Mortgage Budget Sheet

May 22nd, 2008 by Potato

Wayfare and I were talking about housing and about how it seems like any halfway decent place in Toronto is out of our reach — when we realized we weren’t quite certain what our reach was. We had some very vague ideas based on our savings and estimated income, and some rules of thumb (e.g.: you can afford a house that costs about 3 times your yearly pre-tax income). However, I didn’t think a lot of those were very realistic: what if we had a lot of debt, or liked a lavish lifestyle, or were frugal and wanted to spend more of our income on a house? Plus, as nice as some of the rules of thumb are, they seem to have been largely blown out of the water by the current housing market (which I think may be due for a flatlining or correction, but that’s a topic for another day). So to help us look at our options and lay out a few future scenarios, and also to see where all the figures and calculations were coming from, I made a spreadsheet. It was actually a rather good spreadsheet if I do say so myself, and I took the time to put a bit of formatting into it, so I decided to share it with you here.

[Note for those reading this via a feed: you may need to come to the web site proper at www.holypotato.com/?p=499 to download the excel file]
I am not a financial advisor, nor do I even own my own house. This spreadsheet will likely contain errors and is simply an attempt to share my efforts with you, don’t take it as accurate financial advice. Use it, edit it, redistribute it to your liking. Attribution is appreciated but, in this case, not required.

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