Almost everyone does this backwards: fall in love with a house, then find out what it costs to own. The monthly number is the whole number, not the mortgage.
Payment, taxes, insurance and HOA together. In South Florida the last two are not a rounding error - insurance alone can move what you can afford by a hundred thousand dollars.
The whole monthly number — payment, taxes, insurance, HOA — and the home price your income actually supports, with the arithmetic shown line by line.
Ours is an estimate built from properties like yours. An agent quoting your actual roof, year and elevation will beat it every time. There is a box for you to type that number in and everything downstream re-reads it.
Unpermitted work. Our value comes from what the county has on file, so a renovated home with no permits reads as un-renovated. It may be worth more than we say — and an inspector can still make you undo it.
Worth knowing before a lender says no — or, worse, says yes to more than you should carry. These are guidelines lenders use, not law.
The old classroom rule: keep the housing payment under about 28% of your gross income, and all debt payments together — house, cars, cards, student loans — under about 36%. Plenty of lenders still start there, and it is a sane place to start yourself.
With strong credit and real money in reserve — what underwriters call compensating factors — mainstream loans routinely go past the classroom rule: Fannie Mae allows up to 45% of gross income in total debt on a manually underwritten loan with those factors, and up to 50% through its automated underwriting.
Until 2021 the federal ‘qualified mortgage’ rule tied lenders to a hard 43% debt-to-income cap. The regulator — the CFPB — replaced that cap with a price-based test, so 43% is now a habit some lenders keep, not a regulation. The number that actually stops you is whatever your lender’s own rulebook says — which is why two lenders can answer the same file differently.
Two ways in: the best price per foot, or the place you actually want to be.