Re: How do people afford it here?
Posted by:
Johnny Fairfax
()
Date: December 01, 2015 11:30AM
Late 90s/Early 2000s Housing Lottery Winners. Those of us who bought in mid to late 2000s are just jealous:
1) Bought 475K house in 2000, paid off mortgage in 10 years, traded up to 1.75M house during the mini boom in 2014. Dropped an extra 500K into it and now have a 500K mortgage. On track to pay it off in 20 years, in time for retirement.
Paying off your house is very feasible - just requires discipline. A 30 yr, 4% fixed rate loan for $417K, paid off using bi-weekly payments and $500 extra per month is done in 18 years.
Oh, and college educations are paid for with 5 years to go
2) wife and I moved up here from Florida in 2000. huge sticker shock when selling a three year old house in florida for 100K, and buying a 20 year old fixer-upper in REeston for $250K.
thank god we bought the house cheap. in ten years we doubled our money on it and sold it. Now live in Vienna and bought cheap at $780K, homes on the street are now selling for close to a million. so we hare now house rich.
Wife and I combined income 180K.
driving one 8 year old car, one two year old car. Both domestics. nothing extravagant. Both owned outright
Just got done paying for braces for the kid.
have 40K banked in savings... 529 for the kid is near 100K
no CC debt....
it can done. I'm not eating caviar and drinking champagne every day. but i;m not going hungry either...
3) $240k HHI here, sold our home in Springfield for 3x what we paid for it, after all closing costs, we were left with $350k. We moved up to a $850k home, used our old homes equity, put down an additional $150k out of savings, and took on a $350k mortgage. We could have paid all cash for our home, though our investments make more than what we pay in interest on our mortgage. Looking back on it, I would should have put down even less, but at least now we have a pretty small monthly payment.
So how to afford a nice home? Income helps, your investments help a lot, if you had money in the stock market over the past 5 years you have likely done very well. Having bought our first home over 15 years ago helps, but our other investments have far out performed the 3x increase we made on our Springfield home.