What Percentage of your take home pay goes to your mortgage?

[peyjax]

How much of your take home pay goes to your home including escrow or PITI? If you rent just include rent and insurance!

Incomes can fluctuate depending on where you live so thought it would be interesting to see where people stand percentage wise.

Are you comfortable there? Would you be more comfortable moving up or would like to go down?

Would love to hear comments!

 

[girli565]

We're comfortable at 28% right now but would probably still be comfortable at 30-35%. We're renting right now so I'm sure our mortgage will be a little bit more than our rent when we finally do buy a house.

 

[mrudman]

We're right around 24% right now.. but there's factors you didn't account for that are going to change people answers also.

We have our taxes rolled into our mortgage, which a lot of people I know don't... we also have a lot of things taken out of our paycheck, which causes our take-home to be lower than it could be (deferred comp, medical reimbursement acct, medical insurance, even my dinners at work are taken out of it).

We're comfortable where it is right now, but of course, it would always be nice to get it a few percentage points lower too, lol... thinking of refinancing, but hasn't hit the point where it would be worth it quite yet.

 

[mrodgers]

22% and we live in a matchbox. Tells a bit about income. We couldn't go lower, I don't think I could find a house smaller and cheaper than mine. Couldn't upgrade houses either as we would probably have to go more than 100% more to buy another house.

This question also needs to address when the house was purchased. Had my mother not paid her house off with a life insurance payment, she would still be paying on it and the mortgage would be about 28 years old now, quite low of a payment on something that was purchased 28 years ago compared to what would be paid today if she sold it.

 

[ICF]

Tough call to just give a blanket answer on.

My take home pay includes a large amount coming out for insurance, 401K, flex spending accounts and the like. A poll that asks what it is of your GROSS income, would be an easier one to answer.

My mortage payment based on our recent refi -- including escrow for taxes - is about $1000. However, we actually send in $1400 (most months) in an effort to pay it offer sooner than the 20 years we had on the refi.

 

[Fjobe]

We are in the 15% or below category. Yes, I feel comfortable with it, but I would not feel comfortable going up. We have a daycare bill that is higher than our mortgage, so I like to keep the mortgage expense down.

 

[Minnesota!]

Mine is at 15.9%. Will be less when my raise kicks in in 6 weeks

And like a pp - mortgage is one of our lowest bills. Daycare/tuition accounts for 38% of our income!!! That will change, thankfully, come September! It will "only" be 25% then!

 

[scrapquitler]

How much of your take home pay goes to your home including escrow or PITI? If you rent just include rent and insurance!

Incomes can fluctuate depending on where you live so thought it would be interesting to see where people stand percentage wise.

Are you comfortable there? Would you be more comfortable moving up or would like to go down?

Would love to hear comments!

Our home costs us approx. 15% of take home pay, including PITI. We bought a home that was significantly less expensive than we qualified for. We planned it that way on purpose so that we wouldn't have to be stressed about money.

 

[neatokimmo]

Take home pay is hard to calculate. The house we just bought together is 14%, mortgage, taxes & insurance together on our gross. I wouldn't change a thing about the size, location etc. It was an auction house and we are fixing it up.

 

[MSLRAC]

We are at 8% of DH's pay at the moment. We would feel comfortable going up to about 15% of his pay for the right place (acreage, house, location) but that is about our limit. We got caught up in the booming housing market a few years ago and were upside down with 50% going towards our mortgage and once we saw daylight, we decided that we will NEVER go there again.

 

[Gumbo4x4]

Right at 15% of takehome (assuming no OT for me, wife is on fixed salary), a bit more if you figure in insurance & taxes (we do not escrow). Love our home & have no plans to move up or down. We pay less on our mortgage than we do on health insurance though

 

[Colleen27]

When we had a mortgage it ranged from 20-40% of our income and no, that wasn't comfortable with the way our income fluctuated. It was comfortable in good years and scary in bad, even though we bought well below what we were approved for.

We've since unloaded that house because when the housing market imploded we stumbled into a better home for us at a price that we were able to come up with in cash. So our housing costs now are just taxes and insurance which come to <5% of our gross income. We have no intention of moving again at all until the kids are gone, but we're considering buying the home next door which will mean more taxes and a total housing expense of right around 10%.

 

[Ginny Favers]

We're at 18% but we bought a house that we could grow into. I wouldn't go any higher since we have a $21k/yr child care bill.

 

[Sarah_Rose]

We're at 21% of take home, based on pay checks. But my husband makes anywhere from $50-70K more a year, based on bonuses. Still, we only felt comfortable spending about half of what we were pre-approved for because we're so paranoid about losing income (like if the bonuses were suddenly cut off, we don't want to have to rely on them) or having our home's value dropping a lot.

 

[DeltaDiamond001]

Because our house is paid for, we're at the <5% mark.

We qualified for homes with values three times as much as ours, but decided to spend less up front and pay it off quicker.

As a matter of fact, we had already purchased the land and paid some construction fees for one of those more expensive homes, only days before 9/11. Thank goodness we were able to get our money back on all of it (we were building the new home with a family friend's building company.)

Needless to say, we waited over a year to purchase this house.

 

[hugApug]

Factoring in only my take home pay, we're at about 30%. It seems high, I suppose, but if we were to rent the same condo unit - we'd pay anywhere from $500-$600 more per month.

 

[kmeads]

We sit around 18% of our net pay. But, we get paid every two weeks so every 6 months we get 3 paychecks in the month. If I average the paychecks out, though, then we are around 15%. I know lots of folks who are way above that and in nicer homes but I do not envy them for one second.

Good poll, btw. Always nice to know where you sit in relation to other people.

 

[marmalade]

We are currently a one income family and ours varies per the time of the year. We are anywhere between 15-26%. My DH is a roofer and we live just outside of Buffalo, NY so there isn't much work in the winter months. It is comfortable for us, especially knowing that I will be returning to work FT soon since my kids are getting older.

 

[kydisneyfans]

We are around 15% of our take home, including property tax and insurance.
We could go higher, but why?

This is on base salary only, OT, bonus, or contract money are not included. We also each put 20% in our 401K.

We could pay off the house, but are locked in around 4% interest. We have earned no less than a 10% return on our stock market portfolio each of the past 3 years, so I would rather invest the money instead of paying it off. We also get a decent tax deduction by keeping the mortgage.

 

[Mickeyluver37]

Just closed TODAY and we are at 32%. I'd like that number to be smaller, but our income should continue to go up and hopefully one day these kids will stop costing so much. This is house is big enough for our family, and I imagine in 20 years or so we'll be downsizing anyway.