re: Question about using fiancée's income when buying a home

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How many people do you know could save $30,000+ in one year off $100k gross paying $1100 just in rent? You would have to have almost zero living expenses after paying utilities, gas for car, groceries, and be making only small contributions to retirement. And all that assumes no loans of any kind.

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I mean it's not insane. You're paying $1100 a month in rent so let's say utilities run about $500 a month so now you're looking at basically $20K of your $100K gone for living expenses (we're assuming $100K is takehome pay in this example not pretax).

Throw in $100 a week, hell let's make it $200 a week just to be conservative for groceries, and that deducts $10K a year so now you're left with $70K of the original $100K. Cell phone and gas probably hits you $500 a month (no idea yal's commuting/driving lifestyle) so that deducts $6K leaving you with $64K.

If you're trying to save $30K a year you now have $34K of available money for "living". This is almost $3K a month. That's basically $600-700 a week on movies, restaurants, trips, whatever.

It's a lot easier to save than people think. It sucks to get in the habit of it and be disciplined, but it's more than doable.

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Why would I waste my time buying a house that I would need to upgrade when I have two kids if I could buy a house that would handle that from the get go? And it's not like I want to spend a fortune on my house, I just want to make sure I qualify for the best rates. DTI makes an impact on that.

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How do you know you'll be in BR forever? Do you have some job/career that's central solely to BR? Tons of people move these days, you never know where you'll be.

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I'm very handy as is my dad, not really concerned about this at all. Not much you can't fix with a good set of tools and a youtube video.

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So get a small fixer-upper in a decent neighborhood. You live with your parents so you could buy it, continue to live with them and fix it up for 6 months. If you didn't want to do that you could move in right away and fix it up as you go.

Your wife won't have a huge house to clean as a new graduate. It will likely increase more in value with the improvements than some bigger house out in the pop-up suburbs (just my opinion), and then you can upgrade when you need to.

Best of luck with your choices. Like someone said, most on this board, including myself, are beyond conservative when it comes to finances. Nothing you're saying is wrong, just different schools of thought is all !

I will say, yal need to make a realistic budget and see that even with a $1.1K rent yal could still absolutely save $20-30K a year if you're responsible. If you have student loans, you can absolutely pay a huge chunk of them with the 2 salaries.