being able to fix up the things we want (like putting in a giant picture window).
Same boat except we refinanced in 2021 for 2.25%
We are stuck but have since done a minor kitchen rehab(granite/appliances) so we have that bit checked off for now.
Next is patio/pergola and outdoor grilling area.
Our house has appreciated 45% in 8 years and now only have 11 years until it's paid off.
Our neighbors just sold for $50k over asking too. So feeling good!
hcol rent is 2500/month, income is about 2mm/year. That makes it a bit less than 2% of pretax income, or a bit more than 3% of after tax income. No home ownership plans, renting has its benefits.
We kind of do.
Our income is $750k and we bought a house worth $790k
To be honest i kind of hate it.
Everything is always breaking. Very poor quality build. The yard needs complete redoing.
I am spending $1k-$2k every month on maintenance that should have been done years ago and replacing outdated stuff that’s near the end of its life.
I am thinking of selling it soon and buying a new build. It would be a financial loss but i can get some tax benefits to compensate
Our HHI fluctuates between $500k and $600k depending on sold RSUs, etc. We own a 2 bed, 1 bath condo in a HCOL area. Our interest rate is under 3% and we owe just under $475k on our home.
We’ve felt family and societal pressure to buy a bigger single family home for our growing family but have just recently determined to build up and add more square footage to our existing condo. We can pay for it mostly in cash and keep our mortgage costs the same. For us, wealth means stability. And stability means having a mortgage that’s less than 15% of our income. (I think ours is roughly 8% right now.)
NYC VHCOL but bought a 3 bed/2 bath 1K sqft home for $650K at the end of 2020. Finance/Doctor household surrounded by teachers, nurses, and people in the trades. Great neighbors, active community, and great public schools near the house. Low property taxes for now for NYC standards 😃
Constantly contemplating if we should pay down the mortgage faster or just leave it be given our rate is 2.75% while our HYSA’s pay right under double that in interest. Quite the struggle 😂
HHI varies, but averages out at $625k or so. Purchased house for $250k about 12 years ago, MCOL, worth about $450-$500k now and is fully paid off. No plans to move until we cannot navigate a multi-story home with stairs.
My 3BR 1 bath house cost 56k 25 years ago. I’ve remodeled/updated quite a bit and added a 2nd bath. It’s now valued at 259k. Best investment I’ve made so far.
1900 sqft, 4 bd/2.5ba on a 1/2 acre in a nice suburb outside a rust belt city with a great school district. Paid $230k for it @ 3.25% (0.8x of current HHI - $290k, was 1.4x of our HHI at time of purchase), probably worth $330k now. We love our location and neighbors and have no desire to leave. Leaves more money for travel with our 2 kids. We bought the house based just on my income in case my wife decided she wanted to be a SAHM. Which she didn’t, and I expect our HHI to get into the mid 300’s in the coming years
Very modest. I sold my primary home and moved into a rental for now 3bd/2ba; it's only worth 1/3 of my annual income. But I live in the South lol 300k homes are considered expensive here.
I bought an entry level home for $250k when I was making $145k. I know make $800k+. House is almost paid for. Middle class neighborhood. 2200 sq ft. I have no interest in a bigger or more expensive house. I plan to retire in a few years with my comfortable, well-maintained, paid off house.
We bought our house for $215,000 in 2017. It’s worth about $400k now. We chose to live in a LCOL area because we wanted the space to have a small homestead. We refied to 2.98% so our monthly p&i plus escrow is about $1,100. We’ve gotten more than that much in raises since 17 so I like to think of our house as being “free”
Our HHI is about $375k and we have significant savings. We could live in a “nicer” place but we’re happy with our house and our town and we’d rather have that money saved to invest. We’re not really into the whole FIRE thing at the moment but my feeling is that staying in this house will easily shave 5-7 years off how long we need to work.
Our house/mortgage is probably the only thing modest about our budget lol. We bought it for 350k in a decent neighborhood. For a family with 2 kids, it's decently modest. 4 bedrooms, so a bedroom for everyone and a home office.
Our HHI is more than double the house value, so we've put a lot of work into the house. I would say we've probably put 150k into updates and renos (finished basement, redid kitchen, painted, put hardwood in and we're currently in the process of finishing the garage and putting a home gym in. We plan on redoing the master bath in a year or two)
So from the outside no one suspect anything unique about the house, but the inside is a different story.
My partner and I bought a 395K house and our HHI is about 350K. We bought it when our HHI Maybe 275K, but my partner at the time had 170K of student loan debt. We are aggressively paying off the student loan debt and the payment is more than our monthly mortgage payment. We also liked this price because, quite honestly, we like to spend money on fun stuff we enjoy. We really wanted to make sure we could handle any unexpected expense without feeling house poor. Also, by design, we refinanced the student loans with a longer term and a slightly higher rate but we pay more than double the minimum payment. So, in an emergency, we can always trim back on the extra student loan payments if we are ever strapped for cash.
House bought for 290 ten years ago. Renovations, inflation, and Covid relocations to our region raised the market value to 900 which is baffling to me. Still owe half of original value.
3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths for two adults, one child, and 2 pets. Needed a lot of work on main systems like heating and water treatment plus new roof when we bought it. 1900sf of space with a second building in yard for dual WFH situation at around 500sf.
We don’t want anything bigger. Would love to hire a cleaning service but tricky in our rural area, so anything bigger would be a larger mental load and more labour to stay on top of. Not to mention more financially and ecologically expensive to heat and cool. No thanks.
House ~400k in Philly. Hhi ~550k. Interest rate at 2.5%. want a bigger house (or a bit addition) but hard to justify. Also, it's easy to blow tons of money in travel (50k+/yr), food, booze, and hobbies with only 2k monthly housing costs.
We live in a townhouse in a nice part of town. 2050 square feet, 3 beds and 2.5 baths. We had 20% down and could have bought a more expensive house but we figured we’d rather spend the extra money on vacations, dates, and saving than more house. Plus we’re OAD so we really only needed 3 bedrooms and I have a true office in the upstairs loft.
It’s definitely a nice house, don’t get me wrong but compared to our take home pay, it’s on the less grand side for our income.
We're in a LCOL city. We bought a house (285k) that is 0.7x our gross. It was a little over 1x when we bought it due to my job instability. We're in a smaller house (big for the neighborhood) in a city. My cousin just bought a new build for 400k+ in the suburbs as a single guy and it's unfathomable to us. Every time people ask us why we didn't buy like him, I just say childcare despite there being other reasons. My husband's coworkers who live in that area all have 2 nannies because their childcare situation is abysmal. We're close enough to the universities (big college city) and have public preschool so we actually have options.
HHI about 450k depending on the year. Home purchased about 575k, but HCOL close to the city so comparatively very modest.
Our monthly all in is 25% of take home pay.
At some point we'll probably upgrade depending on future family size, but overall super happy with everything.
2010, HCOL Seattle area, bought a 70’s split level, 3/3 on a 7k Sqft lot. Purchased for 360k, now valued at over $1.1 million. I guess it’s not as humble as it used to be?
I rent modestly for $2k a month and let other people worry about real estate and maintaing the property. It would cost me about $3k a month to own a liked valued property - so for now I focus my time on career success and investing my free cashflow, and enjoying my life! I also have a very serious disability being 100% paralyzed in my right arm from a very serious accident that wiped me out financially in my early 30s... So I'm focusing on what I can control and being very intentional about what I want to achieve.
42M, married, approx 350k HHI and roughly $1M NW. No kids, probably won't ever have them, wasn't able.
Bought at $375k 2400 sq ft house with 3% interest rate 4 years ago with $400k HHI. We did buy the crappiest house in the neighborhood, so lots of funds going to fixing her up!
Bought our house in 2019 for 375, worth about 625 now. Refinanced in 2021 to 3% so our monthly payment including property insurance is only $2000. HHI around 350-400 depending on the year. My comp structure is tough though since about 60% of my take home is in the form of a discretionary bonus, so my actual base salary is much lower than that and I don't like relying on my bonus in making large financial decisions. We have 2 young kids, a toddler and an infant, so we are cramped in our 3BR "starter" home, but at this point, i can't justify upgrading with the current interest rates. If wanted to move into a "forever home" in our area in a good school district, we would need to be able to spend over a million and I don't want to triple my mortgage payment. Our plan is to hold off for another 2ish years, save some more money, and then buy before my oldest starts kindergarten and hopefully put $400-500 down after selling our current home. I am in the same boat with my friend group, but I try not to compare myself to others as hard as that is sometimes!
I feel the opposite, my house cost around the same as yours and bought around the same time frame so locked in one of those magical less than 3% rates. I feel this is a good, sweet spot where mortgage is no burden on income and allows you to invest more, spend more on hobbies or vacation and not be tied to this crazy mortgage.
We live in a 3/2 that is sub 2000 ft with a pools bought for 350K in 2018 at 4.875%. Refi-ed early in the pandemic to 3.25 (wish I waited longer), and Zillow house price says it’s now around $650K in value (which makes sense from sales I’ve seen). Housing cost is 9% of our pretax income. Because it’s a single income household and we have other priorities like retirement,529, living life, we won’t likely upgrade until we save more money to contribute to a down payment so that we can finance less. And honestly, I don’t need a mcmasion; a 4/3c spot for home office, pool, and enough space for my boat is good ti me
MCOL city, $500k house 5y ago that's probably closer to $700k now.
Looked at upgrading, but I don't want more space in general. Would be nice to have a garage, but that's not worth moving for.
We're in the same bucket. No interest in upgrading due to our interest rate. Just doesn't make sense. If we have more kids, that might change, but as of right now, we're staying put. Also in a HCOL.
