Posted on 02/20/2014 8:52:58 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Online mortgage company HSH.com recently estimated the salaries needed to afford a house in 25 metropolitan areas across the United States. Because, the cost of real estate varies across cities and regions you need to be making about four times as much money in San Diego as in Cincinnati to afford a house.
The map illustrates these differences. The wider the circle over a city, the more you need to make to afford a house there:
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE MAP AND TABLE
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
What happens is people in that situation get a lot of benefits because of their near low-income status. They can pay their bills.
The problem is with maintenance. If a plumbing, electrical, any kind of home repair comes up, you've got to have cash reserves or let things slide. But for right now, it's a solution. The house isn't abandoned and the family has a place to live.
That’s because two-fiddy cash money will get you a house in Detroit. If you can collect aluminum cans from the side of the road, you too, can own your own house, but neither the gun nor ammunition to protect it.
The key to the math working on these is buried in the details. To get to these salary levels for financing, you’re expected to put 20% down. At these salary levels, who can afford to save the 20% down and live a somewhat normal life? Well, thank goodness there’s MyRA! LOL!
editor-surveyor wrote:
“The truly curious thing is why anyone would want to buy any asset that will be subject to the coming 10% annual Federal asset confiscation taxthat the IMF has set as a requirement for all national governments to employ.”
Now THAT story I want to see more details on!
Have you got a link?
It will make it even harder for people to buy a house....
Wow! Nobody wants to walk away from even $4,000. But by the time the realty and finance people take their cut, there would’ve been nothing left anyway.
Bought my house in Boston in 2003. Paid 329k. Sold my house in 2013 for 655k. It was on the market for 3 days. Moved to the burbs, bought a 4000 SQF house on 3 acres adjacent to a 600 acre nature preserve. Paid $703k. Massachusetts is expensive, but I’ve been here all my life. Don’t plan on moving again.
They are ignoring property tax and heating/cooling costs. A comparable house in the NY area may cost half as much as a house in the San Francisco area however the property taxes and heating/cooling will be double. The total cost of ownership in both areas is about the same, and therefore so is the net income requirement.
Don't lump Pittsburgh together w/ Detroit, the two have nothing in common.
Why do I need 25 houses?
I don’t even LIKE cities.
Well, they’ve both been run by corrupt politicians and tax eating union thugs for generations. It is just that the Pittsburgh version is way more circumspect in its level of greed and corruption.
That's true to an extent, but there's more to it than that.
People here didn't give up on the place, even when things got bad, and beleive me, things got very bad, we built our way back and now we're better off than we were before.
I've worked in Detroit and Pittsburgh is nothing like that.
2 hrs each way? Bah. Takes me only 45 min on a typical day to drive to SOMA, pay my $15 for parking and walk a block to work.
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