[sonick]

Originally Posted by westopher

200kish is like 12-13k post tax per month. With a million dollar mortgage you’d be paying about 5k before property taxes and home insurance. So after home costs being left with like 7k for all the other stuff life comes with, is ok, but it’s certainly not going to be living the dink life you could be living otherwise. Especially if you add in a big commute, and want to save fairly aggressively, because let’s be real, we are going to need at least 2 million for retirement if we want to live well from 60 on. The numbers don’t look that sweet, and let’s be honest, as much as everyone from RS likes to act like they make 6 figures and only bang models, over 200k is a very good income, and not the norm in the lower mainland. It still is indicative of people way over extending for housing here.
There is a point where it’s just not worth either owning a house, or living somewhere that you need to work an, I’m assuming, high stress job and have to choose between owning a home, in fucking Surrey no less, or enjoying yourself.

Yup this is exactly our thought process when we decided the recent uptick in housing prices has pushed it out of our reach to be comfortable with.

Living responsibly with a rule of thumb of 50% take-home pay for living expenses means mortgage would only about 30%.

That said, we own a 3-bed 2-bath condo that is the size of some SFH that we've seen, so it's not the shithole that GS8 makes all apartments make it out to be (at least for me, maybe for him it still is a shithole lol).

I was pointing out that perception that any living besides SFH is 'for the poors' despite having what would be considered a very comfortable income. When you really crunch the numbers, unfortunately that income does not go very far (or rather, it goes too far when you have to buy in North Delta and still be over-leveraged).