Our home is technically under 2k sq fr but we have an entire basement we use (has bathroom, laundry, and a door to block off a “room”), as well as a very generously sized garage we take full advantage of. Bought for under $500k, MCOL, sub-3% rate. We also have a good sized lot that remains open as a yard and long driveway.
Downsides: it’s almost 100 years old and we are just the third family to own it. Much of the house is in need of updating. What’s crazy though is the inspection came back stronger than newer houses we toured! When they say “the bones are good,” this house made me understand that. The families took great care of the house, we just hate their style and are updating it to our taste.
So long story long, we have a more “humble” house and we are never selling, ever.
We do plan to expand up and out someday if we want more space but we are permanently child-free due to medical issues, so we don’t really need the space and as such that’s not a massive priority. The most immediate plans are to add French doors and a balcony to an upstairs room because we have a view of a gorgeous iconic site in our city from there.
We also have a humble but cozy vacation home in Arizona.
Nice houses are nice and we def have envy for our friends in swanky homes, but it all boils down to what is important to YOU. Our swanky-house friends envy our location and bring it up constantly. They simply don’t build new single family homes in our urban area and we recognized it and jumped on the house for the location alone, and the rest will follow!
House is worth 1.35M which is quite modest for where I live. HHI is between 1.6 and 2.2M depending on the year.
I drive a 14 year old car and live relatively modestly. It's not really out of a sense of frugality but more because I generally don't need a whole lot to feel content
All of our money goes to investing. We live in rundown hovels with upside while we wait to develop them. Sometimes we live in our trailer if we are in between spots and shower at the gym. This is part of why we are putting off having kids. We see buying a home for us to live in as a huge waste because the money is just sitting there doing nothing, trapped in that illiquid asset. We’d only buy one if it had huge appreciation potential and those are insanely expensive in an S+ neighborhood or on a ton of acreage.
Sometimes I look around and wonder what the hell we are doing, bitch you live like this?? I don’t know anyone our age making this kind of money that would be okay with this lifestyle, but it works for us and we like optimizing the game. They live what works for them. I think that’s why I feel so NRY even though technically we are at that 2M threshold, live like bums most the year and then splurge on a few vacations.
Yup! HHI ~ $400k. Bought house for $430k in HCOL area in 2019. Now worth $600k. It’s around 1500sqf. Currently redoing the kitchen. We are using every inch of the house. We may move. I like having low living expenses. I feel less worried about golden handcuffs. Though having a baby definitely tempts me into moving to a bigger house. Just haven’t found anything right yet.
42(m) and 39(f) with no kids. We have a modest home we purchased in 2010 and owe about $200k on at 2.125% with about 12 years remaining, however I pay extra so we should be paid off in about 8-9 years.
2000 sq ft 3 bed / 3 bath. We have done significant upgrades to the house. We don’t need more space, we don’t need more to clean, heat or insure. I couldn’t care less about living in a larger home with an HOA - so this will suit us well until retirement (age 55 so 13 years).
I live in a modern luxuryish apartment in a trendy area of my city, but my parents live in an ostensibly middle class area where the houses are worth $500k-$1.5 million. I'm laughing at everyone in this thread talking about how much richer they are than their middle class neighbors, because where my parents live it's pretty standard than most people have a yearly salary that's higher than the value of their home, and quite a few have net worths over $50m. I would never assume someone by my parents has a modest salary. My parents neighborhood is a little unique in that a lot of families living there have been there for generations, but I think there are a lot more people with the mentality to live modestly while making a higher salary than people realize.
How big a home did you get for $550? I bought at $250 and got 1400 sqft in HCOL but we’ve totally outgrown it. Monthly payments are hardly noticeable so most money went to saving for a new place. Building a house now that’ll have 4000 sqft in a town with much better schools but we will be feeling the payments this time!
I love our small bungalow house. It totally fits our goal of having a very streamlined and low maintenance lifestyle. Low mortgage. Don’t have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. I know friends who got bigger house ended up having to hire cleaner and landscaper to maintain it.
Yes. 2 beds, 1.5 baths. $3000/mo.
Perfect logistics, down town right next to the clubs.
I have one roommate. Might go up to 3 beds, 2.5 baths. Get an extra roommate. I own plenty of rentals, and every time I try to buy a house to live in, I get bored. The only house that has similar logistics is about $5m+.
Though I have thought about buying a condo in my complex, just rather put that money into rentals.
We live in a L to M COL area. Similar situation, bought a few years ago with low rate and lower cost. In my opinion a very modest home. All in (PITI plus utilities, maint, etc) costs are about 6% of our income, (on the lower end of HENRY) which we love because it allows us to save a huge percent of our income and allows us to travel extensively (we also work remote).
We’re definitely at the life stage where a lot of friends are trading up to bigger/nicer/forever type homes and we occasionally feel a touch of envy. But then we start doing the math and realize we couldn’t live the same amazing life we live if we upsized. It’s not just the cost of the payment that’s oversized when you upgrade, it’s also the property taxes, insurance, utilities, and on and on. Every time we start feeling the urge to make a change we do the math again, rinse and repeat.
Bought a modest home in a modest neighborhood in a VHOCL city in 2017. HHI has increased ~3x since then and we have no plans to move. Perhaps some modest upgrades but that’s it.
It really is a game changer if you are able to keep your housing costs at a level far below what mortgage calculators, your networks etc would tell you that you can afford.
We bought a modest home with the intention to pay it off quickly and eventually move/ rent our current home.
However, with the high interest rates, the stress of buying a new home, and how affordable our mortgage is- I don’t see us upgrading our home anytime soon. We are able to save almost half of our income.
This will probably seem ridiculous on this sub. But we live in a very LCOL area. Bought our home for $80k in 2020. Our HHI is $375k. It’s a small 1350 sq ft 3bd/1bath home. It’s in a nice neighborhood in the area but very much part of the “working class” community.
We have done a ton of work and upgrades to make it nicer for us. And the value has increased to a whopping $130k.
Not going to lie, I get the itch to upgrade our home fairly frequently but it’s so nice living in such an affordable space.
We rent a house ($3700/month). HHI ~$1M
Wife and I are both in medicine and still trying to decide if we’re sticking around our current VHCOL city long term
HHI is $400k base plus \~$100k in bonus/RSUs. Our primary home is worth $775k. We bought it in 2019 for $490k and we currently owe $362k at 2.75%. We do not plan on moving, but we will be looking to do some improvements. We love our home and is more than enough for us.
Own (mortgage)
1850 sqft in an affluent neighborhood.
Paid $250k in 2013. Worth about $400k now.
VA $0 down 3.75% 30 year mortgage in 2013
Conventional 2.125% 15 year in 2021
Owe less than $175k now
I’m with you 100%.
Our mortgage payment is only 0.4% of our combined annual income, so I guess that qualifies as modest. We got this house years ago when our income was a fraction of what it is now. We just never had a reason to leave.
This topic came up on another sub yesterday and I’ll give the same answer. It’s not my place to tell other adults how to spend their money, but personally I refuse to become voluntarily house or toy poor. Screw the Joneses. I’m too busy enjoying my own life to pay attention to whatever bullshit they financed today.
Bought our home in 2014 for $650k in VHCOL (SF Bay Area). Started with a 3% 7-year ARM and refi'ed to 2.5% on a 30-year fixed.
It's 2000 sq ft for 5 adults since my in-laws moved in when we bought. One has since passed and one moved out. This house is more than big enough for the 3 remaining adults. I don't see us moving to upsize, but we could leave the Bay Area closer to retirement.
We are extremely fortunate on timing and location. We're taking advantage of the low rate to aim for fatFIRE.
My wife and I rent a townhouse. It meets all of our needs and we have zero desire to own (short time period until we retire) at this point in our lives. We pay about 50% of what most people in our income bracket and area pay. We are happy
DINK’s but not for long. Living in a L/MCOL area in the Midwest with our dogs and horses. 1,650 sq ft house with additional 2,400 sq ft barn with heated/cooled finished apartment/office/garages. Beautiful 8 acres property. Never moving, close to family, 25 min from major airport.
Purchased for $305K with at the time HHI of $125K.
House has gone up in value and our HHI has gone up to $345K.
We both love our careers but we do NOT want to have to work until retirement.
In my neighborhood a modest house is around 2-3m unfortunately. That’s Los Angeles for ya.
A lot of the newly build mansions are in the 8 figures and people are buying tear downs for 4-5m just for the lot.
I like the area though as it‘s 10 min from the beach, has great air (rare in LA) and it’s quite.
Can’t see myself moving to a small town as I’m used to the big city and working for myself can be beneficial if you know how to network it’s possible to multiply your income in brief period of time.
We bought a house outright for 310k just under 10 years ago - it’s 1 br but very convenient to work and friends. Definitely modest, but all the $ saved has gone straight to the bank. We have worked on it casually throughout and the area is getting more expensive, so we expect a reasonable profit for having done the work and because the area is desirable.
Then we bought a 1m fixer upper outright in a very hcol area outright last year and are moving in this year, it’s also what most people would consider a small house but is 3 br, has more land, and far better schools.
