re: Salary of $115,627 needed in order to qualify for a mortgage on a typical American home

My wife is going to be a surgeon. You can't really be on call and live 30-45 minutes away from the hospital. And like someone else has said, because of the city market, the outlying areas further out are being flooded as well. I just searched Realtor.com for house in Maryville for under 200K. There are only eight listed, with five of the eight already pending or contingent, and the other remaining looking like this:



I mean, does any of this click with you? The market is so competitive, if a decent option even comes up, it's bought within hours by some investor or goes into a bidding war amongst the plethora of people desperately trying to get into a home. Even my boomer father who has a nice house, same one we grew up in, in a much more affordable area in the southeast, called me recently after looking at the market and said he doesn't know how anyone is making it nowadays.