back when I was taught about mortgage rules it was 28% of your income including your mortgage payment.
Funny you mentioned that. It is the way it used to be. Back in the early 2000’s my wife was a real estate agent. She came home one day and said the mortgage rules had been changed and they upped the number to 50%.
I said to her, “they are going to drain the apartment complexes and rental units and pump up the buyer pool. They are going to creat a bubble in house prices.”
As we learned, it was not really a house price bubble, but a credit bubble. And I was not quite smart enough to take advantage of it the way I should have, which would have been to buy as much as possible as soon as possible. Instead, I became a renter.
The good news is that when we left Seattle for Kentucky, in 2011, our rent had never gone up. We were paying $1,600 a month for a house valued at $525k with a several hundred dollar per month real estate tax bill alone.
Frankly, that was my first clue that the economy was being falsely pumped.
I am sure it was a huge relief to get out of Seattle, the “progressive DC” and get to Kentucky where there may still be a little truth around. Although they do not have nearly enough conservative Catholics.