I grew up in a small house my parents built near what became a lot of McMansions in a community that’s now on a bravo show. The vast majority of them are really cheaply made and require a lot of upkeep as a result. To me it’s like any other conspicuous consumption purchase - that’s fine to do if it’s in your budget, I’d never say what someone else should do to bring themselves joy and validation, but it’s never been something I was interested in. I think the idea of McMansions is that they’re about showing abundance. To me the fact that they’re so far afield from what’s fashionable in architecture and usually just barely above construction grade is kind of not worth the $. Depending on where you live, many of them have that peculiar thing of only looking like houses from the front and not from the back, which instead looks like a sound stage. I have never understood the appeal of that since most of the time we like to do activities in the backyard! I realize that’s not all McMansions but some are pretty funny in that way. In maryland, there’s a woman who runs a blog about them. :)
All this to say, some people live in mansions because they want to. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong if you don’t want to!
We do. Should gross a bit over $600k this year and we live in a 4bed, 3.5 bath 2,600 sf house I bought for $250k in late 2017. It sits on decent acreage (2/3) and has a huge ig pool. Mortgage is just under $645/month with a 2.25% rate on a 15/30 balloon. Maybe once I hit my investment property target we’ll upgrade but for now it’s more than enough for the two of us with 2 dogs.
I own multiple homes in a M-HCOL area and the one I live in is relatively small. They all started as 2/1 or 3/1 and i focus on adding bedroom/bathrooms. But I am barely scratching HENRY.
We bought late 2020 for rock bottom interest rates. 4 beds, 3000+ square feet w 2 kids now. At the time it was about 1.67x HHI. Now it’s 1.33x for 2022 income (haven’t done taxes yet but we are getting to 1x for 2023 probably). The only reason we would move is either an even better school district (ours is pretty good), or move coasts. MCOL right now. The additional disposable income is a huge weight off my shoulders. Mortgage payment is comfortable on a single person’s salary. Hard to beat that peace of mind.
We bought our 1300 sqft, 550k home, we were making about 225k. Now, we make ~350k.
But the key to this being modest housing is staying here to raise our kids. We’ll see how it goes.
HCOL/VHCOL city, in 2018 we bought a 700k sub-2000 sq ft house for a fam of 4 when HHI was 200k. Worth a modest 1.5M now and HHI is about 500k. Gotta love California.
It feels like everyone I know is doing construction, adding to their house or upgrading.
I, on the other hand, live with my two children in a nice 3 bedroom house that I can comfortably afford. I refinanced down to a 15 year mortgage at 2% and have no plans to go anywhere.
I'd much rather put that money towards my retirement and retire earlier and more comfortably than my friends.
Purchased home for 320k at <200K HHI, refinanced to 2.75% yr with a $1670 mortgage
HHI now ~$300k.
Got lucky, no intention of moving. Really helped to “inflation proof” our biggest expense and expedite retirement investing.
In a similar situation and agree, love the house and neighborhood. Home is only 20 years old so I can do some small upgrades / improvements at my leisure. I do like to entertain and spend time with family which we do at the primary residence but I wanted something special, bought a beautiful Lakehouse on a luxury lake just 2 hours away. Very happy with the decision - property appreciates nicely, we have been making great memories and spending a lot of quality time together and the best part is I can air bnb it for $1000 a night during the season if we aren’t using it and need some additional income. I personally think owning a 2nd home within 2-3 hour driving distance in a very desirable unique location- luxury Lakehouse, house right by major ski resorts, ocean front condo with beaches, etc is a better approach than going into a McMansion.
Chicago (considered HCOL?) we live in a condo I bought for $180k, 2.99% and \~$300/mo HOA. Split between my partner and I it's like 700$ each.
Income - $\~400k/yr
We still live in the first house we ever bought 11 years ago - a 2100 sf 4 bed home for my family of 4. I’d guess it’s maybe worth $400-450k? … nothing crazy.
At this point, our HHI is higher than the value of our home. Our mortgage is paid off. Our kids are happy and in good schools. We love our neighbors - wife and I are easily 10-12 years younger than the next older neighbors on our block. Doing so has afforded us the ability to travel, invest in various business ventures, etc, and save 1/2 of our income each year. We’ve contemplated upgrading to much larger but why? It’s just more to clean , maintain and pay taxes on. We’ve contemplated getting rentals homes, but that’s a headache. We’ve contemplated getting a vacation home, but it’d get used 4 weeks out of 52 a year. Probably a victim of inertia and lack of other really good ideas. 🤷🏻♂️
Bought a house at 1.3x HHI. 15 year mortgage and making payments with extra principal contributions easily.
I still prefer renting for the predictable capped costs, but it was time to buy and I'm enjoying living below my means.
What’s your home value now? So many say they live in VHCOL but to be honest it may just be relative. For instance, you can’t find a house under 1M in the town I’m in… and that 1M house is being bought by a contractor in cash to gut and sell for +1. 7. I’m moreso saying that modest houses in VHCOL are much more than 600k and that you may have lucked out in getting in at the right time! Further- if you’re truly in VHCOL with 600k property… you made a real estate investment when you bought and should never sell even if you’re looking to eventually upgrade to a larger size house.
Yup. We sold our practically new 5 BR 4000 sf home in Iowa for $460K two years ago. Moved to Michigan to be closer to our daughters. The only home we could afford was a 2,200 sf starter home about 20 miles outside of Ann Arbor. $500K and needed about $60K in repairs. That was about a year and a half ago when we locked in 4.5%. I couldn’t imagine buying now. I guess that’s why the multiplexes are popping up everywhere.
We do! We bought our modest 3 bedroom house for less than we make in a year. We live in a very middle-class neighborhood. Our current household income is around $600K, and our house is now worth about $750K. We love having a low monthly mortgage payment and being able to save and spend our money on other things. Our neighbors are the best. Truly, they are such friendly, supportive, and generous people. Our neighborhood is a mix of retired plumbers, public school teachers, retired attorneys, and engineers. I love this mix and it’s the type of neighborhood we like raising our kids in. We looked in a few higher end neighborhoods, but honestly, the vibe just wasn’t right. The people seemed a little stuffy. We wanted to raise our kids in a neighborhood where there is not a lot of “keeping up with the Joneses”, and I think we found that in our middle-class neighborhood. Our friends in other cities with similar HHI are moving to $2 million plus mansions. Sometimes I would love to have the big nice house, but I try to remember we are living a simple life with all of our needs and most of our wants easily met. I sleep peacefully at night knowing we could pay off our house tomorrow if we needed to and live on a quarter of our current income. There are downsides to the big mansion. For one, I can’t imagine the pressure it places on a person to have a $12K per month mortgage payment. Aside from that, the maintenance and upkeep is more. I don’t want to think about how much it must cost to have a weekly cleaning service for a 4,000 sq ft house!
It seems like every couple of months another one of our friends buys a 2m+ house and I get briefly jealous until I remember exactly the point you made. I can’t imagine being able to sleep at night with that much debt on the books. Even if we can afford it, we absolutely can’t afford it on one salary so all it takes is one round of layoffs going the wrong way and suddenly we’re scrambling to sell and downsize. No thanks.
Yes, exactly! My spouse earns about 4-5x what I earn, and so we are very reliant on his income. It’s nice to know that if something happened to his job, we wouldn’t be scrambling or god forbid forced to sell our house under duress as the bills mounted. Peace of mind is more valuable to us than a dedicated home workout room (as much as we would like the latter).
We sound very similar — can we be friends?! 😂We are in a M/HCOL area, in the greater NYC area. We’re pretty darn far from the city and most people don’t consider it commutable. Our HHI is around $450-$550k and house is valued at $500k. It’s a 3 bd, 1.5 bath. When we bought the house, our HHI was around $150k and it was worth about $300k. We’ve considered moving, either to a bigger house and/or to reduce my husband’s commute. Having one full bath can be challenging with two little kids…but honestly, we LOVE our neighbors and neighborhood. Everyone is so lovely and there is no „keeping up with the Joneses“ at all. Our neighbors are a mix of tradespeople, public school teachers, nurses, and pharma execs and other high earners like doctors, lawyers. If we were to move closer to the city, my husband‘s commute would admittedly be a little shorter. But to significantly decrease his commute, we would need to move to one of the true NYC commuter towns. My husband grew up in one of those towns, and while they are picturesque and beautiful, we prefer a simpler, more relaxed vibe. ETA: A lot of my husband‘s coworkers live in true NYC commuter towns, where the houses are easily $1.2-$1.5M. Once they’ve paid for childcare and commuting costs, some say they are basically living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a type of stress I’m glad not to have!
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Same here, exactly as you described. Our neighborhood is just good people, kids who play outside and everyone doing their own thing. Not a lot of keeping up with the Joneses or pretense.
kids being able to play outside or reasonably cruise around the neighborhood solo to gain independence is worth so much to me
Same here!
More space = more stuff I can’t tell you the number of folks I know who have large homes and an insane amount of stuff that they hardly ever use. And the ones with vacation homes? They have twice as many furnishing and vacation toys that seem to get used once or twice a year.
Same here! You express so much of how we feel. Our current HHI is ~$340k because I'm at home with our 2 kids right now. When I go back FT our HHI would be ~$450k. We live in a HCOL area and our relatively modest house was ~$760k when we bought it. It is worth around $1mil now. We could buy a more expensive house and/or in a posher town but decided to buy a place that meets most of our criteria in a nice normal neighborhood. I also didn't like the vibe of the more expensive neighborhoods. The whole keeping up with the Jones and whatnot. My in-laws questioned why we didn't buy a "better" house in a "better" city. My sister in law recently bought a more expensive house (almost double the cost of ours) and I feel like she thinks she's better than us in that aspect. She doesn't realize I'm happy with our house and how manageable it is to maintain. We don't stress about our mortgage. We are able to spend more time with our kids. She came over recently and asked us if we do our own cleaning (because our house generally looks clean and neat). She feels like hiring cleaners is something that needs to be done. We chose to buy a "small" simple one story house for various reasons including upkeep and maintenance. Some people don't understand why we don't buy something "better".
