One of the most often asked questions from first-time home buyers is “How much home can I afford?” The answer, as a mortgage lender will inform you, is “it depends”. There are no hard and fast rules for how much home you can afford, or how high your mortgage can be. This is, in part at least, because mortgage lenders determine your maximum home purchase price in a different way than the way you might compute it yourself, via a mortgage calculator.

Lets examine the two options that take today’s mortgage rates into account.

Strategy 1: Let the Lender use DTI to determine your maximum Buy price

At such time as the lender has calculated your maximum mortgage payment, they will use the current mortgage rates to “back in” to a loan amount that you can borrow.

USDA mortgage loans, and FHA, VA also enforce a DTI near 45 percent. Often, Fannie and Freddie will allow DTI as high as 50% with compensatng factors. Jumbo mortgages stopped approximately DTI that is 40 percent.

When you ask a lender to calculate your maximum home purchase price, they give very little consideration to your current home hunt or any properties on which you’ve considered making an offer. This way of determining how much home you can afford can prove harmful. It is predicated on borrowing the maximum for which you can get approved, which is often not sensible.

Strategy 2: Make your Personal monthly Home budget

As opposed to using a sales price, the bank will consider your income and your debts. It will use that data to find the maximum mortgage payment you could afford, without taking your debt-to-income (DTI) ratio over permissible maximums.

But first, determine the maximum monthly payment you’d be comfortable making every month. This may require consideration and attention to your household budget. Then, utilizing a mortgage calculator, plug in your preferred payment and the current mortgage rates to find the loan size that sort of payment will manage.

By way of example, if your budget for a monthly housing payment of $2,500 with two percent yearly going to taxes and insurance, assuming the current 30-year mortgage rate is 4%, the math worked backwards reveals a maximum house purchase price of $385,000.

As a home buyer, you can depend on a lender to walk you through how much home you are able to afford, but you are able to calculate it all on your own.

In many cases, your bank will approve you for a higher mortgage payment than you would like to commit to.  That is because lenders will often pre-approve you for your maximum home price, in an effort to generate more fees.

When you purchase at your highest possible upper-limit, however, it doesn’t give you much money for saving, investing or living let alone paying taxes.

This procedure is better at holding you”on-budget” as compared to letting a lender establish your maximum price.