re: The Medium income Amercan Family now earns 1/2 the income needed to buy the avg home.

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Maybe not where you want to be. 10K a month would allow a 4K payment.

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Except they wouldn't take home anything close to $10K/month. After taxes and insurance, that's probably more like $7500/month.

Maybe it's just me, but using over half of your monthly disposable income on a mortgage payment is not a very smart idea.

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Maybe not where you want to be. 10K a month would allow a 4K payment. At 6% you can buy a 840K home. That's a REAL nice home in a rural area. Again, sacrifices.

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This tells me all I need to know about your math skills.

You think someone making $10k/mo after tax can afford a $840k home right now?

Tell me you suck at math without telling me

Hint - at current 30 year rates which sit about 6.65% on average, assuming you can put down a massive $168k down payment (20% of $840k), your mortgage alone would be about $4.3k/mo. This is BEFORE property tax, insurance, or anything else related to the house. That's easily 50% probably of their income

That’s fair enough, I was just going on absolute median

60k doesn’t change the fact that a median income prohibits homeownership. There is not enough take home pay to purchase a $250k house, which is very much a starter home in this market

Without any assistance from parents I think a household would need to currently be top 5% earner worldwide to realistically afford a house + save money today in a major US city.

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Sounds to me like you can't have what you want

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And once again you couldnt be more wrong. Our household income last year would put us well into the top 10% nationally. We both make six figures of income. We can absolutely afford nice things like a 3rd fun vehicle, going out to eat often, some nice trips and still have the ability to save/invest 25-30% of our income no issue year over year.

It just doesnt take an intelligent person to recognize the fact home affordability in general has gone to absolute sh*t the last few years and its all due to housing prices going insane along with higher interest rates. Again, $300k house at 2-3% rates in 2020-2021 going for 50% more than that just last year at 7% rates. All from many years of us not building ENOUGH decent housing to boot. New stuff is almost always "luxury" nowadays and has been for far too long. Lots of dumb zoning issues everywhere, etc...I've seen countless of our friends have their mortgages double or more than double simply moving to a slight step up in house in the past few years. Can you imagine your housing costs doubling overnight? Oh on top of that you have to pay for things like child care as well?

That's great if you love to live the rural life and spend hours in your vehicle every day, this is not a quality of life many are going to choose to live (or will be forced into living so you get some sort of weird satisfaction out of a couple who makes $150k/yr suddenly moves in next to you and said they were "forced" into doing that because living somewhere else in civilization was not really affordable to them).

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If they want it bad enough, they'll sacrifice.

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It's easy for us with higher incomes to sacrifice some in areas. For the median or 60-70% decent income in metro areas though its basically completely unaffordable all of sudden to buy any type of decent housing and those are the people that suffer the most and sucks for them. I dont think you're going to suddenly see 5 million metro atlantans park it in Breman GA to afford housing, either.

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Hint - at current 30 year rates which sit about 6.65% on average, assuming you can put down a massive $168k down payment (20% of $840k), your mortgage alone would be about $4.3k/mo. This is BEFORE property tax, insurance, or anything else related to the house. That's easily 50% probably of their income

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I was talking principal and interest, since there is no way of knowing the locality of anyone else. My numbers were spot on. I'll match my math skills with you anyday.

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all it will do is cause less and less home ownership as generations move along.

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Tell it to GenZ .... just stating actual facts.

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Except they wouldn't take home anything close to $10K/month.

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If you've ever bought a house, you know that the mortgage company looks at gross income.

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Maybe it's just me, but using over half of your monthly disposable income on a mortgage payment is not a very smart idea.

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Not saying it's a good idea, I'm saying it is possible if you make sacrifices.

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I was talking principal and interest,

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Ok, so on what planet do you think paying 43% of your after tax pay on your mortgage NOT including taxes/insurance is a good or sound idea?

Hint - any financial guru out there would laugh at that ratio, by the way, especially without any other housing costs oyu have to pay on top of the mortgage. That's a "you're very house poor" ratio there

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home affordability in general has gone to absolute sh*t the last few years and its all due to housing prices going insane along with higher interest rates. Again, $300k house at 2-3% rates in 2020-2021 going for 50% more than that just last year at 7% rates.

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Right. So your concern would be for folks who just landed jobs in the past three to four years? Because obviously owners in the market prior to 2022 are riding that wave.