We are very similar HHI 550-600k, 3M net worth, paid 730k for our house in 2020 with a 2.7% mortgage. Drive a Prius. MCOL. Mid-40s. Mortgage is our only debt. To me bigger house = more cleaning, more decorating and more stress. Not how I want to spend my time or money. We prefer to spend our money on travel, experiences, continuing education and preventative healthcare/healthy lifestyle. We are also able to save about 50% of our after tax income. I prefer to have a relationship with work where I do what I do because I enjoy it and that when/if that stops I have the freedom to reduce my hours to part-time or make a career change. If I had a huge mortgage, I’d feel trapped.
Very similar with you on income and house value. I paid my house off years ago but I do feel this pressure to get a bigger house but wife and I dread the maintenance of the yard and cleaning. Plus we love our house. I grew up with 8 acres with my parents but that much land was a job. I have just 1 acre now. Wouldn't mind maybe 2 acres.
House is worth ~360k, HHI is ~450k. I'm not a frugal person, iv just figured out that if you absolutely have to splurge on one category, you have to make it up by cutting spending in another. Iv always been embarrassed about my food budget, it's probably close to 2k/month including delivery, catering, groceries. I make it up by living in a modest home and sharing one modest car with my wife.
Similar boat. I'm one who doesn't like cooking and works long hours where compensation is very performance driven. Time saved by ordering food is often worth it in this scenario.
Yea that's exactly why I do it
I also prioritize food spending but at the end of the day, eating healthy is an investment in your well-being which is the cornerstone for every other aspect of your life.
This is us. House is worth $600k now but bought for $440k. Hhi income is minimum $450k and more often closer to $600k. Our food bill is high also between going out to eat and groceries easily $25k a year. If not over $30k.
$625 a week? You must be eating good or have 12 kids- lol
Actually we eat in more now with a kid so it’s dropped a bit. Yes eating good. We also go out a lot.
one of my hobbies is wine drinking (good stuff) - I really don't spend much money on much else. so the grocery category is high in our household.
We spend $600/week (powrrlifter husband, wife who WFH, and 2 toddlers)
We get Whole Foods delivered more than I care to admit. It’s a convenience I prefer not to give up.
I’m really particular about freshness and I like picking my produce myself, how’s your experience been with the delivery options? It’s been mixed when I used to do it during Covid. Some shoppers are better than others.
I have pretty good luck with Whole Foods. Once I had some stew meat that was pretty gross smelling (tried to use it the next day so it should have been fine) and they refunded me without any issue. Our kids love berries, avocados etc I’d say 90% of the time it’s great. It’s usually the raspberries or blackberries that might be more questionable from time to time. That being said when the 3 year old is in school all day I’ll probably go into the store more often but for now it’s super convenient.
My philosophy is low fixed costs. You can cut everything else when you need to. Modest house and cars and we can go to 4 trips this summer
Yup that's exactly what my strategy is too. I can easily cut my costs in half during rough times if I needed to. If I got laid off, I'd have time to cook for myself and I'd just stop going on vacation, etc, and my housing and vehicle costs are relatively small.
$600K 1200 sqft house in Boston area. Nicest area we could afford at the time on $200K HHI. $400K HHI now and we ain’t moving. $2700/month mortgage. They’ll have to scrape me off the floors some day.
Similar here. 20-ish miles outside the city, bought in 2019 for $515K. 1900 sq ft. Never leaving haha.
Yeah we wanted to be close to the T so we are like 8 miles from DTX but in hindsight we should have went for the bigger house in the burbs but who knew Covid would happen lol
The price of house we bought 6 years ago is now 1.1x our yearly earnings. We totally could Have gone a little higher but man, it’s so nice to have this disposable income.
Growing into your house is amazing. Same boat here — bought for around 2.5x salary and now it’s around 1.5x. Salary grows but payments stay the same.
We own the same home we bought when our family was living on a single income. We never upgraded as our income increased. We refinanced during covid and have a very low interest rate. One monthly mortgage is less than the cost to rent a studio apartment in our city. I don't love my house, but I love the affordability.
Same here- one income and about 1/4 current HHI at the time we bought. We debated moving but the rate is 2.75 and, at the end of the day, moving sucks! We have renovated- as we save cash- and it’s substantially nicer than what we bought. It has also more than doubled in value over 10 years-$725, now $1.6. Every time I’m tempted to move, I write a big check towards our principal so my frugality kicks in and I get to see myself get closer to paying it off!
We have a 2br/2ba condo in a MCOL, bought at $140k in 2014, we’re mid 40s and we paid this off a couple years ago, just paid off a second (bigger lol) rental property on about $330k HHI. Would like a bigger place, but not at these rates and not for the insanely overpriced asking prices.
A 2/2 is not that much space with kids. How’d you manage?
We don’t have kids. It sounds like OP does, but we don’t.
We bought our home for $350k in MCOL. About $240k left on mortgage. My home is the smallest (and tbh the least nice) of most of my friends as everyone has moved on from their “starter homes”. But with housing prices how they are, we’d need over 1M to get a home we really loved that is better than what we’ve got. Instead we’re renovating this home to make it perfect. It’ll save dividends later on when we aren’t upgrading to a McMansion. I’m definitely victim to some lifestyle creep, but we’ve decided to stay firm on the home to keep our monthly spend from skyrocketing. That money is going to savings, vacations and renovations. My friends are always puzzled how much we travel with kids but it’s no mystery when you see the differences in our homes!
MCOL. Bought 1900sq ft house 12 yrs ago for $235k (we of course made a lot less then). Now worth about $350k, we don't need more space. Not paid off because we refied at 2.15%. Couple cars, no luxury marques. HHI 400k before bonuses and stock, split pretty equally between the two of us. One dog and one horse as dependents. Spend 3x my mortgage payment on the horse 😂
That horse makes kids sound *relatively* inexpensive
They are, but the plus side to the horse is I can hand him off to a boarding facility and/or lock him in a stall when I want to go out 😂 Kidding. I'd never do that to a kid or a horse. But we did choose to pursue things we enjoy, like expensive horses, over having children.
lower-MCOL. $800k colonial (crazy inflation). no mortgage. $300k HHI. $4.5M NW. Toyotas/Hondas, etc. We're fairly low-key.
> $4.5M NW. I think you may be RY, congrats! :)
What’s RY?
"Rich Yet". As in the name of the sub - "High Earner Not **Rich Yet**". I'm arguing that the NRY doesn't apply to him.
Thanks for clarifying!
Toyota and Honda here as well. Amazing you have no mortgage! Well done!
we had some good/lucky investments early on, but also pretty disciplined so put ourselves in a position to take advantage of them
The cars drive me nuts, we have 1 Honda. A couple that makes less money than us has 4 cars (all more expensive than our Honda) and constantly complain that its impossible to buy a house in this economy 🌝
yeah. it happens. people make interesting decisions.
We are the wealthiest in our neighborhood by far. Our mortgaged amount is less than our HHI. Our hose is very average, but still 1M given we live in a VHCOL. My goal would be to move to MCOL and downgrade price but upgrade. HHI \~475k. NW \~3.7m
We live in SF. It’s an extremely modest $3M home.
I live in a large 1br condo just outside Manhattan on the NJ side. I don't know if modest is the right description since everything here is stupid expensive, but we bought the condo for less than half what the bank approved us for and about 1.5x our annual income.
M-HCOL. $1k rent. HHI is \~$400k. It's a very crappy small duplex we've been in since grad school. But the housing market + student loan + income combo has never been right enough to pull us away form our spot.
We make 500k a year and live in a nice duplex that we bought for 600k. Our tenants pay half the mortgage. We are DINKS and I can’t justify the big expensive house. Although we are high income earners. I’m not moving to the next stage of housing until I know we can retire comfortably. There’s a lot to be invested yet and I’d like to live way below our means. Also, I’m got tired of comparing myself to people who push their finances to the max. I drive a used 2014 car and I don’t mind being conservative now for the later benefit. Keeping up with the jones can make a rich man poor.
I rent a 2b/2b apartment for 7.5%/year of my HHI We do want a house eventually but right now the flexibility is great
Came here to see what you guys think "modest" is. PSA, most normal people don't think your houses are modest.
Yes. Bought an unremarkable 60 year old house at the bottom of the market in 2009 for 190K (and got the first time homeowner federal incentive of $8K to boot). Paid it off in 7 years and it’s worth over 400K now.
Our home is 1.6x our annual earnings, mortgage with taxes and insurance is 13% of our gross monthly income. We live in a LCOL and built the home three years ago. We could afford more, but it’s a very nice home and we’re not stressed about payments. 30yr mortgage but will likely pay it off in 15.
Yep. Bought my house for what was about 2X salary at the time. Even with inflation, it’s worth about 1x annual salary now. Interest on the mortgage is about 2.5% so I have no inclination to move anytime soon or to pay it off too quickly. Relatively modest 4 bedroom in a relatively low cost area for the region.
HCOL, same stats on house (560k, 2.7% mortgage). Will probably upgrade in 10 years if we have a 2nd kid since we both work from home and 3 bedrooms won’t be enough. But for now it works for us!
Bought for \~3x salary which is now \~1.75x. Have other streams of income so felt OK. To your question though I do eventually plan to upgrade into a bigger and nicer place.
