Home Buying (Part 1) - How Much Can I Afford

I just went through my first home buying experince. It was an overwhelming experience. I am going to capture my experience and learning in couple of posts. My first post in this seriese is process to figure out how much I can efford. How much base price and montly installment I can efford. Also how much down payment I can efford.


(Before you decide "how much you can effod" you want to decide whether it is wroth buying or renting. I will talk about this in some other post).

Here are the tools that has helped me a great deal deciding how much I can efford.

This calculator from bankrate.com (http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc/newhouse/calculator.asp) helps you calculate how much base price of the house you can efford. It does require you to estimate home owners insurance and property taxes, on top of all the earnings and expenses.

Here are couple of articles I used on zillow.com that got me started on home buying process.
http://www.zillow.com/wikipages/Getting-Ready-to-Buy

Starting with renting vs buying which is better, home values and credit scores which helps you decide your budget and readyness to purchase a house.

Looking at these sites and doing calculations, now that I have figured out how much I can efford, I am ready for next step. --> Home Hunting