The definition of affordability has to be related to income and debt as well as other obligations.
When you think of affordability, do you imagine the genteel poverty of the family in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility? A single parent in Bangladesh? Perhaps an extended family of twenty-five in Sicily?
For simplicity, let’s assume a middle class American family of four, with one income.
Our modern standard of living has risen so high in the last couple of generations that most of us cannot even comprehend the living conditions of our own grandparents!
We can try hard to:
- free ourselves from competing with the Joneses,
- find what is actually affordable for our own situations,
- avoid burying ourselves in a mortgage we will never pay off, and
- avoid mortgage payments that will take up so much of our paycheck that other expenses are put on credit.
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