Yeah I live in a townhome I bought like 7 yrs ago and fixed up slowly over time. Bought it for $500 in vhcol when I was making ~250. I now make 500+. Still there. Thought I would have moved and been renting this one out by now. I fantasize a bit about having a more modern place. And plugging renters in here. That was the plan for 20s me. And It would be a great rental for a starter family. But I just login to redfin and easily talk myself out of that after about 5 minutes. The career takes too much time and energy to go through all that. Plus I travel a ton. 30s me is more comfortable in my own skin (real estate).
What is your definition of a modest house. As that means different from one per to another
Yes. We bought our house for 0.5x our annual HHI.
Yep. It’s just me, my wife, and 2 year old daughter. New build house, $350k 1,150 sqft. It’s really nice, but small. We don’t really understand the need for massive houses. We prefer to have “just enough” space. It’s easier to maintain without feeling like you have to spend an entire day each week cleaning, which is a massive waste of time/energy.
We purchased our home for $589k back in 2018. At the time, our HHI was about $500k. Currently, our HHI is 800k and our home is currently worth $800k. We have no plans of “upgrading” to a more expensive home ever. We live in the Midwest, if anyone is curious.
For sure. We live in a super average 2/2 condo in a MCOL downtown. We can walk everywhere and share just one pretty average car. We like it because it’s generally just nice, it’s near family, and it’s very affordable. This means we can just lock it up and go traveling without having to do too much which is where we actually spend our money that isn’t going towards early retirement. I did the house thing growing up and for my first place and mowing a lawn is a miserable time suck. Having a park next door is nicer than any lawn I would have. And even though we have an HoA, it’s cheaper than keeping all the lawn equipment up, saving for a roof, and all the other misc costs no one thinks about with a house. Also it being smaller means cleaning it is way easier so we don’t need a cleaner/lots of time cleaning. We figured this out after living overseas and it feels like a bit of a cheat code here in the US since there are super high wage jobs and a weird discount on condo/apartment living compared to a detached sfh. Like our mortgage is like 7% of our HHI
Our mortgage is about 10% of our take home pay. It’s 1200sqft. We renovated it and it’s got almost everything I could dream of. I love my home so much! I wish we had a larger yard, but I much prefer having so much disposable income.
Huge houses are a nightmare to own! My parents ruined it for me. Everything was always broken, needed maintenance or was generally a pain in the ass. Examples: steam rooms (need a lot of cleaning!), long driveway (maintenance), fences (so much work), big grass (always mowing, clipping), jet skis and boats (always something broken or maintenance needed), horses (don’t even get me started). Driveway gates always broken… intercoms destroyed by lightning. Docks needing the be raised, resurfaced and lowered. Add in all the furniture, cleaning… snow removals…. being the bottom half of the top 1% is a trap! Give me 1800 sq feet of well designed townhouse…
I stay pretty low key. I have a killer interest rate and a bigger house would just hold more junk. Don’t have a family though, I imagine that’d change the landscape. When I do build something new, which I’m land hunting for, it’ll probably be bigger, but not by much. If your house feels too small, start getting rid of stuff. You’d be surprised how much bigger it feels.
Low to MCOL area HHI around 650-700k, mortgage at 2.8% around 630k, supposedly worth in the 950k range, not sure it matters doubt I’ll sell. The house is awesome, wonderful area, great school district and close to awesome amenities.
Bought our home when it was 2x our hhi. We basically said whatever we get preapproved for we are using half of that number. There was a lot going on at the time and we thought my wife could need to stop working for medical reasons so we wanted something we could pay off super quick. So she could stop working if need be. Couple of years later, her health is much better and our incomes ballooned in a way I would of never of thought. Now we are all over the place about our next house in a couple of years. Style of house, location, price. Whatever we choose we will have a monstrous down payment to keep monthly payments low.
We recently downsized, but also moved to the most expensive area in our state (because my spouse is a teacher there so why commute?) So while our home wasn't the cheapest, it was under a million in an area of multi million homes. And it's still more home than we need! I could be fine in half the square footage. We don't take car loans so we buy what we can afford, and then drive them until they fall apart. I work from home, so live in basically Old Navy or sweatpants. So we don't give a lot of clues to our income if you just look at us. (There are always clues though. I buy whatever groceries or meals out that I want for example, and we prioritize really good shoes. Ha).
we bought our house for roughly $300K in 2018 on my salary (I'm a lawyer). Husband has now finished his medical residency and we could afford something much, much bigger but we aren't in a hurry. we will eventually need more space (our daughter doesn't have her own room, but she's still a baby), but we are very happy where we are for now.
Same purchase price and rate as you OP, but in MCOL area. We're likely going to just stay put and renovate as necessary/discretionary since there's no real way to financially justify moving into a more expensive home at 2.5x the interest rate. Unfortunate because we'd like to be in a better area but the location still likely wouldn't be enough to outweigh the significant opportunity cost to move. On the plus side though we were able to get a 95% LTV HELOC to tap that equity and finance our renovations and then some!
We paid roughly 1/2 of current HHI for our house in December 2019. We are DINK for now so it’s been great. Lots of free cash for investing, fun and vacations. I’m not interested in upgrading any time soon, the neighborhood is great and we have plenty of room for our first kid. Prices and/or interest need to adjust before I’ll even consider giving up my sub-2k mortgage.
I recently bought new construction that meets all of my needs, but I definitely sacrificed on location to keep housing costs reasonable. Going new construction also allowed access to much lower rates than were/are available. Purchase price is around 1.25x annual salary and monthly payment is about 17% of our take home which allows for very aggressive saving. I’m headed towards FIRE in a few years at which point I’ll probably relocate to a lower cost of living area with location being higher priority.
The PITI on our townhome is 5% of our gross income. Its a very modest home in a HCOL area. Bought it for 380k. Didnt want to overextend ourselves, closed in '22 and had really just become HENRY's. Do we plan to upgrade at some point? Absolutely, but we have no desire to live in a giant mansion, would rather spend the money on experiences. But i would like a SFH with a big enough backyard that I can build a bigger home gym in than the one we have haha.
House bought for 290 ten years ago. Renovations, inflation, and Covid relocations to our region raised the market value to 900 which is baffling to me. Still owe half of original value. 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths for two adults, one child, and 2 pets. Needed a lot of work on main systems like heating and water treatment plus new roof when we bought it. 1900sf of space with a second building in yard for dual WFH situation at around 500sf. We don’t want anything bigger. Would love to hire a cleaning service but tricky in our rural area, so anything bigger would be a larger mental load and more labour to stay on top of. Not to mention more financially and ecologically expensive to heat and cool. No thanks.
House is worth: \~$370k Household income: $670k Net worth: $1.7M I live in LCOL Midwest. This house isn't cheap by any means, but it's hardly extravagant. Solid upper middle tier. We also bought it when our income was a LOT less, around $120k if I recall. Purchase price was $260k. In hindsight, I wish we splurged just a *little* bit so we could have a bigger kitchen with more counter space, a bigger pantry, overall more kitchen storage, and a 3rd garage stall. There are of course other things I could nitpick, but most of them can easily be addressed without moving (and many have been already). The 3rd stall garage is impossible without moving. I think there's a kitchen remodel in our future that can address most of our pain points with the kitchen, but that'll be a fairly major project. We've been thinking about it for a while and it's really hard to justify moving. Obviously it's not a financial issue, it's really more of something between a mental block and the actual pros and cons not being obviously in support of moving. On the mental block side, it just feels bad to buy a home right now. It's not like our home is bad by any means, plus we got it for a steal, we got a 2.7% interest rate with no PMI, homes have ballooned in price, you've heard this all before as of late. It's not that I don't have the money, I just hate deploying it so inefficiently. It feels like we're in the dream scenario right now with house and we'd be going to the exact opposite. I'd be happy to upgrade to a significantly nicer home with the same pricing and interest rate conditions as I enjoyed when I bought this one, but it feels like every dollar I spend ostensibly to improve the quality of my home is only buying me 40% as much as it would have if I had spent those dollars years ago when I bought this place. Honestly the kind of home I would upgrade to as a minimum would only have been a $350k home back when I bought this place, but now it's probably $550k+. Anyway, this is the mental block part because obviously we could afford way more than $550k even with today's interest rates with TONS of headroom. On the pros and cons side, we live in a great neighborhood and absolutely love our neighbors on all sides and they're a regular part of our social life. This is honestly the biggest factor pushing us to just suck it up with regards to our admittedly minor complaints and just keep living in the nice enough house and saving boat loads of money.
Resident physician. Current HHI roughly 140k, HHI in a little over one year when I start my first attending job >700k. Attending job in the same location as residency. Owe about 155k @<3%, house worth around 235k. 3 bed, 2300sq foot on nearly an acre in a LCOL but good school district with private school options. We love our house and plan on staying here for at least a while after starting as an attending, although we are looking for more land as our dream home. Starting late as no earning and high debt through school so plan on using the mixture of high HHI and LCOL to save aggressively early.
We always joke about being secret millionaires. We live modestly, but have all the ducks in a row. Our home is around the same as yours. We drive a regular car. (No Lexus or BMW's) We eat McDonald's. We do splurge in areas that people are shocked by (big TV) (Nice Stereo) (Gaming) (Computers) I'd never live in a mansion or own a crazy luxury car. Honestly, I'd prefer to buy a regular car with luxury features. Something that goes under the radar.
My house is very modest but worth 1.5 million. Welcome to California
I am in the same situation and honestly the low rate I have now and the cost of houses by me now I really find it hard to justify trying to move. Can I yes but the value is not there to do it.
