Comment by darth_avocado

From a livestyle perspective renting sometimes makes sense. Financially almost never does. There are of course edge cases like very expensive urban areas where there’s no possibility to buy because there are no units on the market and commuting is not possible. But if you work remotely, or suburbs are nearby then owning a place is likely a much better choice than renting particularly if you take advantage of subsidies like state/federal assistance for first time buyers and tax abatements in opportunity zones.

1. Are you under rent control?

2. What is your income and what is your rent?

While I appreciate the anecdotal data point, it’s easy to conflate personal situations to “this is what everyone else can do”. I say this because for a good 5 years I lived with my spouse in a $2k single bedroom apartment in San Francisco that was under rent control when both of us were raking in tech money. It’s doable, but not something that you can extend to everyone in the country.

The abstract math can work out well but the practical reality is that every landlord exists on the slightly-shitty-to-living-slime end of the human continuum. Even if your municipality has "strong" renter protections it is so draining and stressful dealing with them and their weird invasive bullshit and petty malfeasance for decade after decade.

There’s no limits per se. 43% is what they “prefer”. More recently with the low demand for mortgages, that number is more flexible. And all of this is on Gross Income and not net. So you could in theory be spending more than 50% of your net income on mortgage alone. If you want to consider “housing” costs, the number would be lot higher.

I bought a year ago and my max lending amounts were around 45-50% of my gross salary.