Deborah Acosta

speaker

109 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2021 last heard Jun 2021

Deborah Acosta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Before Upping Your Bid for a Home, Ask Yourself These Questions First · 18 May 2021 podcast

And you're going to be in a situation where you might be in a bidding war.

Thank you for having me, JR.

Sure.

So a general rule of thumb is to spend only between a quarter and a third of your monthly gross income on your mortgage payment.

So if you're looking at, let's say you make $100,000 a year, you should be spending around $2,340 a month on your mortgage.

And it could be a little bit more, a little bit less, depending on what your financial goals are, including spending, paying off debts and saving for retirement, for example.

Sure.

I mean, when I say a quarter and a third, I'm not including maintenance, taxes, and insurance, which are going to be built in.

So if you're incorporating all of that, then it's really between 35% and 45% of your monthly gross income is what you should spend on your mortgage, which is quite a bit actually.

And nowadays, mortgage brokers might give you up to 50% in a loan.

So you might be able to qualify for...

for a little bit more than that.

And really, it depends on what your financial goals are, whether or not you should accept it.

You would probably feel pretty stretched if you did go all the way and spent 50% of your monthly gross income on your mortgage.

So really, it's up to you.

You can go for it, but you will feel pretty tight when it comes to everything else that you might want to spend on.

So one thing that you really want to make sure of right now in this hot market that we're in is that the house that you're buying is really one that you want to spend quite a few years in.

Let's say you buy a house now and for whatever reason in two years the price goes a little bit lower than what you paid and it happens to coincide with a moment where you want to sell, then you're losing quite a bit of money on your investment.

However, if you stay in that house for the next 10 years or the next seven years even, then you have a lot more cushion there.

And even if the market does dip, you won't be in a situation where you're potentially selling in a soft market.

Showing 61–80 of 109 · page 4 of 6