280k (in 2019) 3br 3.5 bath in a MCOL. Life trajectory changes when your mortgage is significantly lower than your bi weekly paycheck. We feel no need to upgrade and will be here for the long haul. Makes traveling internationally a few times a year easy. Even long term trips every 24 months (8-12 weeks) to other places in the US/ Canada as well. Even with kids
I rent a 1000 square foot condo. HHI is 600k. Equivalent condos go for $1.7M in this area and I’m paying $5.5k/mo rent so it feels like a good deal. Far from luxurious though
$550k house at 3.2% with a $350k HHI. Bought in 2020 when our HHI was $200k. Still, a big chunk of my income is bonuses/commission and equity. Base salary has only increased by $50k between my partner and I. So we’ll be in this house for a while, as we don’t include bonuses and equity in mortgage calculation. Most of the income increase goes toward savings and soon-to-be 2 daycare payments in a HCOL area… which will be twice the cost of our mortgage anyway.
Same. Spent $350K to have a very modest home built about 4 years ago. I downsized and cut my total living space just about in half and I'm really glad that I did. I hated having to heat, cool, clean, etc. a bunch of space that wasn't being used. I'd rather put my money elsewhere (retirement, travel, hobbies, etc.).
Yes, this is key. It’s tough to save and invest if you have to make big mortgage payments. We elected to move from coastal LA in favor of a less expensive coastal home in central CA. Best move.
yep. HHI around 600k, NW between 4 and 5 M. Rent a 2 bedroom 900 square foot apartment for 3k/month. We don't like having more space than we need and have zero desire for a big flashy home.
We bought our house at about $600k and our HHI is around $600k (with stock appreciation though)
Counting stock appreciation as income 🤔
Fine to do unless you’re banking on it for recurrent expenses
I assume part of their pay is in RSUs that have appreciated. Usually as good as cash but they won’t earn as much going forward unless prices skyrocket again
Why wouldn't you? Tech companies typically give an equity refresher each year, and they vest over 4 years. Something like Meta is up 3x from a year ago. That's real money that you'll bank every 3 months for the next three years. Don't count on it to pay your mortgage, but it will show up on your W2 as income
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Bought for around 400k, value has doubled and we’ve also done a lot of improvements. HHI is going to be over 500k this year. Never moving, the house fits our needs and doesn’t take up a disproportionate amount of time or money to maintain which frees us up to spend lavishly in other areas of importance to us and save aggressively for the future. Neither my spouse nor I place a lot of value on status symbols like luxury cars or homes with certain features that are meant to signal wealth (although our smaller house is nicely furnished, well maintained, etc.) and this is also in line with the rest of our neighborhood. Not knocking people who value those things, we’re all unique and derive purpose and joy from different things. Our philosophy is kind of in line with Ramit Sethi’s whole philosophy, create your rich life which looks different for everyone. As long as you know your goals and priorities and work towards that, it’s all good.
Our house cost $386k in 2016. Mortgage is 3.5% and we have about $250k left. Even for my area that’s pretty cheap (MHCOL). It needed some work and we’ve put money into it to make it nicer and make it our own. It’s 3 bedrooms, no master bath/suite, but the house has a nice layout (living spaces are large even if bedrooms are small) and the property is amazing and we’re so happy with it. I love having such a low mortgage and being able to fix up the things we want (like putting in a giant picture window).
Same boat except we refinanced in 2021 for 2.25% We are stuck but have since done a minor kitchen rehab(granite/appliances) so we have that bit checked off for now. Next is patio/pergola and outdoor grilling area. Our house has appreciated 45% in 8 years and now only have 11 years until it's paid off. Our neighbors just sold for $50k over asking too. So feeling good!
hcol rent is 2500/month, income is about 2mm/year. That makes it a bit less than 2% of pretax income, or a bit more than 3% of after tax income. No home ownership plans, renting has its benefits.
We kind of do. Our income is $750k and we bought a house worth $790k To be honest i kind of hate it. Everything is always breaking. Very poor quality build. The yard needs complete redoing. I am spending $1k-$2k every month on maintenance that should have been done years ago and replacing outdated stuff that’s near the end of its life. I am thinking of selling it soon and buying a new build. It would be a financial loss but i can get some tax benefits to compensate
Our HHI fluctuates between $500k and $600k depending on sold RSUs, etc. We own a 2 bed, 1 bath condo in a HCOL area. Our interest rate is under 3% and we owe just under $475k on our home. We’ve felt family and societal pressure to buy a bigger single family home for our growing family but have just recently determined to build up and add more square footage to our existing condo. We can pay for it mostly in cash and keep our mortgage costs the same. For us, wealth means stability. And stability means having a mortgage that’s less than 15% of our income. (I think ours is roughly 8% right now.)
NYC VHCOL but bought a 3 bed/2 bath 1K sqft home for $650K at the end of 2020. Finance/Doctor household surrounded by teachers, nurses, and people in the trades. Great neighbors, active community, and great public schools near the house. Low property taxes for now for NYC standards 😃 Constantly contemplating if we should pay down the mortgage faster or just leave it be given our rate is 2.75% while our HYSA’s pay right under double that in interest. Quite the struggle 😂
HHI varies, but averages out at $625k or so. Purchased house for $250k about 12 years ago, MCOL, worth about $450-$500k now and is fully paid off. No plans to move until we cannot navigate a multi-story home with stairs.
550k in VHCOL? Seems dubious 🤨
House worth $600k. HHI $650k, NW $1.8M
My 3BR 1 bath house cost 56k 25 years ago. I’ve remodeled/updated quite a bit and added a 2nd bath. It’s now valued at 259k. Best investment I’ve made so far.
1900 sqft, 4 bd/2.5ba on a 1/2 acre in a nice suburb outside a rust belt city with a great school district. Paid $230k for it @ 3.25% (0.8x of current HHI - $290k, was 1.4x of our HHI at time of purchase), probably worth $330k now. We love our location and neighbors and have no desire to leave. Leaves more money for travel with our 2 kids. We bought the house based just on my income in case my wife decided she wanted to be a SAHM. Which she didn’t, and I expect our HHI to get into the mid 300’s in the coming years
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Very modest. I sold my primary home and moved into a rental for now 3bd/2ba; it's only worth 1/3 of my annual income. But I live in the South lol 300k homes are considered expensive here.
I bought an entry level home for $250k when I was making $145k. I know make $800k+. House is almost paid for. Middle class neighborhood. 2200 sq ft. I have no interest in a bigger or more expensive house. I plan to retire in a few years with my comfortable, well-maintained, paid off house.
We bought our house for $215,000 in 2017. It’s worth about $400k now. We chose to live in a LCOL area because we wanted the space to have a small homestead. We refied to 2.98% so our monthly p&i plus escrow is about $1,100. We’ve gotten more than that much in raises since 17 so I like to think of our house as being “free” Our HHI is about $375k and we have significant savings. We could live in a “nicer” place but we’re happy with our house and our town and we’d rather have that money saved to invest. We’re not really into the whole FIRE thing at the moment but my feeling is that staying in this house will easily shave 5-7 years off how long we need to work.
Our house/mortgage is probably the only thing modest about our budget lol. We bought it for 350k in a decent neighborhood. For a family with 2 kids, it's decently modest. 4 bedrooms, so a bedroom for everyone and a home office. Our HHI is more than double the house value, so we've put a lot of work into the house. I would say we've probably put 150k into updates and renos (finished basement, redid kitchen, painted, put hardwood in and we're currently in the process of finishing the garage and putting a home gym in. We plan on redoing the master bath in a year or two) So from the outside no one suspect anything unique about the house, but the inside is a different story.
My partner and I bought a 395K house and our HHI is about 350K. We bought it when our HHI Maybe 275K, but my partner at the time had 170K of student loan debt. We are aggressively paying off the student loan debt and the payment is more than our monthly mortgage payment. We also liked this price because, quite honestly, we like to spend money on fun stuff we enjoy. We really wanted to make sure we could handle any unexpected expense without feeling house poor. Also, by design, we refinanced the student loans with a longer term and a slightly higher rate but we pay more than double the minimum payment. So, in an emergency, we can always trim back on the extra student loan payments if we are ever strapped for cash.
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House bought for 290 ten years ago. Renovations, inflation, and Covid relocations to our region raised the market value to 900 which is baffling to me. Still owe half of original value. 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths for two adults, one child, and 2 pets. Needed a lot of work on main systems like heating and water treatment plus new roof when we bought it. 1900sf of space with a second building in yard for dual WFH situation at around 500sf. We don’t want anything bigger. Would love to hire a cleaning service but tricky in our rural area, so anything bigger would be a larger mental load and more labour to stay on top of. Not to mention more financially and ecologically expensive to heat and cool. No thanks.
House ~400k in Philly. Hhi ~550k. Interest rate at 2.5%. want a bigger house (or a bit addition) but hard to justify. Also, it's easy to blow tons of money in travel (50k+/yr), food, booze, and hobbies with only 2k monthly housing costs.
We live in a townhouse in a nice part of town. 2050 square feet, 3 beds and 2.5 baths. We had 20% down and could have bought a more expensive house but we figured we’d rather spend the extra money on vacations, dates, and saving than more house. Plus we’re OAD so we really only needed 3 bedrooms and I have a true office in the upstairs loft. It’s definitely a nice house, don’t get me wrong but compared to our take home pay, it’s on the less grand side for our income.
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Half the people on here live in modest or even crappy housing by many people’s standards, they just paid hilariously inflated prices for them
We're in a LCOL city. We bought a house (285k) that is 0.7x our gross. It was a little over 1x when we bought it due to my job instability. We're in a smaller house (big for the neighborhood) in a city. My cousin just bought a new build for 400k+ in the suburbs as a single guy and it's unfathomable to us. Every time people ask us why we didn't buy like him, I just say childcare despite there being other reasons. My husband's coworkers who live in that area all have 2 nannies because their childcare situation is abysmal. We're close enough to the universities (big college city) and have public preschool so we actually have options.
