When determining how much you should spend on a mortgage payment, there are several factors you have to consider first.
You first need to determine what your take home pay is. Lenders look at your gross income, but after Uncle Sam takes his cut, you can only pay your bills with what is left over, so the first step is to determine what your net monthly income is.
With your net monthly income being the starting point, you then need to subtract out all of the monthly costs you currently have (and will continue to have) and all of the new expenses you will be likely to have once you own a home. Once you have estimated all of the monthly expenses you would have, then you can see how much money is leftover to be used for a mortgage payment.
The best case scenario is that before you take out a mortgage, you overestimate your expenses and find that you’re still able to pay all of your bills, fully fund your retirement account, pay the mortgage and still have some cash left at the end of each month.
We like to use a very basic budget spreadsheet with our clients to help them see the math before making any final decisions on the mortgage amount they are considering.
As you can see, based on this mock budget, the home buyer has estimated that if they had a $2500/month mortgage payment and they were fairly accurate with the other monthly expenses, they would still be able to save each month and have a few dollars to spare. If you have questions about setting a budget or other mortgage related questions, feel free to contact us anytime.
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