Affordable Home Calculator
The Affordable House Calculator is designed to make it very easy to answer the question, "How much house can I afford?". It considers income, taxes, loan payments and maintenance. See "Help" for more details.
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This calculator, while called an "Affordable House Calculator", can actually be used for determining the affordability of any building or property. This is a common trait of many financial calculators. They can be used for similar, though different, calculations. It can be confusing, but we're here to help. Just post your questions below.
C-Value!, A TVM Calculator for Windows
An extremely flexible time-value-of-money calculator for Windows computers.
- Loan or investment calculations.
- Cash flows can be regular or irregular
- Create and print schedules.
- Save your data to disk for later use.
Suitable for auditors, accountants, lawyers and you!
Affordable House Help
This calculator answers one of the most important personal finance questions that we ask ourselves — "How much house can I afford?".
Enter your annual income (before taxes) and the cash you have available. Then enter the interest rate you expect on a mortgage followed by the number of monthly payments you expect to make (360 for a 30 year mortgage, 180 for a 15 year mortgage). Enter the estimated annual taxes and insurance, the estimated annual total maintenance.
For the "Expressed as a percentage of your annual income, how much do you want to spend?" question, this relates to the amount entered for "Buyer's Annual Income?". If you entered $125,000 for income and you enter 33% for the amount of the income you are willing to devote to housing, then the calculator will assume $41,250 (33% of $125,000) will be the annual amount spent on housing to cover mortgage payments, taxes & insurance and maintenance.
Note that your "Monthly Mortgage Payment" may actually be higher due to the lender adding taxes and insurance costs to the amount they collect.
Join the conversation. Tell me what you think.
Anthony says:
Hello, Why is it on Affordable home calculator that when I decrease taxes and insurances the payment per month increases? I am expecting it to decrease also. Thank you
Karl says:
That behavior is expected.
If either the insurance or maintenance decreases, then the home buyer can afford more for the mortgage payment itself.
Beth Sobiloff says:
I have a client that needs a calculator so that visitors can determine if they qualify for affordable housing units in the town. Will this work?
Karl says:
Who’s eligible for affordable housing probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I’m not sure if you can use this calculator or not. Can you provide more details?
Beth Sobiloff says:
Hi, Karl.
I really don’t have the details yet for this project so I’m trying to provide an estimate “blind”. All I know is that there are income requirements for affordable housing. For instance with a family of 4 you qualify if you earn x amount per household and if you have a family of 6 the amount you can earn is more. I’m not sure if there are other requirements, such as residency. The calculator is just to let the user know whether or not they would even qualify. I don’t think it’s meant to be an application per se.