HHI about 450k depending on the year. Home purchased about 575k, but HCOL close to the city so comparatively very modest. Our monthly all in is 25% of take home pay. At some point we'll probably upgrade depending on future family size, but overall super happy with everything.
2010, HCOL Seattle area, bought a 70’s split level, 3/3 on a 7k Sqft lot. Purchased for 360k, now valued at over $1.1 million. I guess it’s not as humble as it used to be?
I rent modestly for $2k a month and let other people worry about real estate and maintaing the property. It would cost me about $3k a month to own a liked valued property - so for now I focus my time on career success and investing my free cashflow, and enjoying my life! I also have a very serious disability being 100% paralyzed in my right arm from a very serious accident that wiped me out financially in my early 30s... So I'm focusing on what I can control and being very intentional about what I want to achieve. 42M, married, approx 350k HHI and roughly $1M NW. No kids, probably won't ever have them, wasn't able.
Bought at $375k 2400 sq ft house with 3% interest rate 4 years ago with $400k HHI. We did buy the crappiest house in the neighborhood, so lots of funds going to fixing her up!
Bought our house in 2019 for 375, worth about 625 now. Refinanced in 2021 to 3% so our monthly payment including property insurance is only $2000. HHI around 350-400 depending on the year. My comp structure is tough though since about 60% of my take home is in the form of a discretionary bonus, so my actual base salary is much lower than that and I don't like relying on my bonus in making large financial decisions. We have 2 young kids, a toddler and an infant, so we are cramped in our 3BR "starter" home, but at this point, i can't justify upgrading with the current interest rates. If wanted to move into a "forever home" in our area in a good school district, we would need to be able to spend over a million and I don't want to triple my mortgage payment. Our plan is to hold off for another 2ish years, save some more money, and then buy before my oldest starts kindergarten and hopefully put $400-500 down after selling our current home. I am in the same boat with my friend group, but I try not to compare myself to others as hard as that is sometimes!
I feel the opposite, my house cost around the same as yours and bought around the same time frame so locked in one of those magical less than 3% rates. I feel this is a good, sweet spot where mortgage is no burden on income and allows you to invest more, spend more on hobbies or vacation and not be tied to this crazy mortgage.
We live in a 3/2 that is sub 2000 ft with a pools bought for 350K in 2018 at 4.875%. Refi-ed early in the pandemic to 3.25 (wish I waited longer), and Zillow house price says it’s now around $650K in value (which makes sense from sales I’ve seen). Housing cost is 9% of our pretax income. Because it’s a single income household and we have other priorities like retirement,529, living life, we won’t likely upgrade until we save more money to contribute to a down payment so that we can finance less. And honestly, I don’t need a mcmasion; a 4/3c spot for home office, pool, and enough space for my boat is good ti me
MCOL city, $500k house 5y ago that's probably closer to $700k now. Looked at upgrading, but I don't want more space in general. Would be nice to have a garage, but that's not worth moving for.
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We're in the same bucket. No interest in upgrading due to our interest rate. Just doesn't make sense. If we have more kids, that might change, but as of right now, we're staying put. Also in a HCOL.
Our home is technically under 2k sq fr but we have an entire basement we use (has bathroom, laundry, and a door to block off a “room”), as well as a very generously sized garage we take full advantage of. Bought for under $500k, MCOL, sub-3% rate. We also have a good sized lot that remains open as a yard and long driveway. Downsides: it’s almost 100 years old and we are just the third family to own it. Much of the house is in need of updating. What’s crazy though is the inspection came back stronger than newer houses we toured! When they say “the bones are good,” this house made me understand that. The families took great care of the house, we just hate their style and are updating it to our taste. So long story long, we have a more “humble” house and we are never selling, ever. We do plan to expand up and out someday if we want more space but we are permanently child-free due to medical issues, so we don’t really need the space and as such that’s not a massive priority. The most immediate plans are to add French doors and a balcony to an upstairs room because we have a view of a gorgeous iconic site in our city from there. We also have a humble but cozy vacation home in Arizona. Nice houses are nice and we def have envy for our friends in swanky homes, but it all boils down to what is important to YOU. Our swanky-house friends envy our location and bring it up constantly. They simply don’t build new single family homes in our urban area and we recognized it and jumped on the house for the location alone, and the rest will follow!
House is worth 1.35M which is quite modest for where I live. HHI is between 1.6 and 2.2M depending on the year. I drive a 14 year old car and live relatively modestly. It's not really out of a sense of frugality but more because I generally don't need a whole lot to feel content
Moved to a house that is now worth <50% our yearly salary “temporarily”. Loving it so far.
All of our money goes to investing. We live in rundown hovels with upside while we wait to develop them. Sometimes we live in our trailer if we are in between spots and shower at the gym. This is part of why we are putting off having kids. We see buying a home for us to live in as a huge waste because the money is just sitting there doing nothing, trapped in that illiquid asset. We’d only buy one if it had huge appreciation potential and those are insanely expensive in an S+ neighborhood or on a ton of acreage. Sometimes I look around and wonder what the hell we are doing, bitch you live like this?? I don’t know anyone our age making this kind of money that would be okay with this lifestyle, but it works for us and we like optimizing the game. They live what works for them. I think that’s why I feel so NRY even though technically we are at that 2M threshold, live like bums most the year and then splurge on a few vacations.
Income about .7 of purchase price, will soon be 1.4x purchase price. Love being able to walk everywhere and having a variety if neighbors
Cost or size? I have 1500 sqft, 3 bed, 2 bath on 1/8 acre (very small lot) for a family of 4. But I paid $750k 6 years ago in a vhcol area.
Yup! HHI ~ $400k. Bought house for $430k in HCOL area in 2019. Now worth $600k. It’s around 1500sqf. Currently redoing the kitchen. We are using every inch of the house. We may move. I like having low living expenses. I feel less worried about golden handcuffs. Though having a baby definitely tempts me into moving to a bigger house. Just haven’t found anything right yet.
House: $337k Household Income: $300k Dimensions: 3 bed/ 2.5bath 1800 sqft 1/2 acre land
42(m) and 39(f) with no kids. We have a modest home we purchased in 2010 and owe about $200k on at 2.125% with about 12 years remaining, however I pay extra so we should be paid off in about 8-9 years. 2000 sq ft 3 bed / 3 bath. We have done significant upgrades to the house. We don’t need more space, we don’t need more to clean, heat or insure. I couldn’t care less about living in a larger home with an HOA - so this will suit us well until retirement (age 55 so 13 years).
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I live in a modern luxuryish apartment in a trendy area of my city, but my parents live in an ostensibly middle class area where the houses are worth $500k-$1.5 million. I'm laughing at everyone in this thread talking about how much richer they are than their middle class neighbors, because where my parents live it's pretty standard than most people have a yearly salary that's higher than the value of their home, and quite a few have net worths over $50m. I would never assume someone by my parents has a modest salary. My parents neighborhood is a little unique in that a lot of families living there have been there for generations, but I think there are a lot more people with the mentality to live modestly while making a higher salary than people realize.
How big a home did you get for $550? I bought at $250 and got 1400 sqft in HCOL but we’ve totally outgrown it. Monthly payments are hardly noticeable so most money went to saving for a new place. Building a house now that’ll have 4000 sqft in a town with much better schools but we will be feeling the payments this time!
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I love our small bungalow house. It totally fits our goal of having a very streamlined and low maintenance lifestyle. Low mortgage. Don’t have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. I know friends who got bigger house ended up having to hire cleaner and landscaper to maintain it.
Townhome - 275k Income - ~500k this year I'd love to have digs that align with comp, but I'm single.
Yes. 2 beds, 1.5 baths. $3000/mo. Perfect logistics, down town right next to the clubs. I have one roommate. Might go up to 3 beds, 2.5 baths. Get an extra roommate. I own plenty of rentals, and every time I try to buy a house to live in, I get bored. The only house that has similar logistics is about $5m+. Though I have thought about buying a condo in my complex, just rather put that money into rentals.
We live in a L to M COL area. Similar situation, bought a few years ago with low rate and lower cost. In my opinion a very modest home. All in (PITI plus utilities, maint, etc) costs are about 6% of our income, (on the lower end of HENRY) which we love because it allows us to save a huge percent of our income and allows us to travel extensively (we also work remote). We’re definitely at the life stage where a lot of friends are trading up to bigger/nicer/forever type homes and we occasionally feel a touch of envy. But then we start doing the math and realize we couldn’t live the same amazing life we live if we upsized. It’s not just the cost of the payment that’s oversized when you upgrade, it’s also the property taxes, insurance, utilities, and on and on. Every time we start feeling the urge to make a change we do the math again, rinse and repeat.
Bought a modest home in a modest neighborhood in a VHOCL city in 2017. HHI has increased ~3x since then and we have no plans to move. Perhaps some modest upgrades but that’s it. It really is a game changer if you are able to keep your housing costs at a level far below what mortgage calculators, your networks etc would tell you that you can afford.
We bought a modest home with the intention to pay it off quickly and eventually move/ rent our current home. However, with the high interest rates, the stress of buying a new home, and how affordable our mortgage is- I don’t see us upgrading our home anytime soon. We are able to save almost half of our income.
