What exactly seems to be the problem or concern?
With 300k income you should be able to save a 200k/20% down payment in a year, especially if you have 6 figures already. With todays rates you looking at 70k/year mortgage and <25% of your income.
With 300k income you should be able to save a 200k/20% down payment in a year, especially if you have 6 figures already. With todays rates you looking at 70k/year mortgage and <25% of your income.
300K post taxes is basically 150K, the are probably paying 60K+ in rent and another 30+ in other basic cost of living expenses.
If you take the mortgage interest tax deduction, you will be spending about 35k/yr less on taxes and have more disposable income relative than renting at 60k/yr rent VS (70k mortgage - 35k less taxes).
If two years is too long for the road map, you can rent a room in Palo Alto for 15k/yr or a 1Br apartment for 30k/yr.
If you are paying a 50% tax rate, I would also look at tax avoidance strategies. Maxing out the 401k and HSAs to get that down. Each person can always borrow 50k back from the 401 account to put toward the down payment.
I might be able to save all my stocks, pray that they don't go down any further, and cash all of them for a down payment. Then I have to pray to not have any unexpected emergency or lose my job, since I dumped most of my life savings in a down payment.
Hardly what i'd call a middle class lifestyle.
All I can say is that no option will be risk free and all involve uncomfortable tradeoffs. Every choice has an opportunity cost, but they are mostly financial.
5k/mo including rent actually sounds reasonably frugal in a HCOL city, about as low as my partner and I wanted to go in SF. My only recommendation would be to pick a number for your emergency fund and pick a goal for your down payment. If you have a concrete goal, you can see yourself getting closer, unlike some nebulous idea. I considered my 401k part of my emergency fund and wanted a year of mortgage because I would spend that before selling the house if was laid off. The banks will tell you how much they are willing to loan based on stock comp and variable freelance work so you my not even have the choice to worry about that.
The worst that can happen is you lose your house and all your money, haha.
If you're a single person in California, at $300k, if you have no special tax situation, you'll pay a bit less than 40% tax. If you're married, significantly less than that.
It's easy for me to believe that a family making 300k in Seattle could be living paycheck to paycheck without being extravagant. Definitely not frugal, though, either.
This is incredibly out of touch with what it means to actually live paycheck to paycheck. 300k is at a minimum 160k post tax which is a little over 13k a month
However, having lived through it, I think more of the challenge is prioritization and sticker shock for high earners, opposed to financial impossibility. For example, you are allowed to take a year off contributing to your 401k to buy a house if it is a higher priority to you, or simply borrow the down payment from the 401k. Smart people often get bogged down in opportunity costs and wanting it all.
A 300K income is well below 200K net, so even if they could live with zero expenses, they can't save 200k in a year. But of course they do have expenses, so it'd be a lot less than that.