So… 1.5?
1.3874 is the exact right number for everyone.
Family of three (although little guy is still little so his food bill isn’t that high yet) here.
We probably spend $100/week on groceries and $300/mo at Costco for essentially groceries as well, maybe a bit more so call it $800-900/month.
I’d say $1500/month seems high but not staggeringly high for a full family of 4.
1 Like
Family of 2. We spend $130 a week on enough food to 4-5 nights of meals. Eat out the other days. Sometimes that stretched to $150 if we need household items.
Family of three (two adults, one 10 year old daughter) -
We spend around $1000/mo which includes most household stuff as well. We rarely use any prepackaged foods so it’s mostly fruit, vegetables, and dead animals. I think it’s a lot, but food isn’t something I"m willing to compromise on to save a few bucks.
I live alone and rarely buy take-out or even frozen, prepared meals. I probably spend $75-$100/wk in total on food.
2 people. ~$1050 per month total on groceries + eating out/ordering in + alcohol (liquor store, bars, etc.).
Last 6 months was almost identical to the 6 months prior to that. Not sure what if anything that says about inflation impact.
I think this is where these go:
This isn’t one of those “I’m a candle reviewer and my wife refurbishes black and white TVs; our budget is $3.4 million” situations. This is an early 30s person with decent savings and a reasonable budget:
It was the fall of 2021 — rents were climbing, and mortgage rates were near a historic low. Ms. DiMarco, who had been putting aside funds since college, knew she had enough tucked away to make a 25 percent down payment on a home costing up to $650,000.
And the places she looked at seemed kind of reasonable:
Open-Plan Co-op in the Village
The building’s policy on sublets was generous: Owners needed to live there for only one year before they could rent out their units.
The asking price was $489,000
But then things went off the rails:
But it was also a land-lease address, meaning the building didn’t own the land it stood on, which introduced some uncertainty into the deal.
with monthly fees of about $2,700
Imagine buying a $500k unit without ownership of the land, and facing $2,700 in monthly fees on top of it. Yikes
1 Like
Land-lease is one of those weird things that mainly applies to New York and maybe a few other cities. It usually happens when the coop is built on land owned by a church with like a 50-year lease. The real fun is what happens when the lease runs out and needs to be renegotiated. There are lots of horror stories.
1 Like
I would love to read detailed narratives of all of these horror stories. NYC real estate is fascinating to me, but I’d be terrified to actually be a buyer.
Here’s a building that pegged their land-lease payments to CPI in 2010. Wonder how that worked out the past few years?
https://streeteasy.com/talk/discussion/12115-building-at-150-east-61st-street-land-lease-bldg
I know a few two-professional NYC families where their approach was to rent in NYC for as little as possible in their 30s (which is still pretty expensive) and try to save enough to buy a house upstate in their 40s. If the cash flows work out (which is tight) it creates a nice long term plan of having a residence with home equity to retire to and it’s easy to just terminate your rental arrangement when you’re ready. In my experience long term NYC residents like the idea of retiring somewhere other than NYC even if they really love NYC. At some point I think the noise and pace and stuff just wears you down.
Haha, yes, every now and then I see Carnegie House pop up in an ad or a search. Basically if a price looks too good to be true it’s either one of these land-leases or HDFC.
You may know this already, but even in normal conditions it is standard for co-ops to maintain underlying balloon mortgage leveraging 70-80% of the buildings worth.
Wife and I bought a house this year on July 1st.
We’re trying to think about this year’s taxes. If our only deductible items are Mortgage Interest for 6 months and maybe $2k in charity giving, what are the chances we’d get under the Standard Deduction?
Close to 100%. Only thing I can think of is if you bought points on your mortgage.
1 Like
Consider state taxes as well though. In at least two states I’ve lived you just copy your federal itemized deductions as your state deduction, and the state standard deduction is super low. So your options may be the ~$20k standard federal deduction and like $2k state standard deduction or itemize and get $10k or whatever for both. Gotta find the breakeven point for your particular situation but if your state taxes suck it can make sense to itemize even if you’re well below the standard deduction.
1 Like
this is a good point and also really annoying. in GA this actually led to a big state surplus as tons of filers were going from ~$15k itemized deduction all the way down to a $3k state deduction.
anyhow, in the world of $10k SALT and 3% mortgage rates it started to get almost impossible to actually itemize unless you have a huge mortgage or give five-figures to charity annually. with these new rates it will be more common to itemize again.