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Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

> Family needs to make $107,700 a year to own a home.

I don't see how that computes. The internet suggests that, on the high end, a family will spend around $10,000 on home repairs, maintenance, and insurance, which is in line with my experience. So almost $100,000 in yearly property taxes for a typical family home? Not a chance.

I suspect you are thinking of buying a home rather than owning a home, but homes are bought with wealth, not income, so an income figure here doesn't make much sense if that is, in fact, what you are thinking of. If that is not what you are thinking of, I, for one, don't understand what you are trying to say. This figure doesn't seem to have any applicability.

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I think you're being overly pedantic in your concern for the difference between "buy" and "own".

Most people in the US will say they own their home even if they have a significant mortgage against it. You can be upset that people are not using the word correctly, but that's kinda pointless.

> but homes are bought with wealth, not income

What do you mean by this? In the US, over 60% of people have a mortgage [1], which almost always means it's coming from some percentage of their income. When you get a home loan, the banks only real concern is your credit score and income. Anecdotal, but I don't know a single person that doesn't have their monthly mortgage scaled to their income, since I don't know a single person under 60 without a mortgage that's coming from their income.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/percent-homeowners-have-mortgag....

> In the US, over 60% of people have a mortgage [1]

A mortgage is the rental of wealth. It is independent of the home. But, even if we want to conflate them for the sake of discussion, it is still dependent on many variables that does not round to a single number. The rent on a $20,000 mortgage is quite different to the rent on a $200,000 mortgage. Two buyers buying identical homes for identical prices, but who come with different amounts of wealth, will have very different rental payments. A single number is meaningless, even if we assume 100% of people are paying mortgage rent.

But, as you point out, ~40% of the people don't have a mortgage, and therefore have no such cost to begin with. The idea that they also need $107K doesn't make any sense.

"Assume a spherical cow..."

They're presumably saying that's the income needed to service the mortgage (where what most people call the mortgage payment includes escrows for insurance and property taxes, on top of the literally mortgage principal and interest components).

That still feels like a fair over-estimated amount to me, but I think that's what they were getting at. (It could also be a figure of the amount needed to qualify for a mortgage on a place with some amount of downpayment.)

It could be an overestimate, it could be an underestimate, or for a specific family buying a specific home it may be spot on. It is kind of like saying that it costs $5,000 to build a software application. That statement is true, but meaningless.

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