Survey claims you need a salary of $66,167.27 to own a home in NYC

brookly homes — If you made $67,000/year, you’d be home by now. via Flickr user unfauxhemian

You might have become briefly hopeful the other day when we informed you that Bushwick, Crown Heights and Sunset Park were “affordable,” in the sense that you didn’t have to sell your kidneys to afford a place there. Of course, we did point out that you’d need sixty or seventy thousand dollars to pony up for a down payment, but something we hadn’t considered is that you’d need to make that per year if you wanted to own a home here. But, according to mortgage research website HSH, it takes a yearly salary of $66,167.27 to cover your stupid mortgage and its stupid interest payments. Whatever, the exciting renter’s life is much more fun than the boring stability of home ownership anyway.

HSH studied the median home price of homes in 25 different cities, and from there, determined how much it would cost you per year to keep up with your house payments. What’s really great (by which we mean horrible) about that $66,167.27 per year figure, which is the minimum to cover a $1,543.90 per month mortgage, is that it doesn’t even cover things like property taxes and insurance and whatever else you’d need to afford a home. HSH also recommends you buy when prices and mortgage rates are low, which, fucking duh.

Fortunately, New York isn’t the most expensive city on the list. After New York comes Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. But who would want to live in any of those places? Anyway, as always, our advice in this situation is to marry a rich person or get hit by a rich person’s car. The good news is that there are plenty of those around here, but the odds are probably more in your favor to get hit by a rich person’s car.

3 Comments

kelly jackson Feb 18, 2014

great article. just goes to show how expensive property is these days. your mortgage payments maybe high or low (if you are lucky) dependent on where you live but keeping up the payments is a whole new ball game.

Feb 18, 2014 at 5:02 pm

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g1mmedaloot Feb 18, 2014

insurance and property taxes are generally included when talking mortgage prices….so i would assume they are included in the 1500 dollar number.
PITI = principal, interest, taxes, insurance.

Feb 18, 2014 at 10:16 pm

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zeke Feb 20, 2014

This is based off a median house price of $386,300, I suspect you’ll be hard pressed to find too much in that bracket in actual reality.

Feb 20, 2014 at 12:15 pm

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