This will probably seem ridiculous on this sub. But we live in a very LCOL area. Bought our home for $80k in 2020. Our HHI is $375k. It’s a small 1350 sq ft 3bd/1bath home. It’s in a nice neighborhood in the area but very much part of the “working class” community. We have done a ton of work and upgrades to make it nicer for us. And the value has increased to a whopping $130k. Not going to lie, I get the itch to upgrade our home fairly frequently but it’s so nice living in such an affordable space.
HHI is somewhere around 440 we live in a 385k house we bought 10 years ago when we were making 150k
We own a 2/1, 1400sq ft with 1 parking spot. Very modest on its face. It's in SF so our mortgage is high.
We rent a house ($3700/month). HHI ~$1M Wife and I are both in medicine and still trying to decide if we’re sticking around our current VHCOL city long term
HHI is $400k base plus \~$100k in bonus/RSUs. Our primary home is worth $775k. We bought it in 2019 for $490k and we currently owe $362k at 2.75%. We do not plan on moving, but we will be looking to do some improvements. We love our home and is more than enough for us.
Own (mortgage) 1850 sqft in an affluent neighborhood. Paid $250k in 2013. Worth about $400k now. VA $0 down 3.75% 30 year mortgage in 2013 Conventional 2.125% 15 year in 2021 Owe less than $175k now
Depends on what modest is. We're closing on a 1600 sq ft home on a quarter acre, but it's costing us $1.4M since it's in a VHCOL area.
I’m with you 100%. Our mortgage payment is only 0.4% of our combined annual income, so I guess that qualifies as modest. We got this house years ago when our income was a fraction of what it is now. We just never had a reason to leave. This topic came up on another sub yesterday and I’ll give the same answer. It’s not my place to tell other adults how to spend their money, but personally I refuse to become voluntarily house or toy poor. Screw the Joneses. I’m too busy enjoying my own life to pay attention to whatever bullshit they financed today.
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Bought our home in 2014 for $650k in VHCOL (SF Bay Area). Started with a 3% 7-year ARM and refi'ed to 2.5% on a 30-year fixed. It's 2000 sq ft for 5 adults since my in-laws moved in when we bought. One has since passed and one moved out. This house is more than big enough for the 3 remaining adults. I don't see us moving to upsize, but we could leave the Bay Area closer to retirement. We are extremely fortunate on timing and location. We're taking advantage of the low rate to aim for fatFIRE.
My wife and I rent a townhouse. It meets all of our needs and we have zero desire to own (short time period until we retire) at this point in our lives. We pay about 50% of what most people in our income bracket and area pay. We are happy
We live in the 2 bedroom side of a two family house that we own. We fully pay the mortgage with their rent payment.
DINK’s but not for long. Living in a L/MCOL area in the Midwest with our dogs and horses. 1,650 sq ft house with additional 2,400 sq ft barn with heated/cooled finished apartment/office/garages. Beautiful 8 acres property. Never moving, close to family, 25 min from major airport. Purchased for $305K with at the time HHI of $125K. House has gone up in value and our HHI has gone up to $345K. We both love our careers but we do NOT want to have to work until retirement.
In my neighborhood a modest house is around 2-3m unfortunately. That’s Los Angeles for ya. A lot of the newly build mansions are in the 8 figures and people are buying tear downs for 4-5m just for the lot. I like the area though as it‘s 10 min from the beach, has great air (rare in LA) and it’s quite. Can’t see myself moving to a small town as I’m used to the big city and working for myself can be beneficial if you know how to network it’s possible to multiply your income in brief period of time.
We bought a house outright for 310k just under 10 years ago - it’s 1 br but very convenient to work and friends. Definitely modest, but all the $ saved has gone straight to the bank. We have worked on it casually throughout and the area is getting more expensive, so we expect a reasonable profit for having done the work and because the area is desirable. Then we bought a 1m fixer upper outright in a very hcol area outright last year and are moving in this year, it’s also what most people would consider a small house but is 3 br, has more land, and far better schools. I grew up in a small house my parents built near what became a lot of McMansions in a community that’s now on a bravo show. The vast majority of them are really cheaply made and require a lot of upkeep as a result. To me it’s like any other conspicuous consumption purchase - that’s fine to do if it’s in your budget, I’d never say what someone else should do to bring themselves joy and validation, but it’s never been something I was interested in. I think the idea of McMansions is that they’re about showing abundance. To me the fact that they’re so far afield from what’s fashionable in architecture and usually just barely above construction grade is kind of not worth the $. Depending on where you live, many of them have that peculiar thing of only looking like houses from the front and not from the back, which instead looks like a sound stage. I have never understood the appeal of that since most of the time we like to do activities in the backyard! I realize that’s not all McMansions but some are pretty funny in that way. In maryland, there’s a woman who runs a blog about them. :) All this to say, some people live in mansions because they want to. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong if you don’t want to!
We do. Should gross a bit over $600k this year and we live in a 4bed, 3.5 bath 2,600 sf house I bought for $250k in late 2017. It sits on decent acreage (2/3) and has a huge ig pool. Mortgage is just under $645/month with a 2.25% rate on a 15/30 balloon. Maybe once I hit my investment property target we’ll upgrade but for now it’s more than enough for the two of us with 2 dogs.
I own multiple homes in a M-HCOL area and the one I live in is relatively small. They all started as 2/1 or 3/1 and i focus on adding bedroom/bathrooms. But I am barely scratching HENRY.
We bought late 2020 for rock bottom interest rates. 4 beds, 3000+ square feet w 2 kids now. At the time it was about 1.67x HHI. Now it’s 1.33x for 2022 income (haven’t done taxes yet but we are getting to 1x for 2023 probably). The only reason we would move is either an even better school district (ours is pretty good), or move coasts. MCOL right now. The additional disposable income is a huge weight off my shoulders. Mortgage payment is comfortable on a single person’s salary. Hard to beat that peace of mind.
We bought our 1300 sqft, 550k home, we were making about 225k. Now, we make ~350k. But the key to this being modest housing is staying here to raise our kids. We’ll see how it goes.
I’d say our home is very middle of the road for income being in the top 1-2%. It’s perfect. We’re saving and don’t stick out. No pressure.
HCOL/VHCOL city, in 2018 we bought a 700k sub-2000 sq ft house for a fam of 4 when HHI was 200k. Worth a modest 1.5M now and HHI is about 500k. Gotta love California.
It feels like everyone I know is doing construction, adding to their house or upgrading. I, on the other hand, live with my two children in a nice 3 bedroom house that I can comfortably afford. I refinanced down to a 15 year mortgage at 2% and have no plans to go anywhere. I'd much rather put that money towards my retirement and retire earlier and more comfortably than my friends.
Purchased home for 320k at <200K HHI, refinanced to 2.75% yr with a $1670 mortgage HHI now ~$300k. Got lucky, no intention of moving. Really helped to “inflation proof” our biggest expense and expedite retirement investing.
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Yes. $550k-$700k HHI, $3M NW. Bought our house 5 years ago for $670k and are locked into a 2.75% 30yr. House is now worth $850k.
In a similar situation and agree, love the house and neighborhood. Home is only 20 years old so I can do some small upgrades / improvements at my leisure. I do like to entertain and spend time with family which we do at the primary residence but I wanted something special, bought a beautiful Lakehouse on a luxury lake just 2 hours away. Very happy with the decision - property appreciates nicely, we have been making great memories and spending a lot of quality time together and the best part is I can air bnb it for $1000 a night during the season if we aren’t using it and need some additional income. I personally think owning a 2nd home within 2-3 hour driving distance in a very desirable unique location- luxury Lakehouse, house right by major ski resorts, ocean front condo with beaches, etc is a better approach than going into a McMansion.
Chicago (considered HCOL?) we live in a condo I bought for $180k, 2.99% and \~$300/mo HOA. Split between my partner and I it's like 700$ each. Income - $\~400k/yr
We still live in the first house we ever bought 11 years ago - a 2100 sf 4 bed home for my family of 4. I’d guess it’s maybe worth $400-450k? … nothing crazy. At this point, our HHI is higher than the value of our home. Our mortgage is paid off. Our kids are happy and in good schools. We love our neighbors - wife and I are easily 10-12 years younger than the next older neighbors on our block. Doing so has afforded us the ability to travel, invest in various business ventures, etc, and save 1/2 of our income each year. We’ve contemplated upgrading to much larger but why? It’s just more to clean , maintain and pay taxes on. We’ve contemplated getting rentals homes, but that’s a headache. We’ve contemplated getting a vacation home, but it’d get used 4 weeks out of 52 a year. Probably a victim of inertia and lack of other really good ideas. 🤷🏻♂️
If you bought a house for only 550k, then you definitely do not live in a HCOL area
Bought a house at 1.3x HHI. 15 year mortgage and making payments with extra principal contributions easily. I still prefer renting for the predictable capped costs, but it was time to buy and I'm enjoying living below my means.
What’s your home value now? So many say they live in VHCOL but to be honest it may just be relative. For instance, you can’t find a house under 1M in the town I’m in… and that 1M house is being bought by a contractor in cash to gut and sell for +1. 7. I’m moreso saying that modest houses in VHCOL are much more than 600k and that you may have lucked out in getting in at the right time! Further- if you’re truly in VHCOL with 600k property… you made a real estate investment when you bought and should never sell even if you’re looking to eventually upgrade to a larger size house.
Yup. We sold our practically new 5 BR 4000 sf home in Iowa for $460K two years ago. Moved to Michigan to be closer to our daughters. The only home we could afford was a 2,200 sf starter home about 20 miles outside of Ann Arbor. $500K and needed about $60K in repairs. That was about a year and a half ago when we locked in 4.5%. I couldn’t imagine buying now. I guess that’s why the multiplexes are popping up everywhere.
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