House (or medium/large condo): bought in last 3 years $1.5mm usd
Mortgage (20% down): $105,000/year
Property taxes: $17,000/year
Maintenance: between $3600-11,000/year (including capital things like AC, roof, flooring, repainting interior, foundation amortized)
Total: $133,000/year
Family:
Grocery: $20,000/yr
Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START)
Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas)
Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc)
Misc costs: $10,000
Total: $96,000
Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.
You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.
Seems kind of disingenuous to include the down payment as a cost considering, in principle, it's a transfer of one kind of wealth to another. Otherwise, your expenses line up well with my own family's expenses in the Bay Area.
The real killer is that if the house needs work - and it will, because the housing stock here is very old and wasn't exactly well built to begin with - the cost of the work in the bay area is 1.5x at least most other areas of the country.
If you put minimal effort into controlling costs this actually makes sense. But for a real-life example, my family of 3 (one kid) has expenses of about <1/3rd of that, childcare included.
That's a pretty real-life example. Are you an owner in that area that bought in the last three years? How long were you wait-listed on daycare? How close to fidi are you? If you're willing to cart your kid all the way to the sunset every day you can find cheaper daycare, or if you're renting your costs are going to be way lower.
Family: Grocery: $20,000/yr Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START) Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas) Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc) Misc costs: $10,000 Total: $96,000
Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.
You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.