How Much House Can You Afford on $80K–$120K Income in 2026?

Uh, Patriot Nation, good to have you back. Simple question for you today. How much house can you afford in 2026? That's usually the most basic question that first-time home buyers or even second time home buyers have given, let's say they make $80,000 as a household or $100,000 as a household or even 120. Given that salary level, how much house can that control if I go out into the marketplace and try to buy a home? We're going to solve for that riddle today. I'm going to show you the very simple calculation that goes into that. And I'm also going to share with you something if you want to receive it, a weekly little flyer that just at a glance you'll be able to tell how much house you can buy given your credit scores, given your debt load, and of course given your income level. So that'll be a great help to you, I hope. So watch this all the way through. Like and subscribe and let's jump on this rodeo. Hi folks, I'm a mortgage patriot Kevin Fagan on your side nestled here in the Hill Country above San Antonio, Texas, serving all you proud Texans and all you great folks all around the country. Another great video today because we're going to talk about how much house can you buy given your income level. So if you make 80,000, 100,000, 120, how much house can I actually buy right now in 2026 given where the interest rates are today and so forth. But before we get into that, if you would hit the like and subscribe please, that really helps me, you know, build my YouTube channel. For example, I give you a great ultimate home buying map. Really takes you through the whole flow of where it starts, where it ends, the entire pathway through for home buyers. Very great video to watch. Another one here, top five mistakes you need to avoid when you're buying your first home, particularly, a lot of great information there. And another super video, I think, in terms of negotiation. Negotiate like a pro. Uh, all these videos and more, of course, have been wellreceived. And look through that library as you would on your own time. and let's enjoy the the material of this video right now. Okay, let's get into this analysis and it's very simple actually and you can play along at home as I say. So just take your annual income which does not include any side hustles that you get paid in cash. This is just legitimate reportable IRS you know related income. Now you take your yearly income, you divide it by 12 to get a monthly figure and you're going to take that monthly figure and you're going to multiply by 38. Why 38? because that's what FHA or conventional loans, which you'd probably start out as as a first-time home buyer, uh they allow about 38% of your monthly income to be contained in your housing payment. Your housing payment is going to be like five different things combined. It's your principal and interest, your property taxes, your property insurance, your HOA dues, and your monthly mortgage insurance. All five of those factors go into your full housing payment. So, that could be about again 38% of your income. We're going to get put examples to all this. Now you have the second ratio. It's called the back-end ratio. Not your housing ratio, but all your other debts. That's your consumer debt. That's your credit cards, maybe student loans, your auto loans, payments, any other installment loans you might have on your credit report. That's your back-end ratio. So your combined housing and your back-end ratio on an FHA or conventional loan can be about 54%. So let's put numbers to all this to make sense, and I'll show you how much you qualify for. Let's put some numbers to this. And remember, I'm going to give you a very cool little cheat sheet. more or less that's on a weekly basis going to tell you just by a glance looking at it. How much house can I afford in 2026 up to date per week given the FHA rates and what your scores are uh FICO scores and your income levels. It's a great little resource and we'll talk about that in a minute. But let's put some numbers to this. So let's say once again you're making $96,000 a year divide it by 12 get $8,000 per month. You multiply that by 38 to get the front-end ratio and what do you get? you get $3,240. So your payment once again of principal and interest, taxes, insurance, HOA dues and and mortgage insurance cannot exceed $3,040 approximately. Okay. Now the backend ratio 54%. Remember that one. How much is we take $8,000 we multiply by 0.54 and what do we get? We get $4,320. So that's your total how much total debt you can have. So to figure out how much additional debt you can have outside of your mortgage payment, you subtract the $4,320 by the by the mortgage of $3,040 and you get a residual amount of $1,280. That means at $1,280, that means that's how much you can roughly have in terms of consumer debt, your auto payments, your credit cards, student loans, your other installment debt. If it exceeds that amount, then you likely will not qualify for that payment because you've exceeded your ratio. Hopefully, all this makes sense. This is all great, Kevin. Now, tell me how much house I could buy at $96,000 a year, $8,000 a month. So, remember your payment, your maximum payment is going to be about $3,40 per that 38% ratio we talked about at the beginning. So, how much house got a $3,40 payment u purchase? You can punch numbers into a mortgage calculator and I put in $375,000 purchase price, three and a half% down FHA loan at a current rate of about 5.75. That's kind of where we are in the market now. We rates have come down below six now. It's nice. I had to make estimations for property taxes, property insurance, and HOA dues. Uh you'll see there the property factor was the property tax factor 1.6%. uh insurance I estimated at 7% HOA uh HOA dues I I estimated at $50 per month and your PMI factor is 0.55. So all that combined came to a payment of $3,12 and some change. So the answer to the question of how much can I afford at $96 $96,000 a year is about $375,000 house right now in the state of Texas. Now, everybody's situation is going to be different depend on your state, depending on your even your county level property taxes, right? Uh depends on what the interest rates are at the time. So, but hopefully this is going to give you a good estimate and I'm going to again let's talk about that report that I'm going to send you here in a sec. So, here's what I want to send you. I'm going to send you on a weekly basis this how much house can you buy today given the FHA where FHA rates are at any point in time and given your circumstances. So, this is a cool uh flyer because look at it. This is what it's going to look like. It's going to give you three. It's got a hypothetical three different variables going on here. You've got hypothetical $80,000 in income, $100,000 income, $120,000 income. You should be somewhere if you're somewhere in there, then you you can kind of extrapolate if you're in between those numbers. But if you're at a 100,000 like on this chart here and you're and the second variable is your credit scores. If you have a 700 to or 720 score somewhere in there and you have maximum uh consumer debt of $1,300, then you can afford to buy today a $395,000 home. That's how you read this chart. So if you make less than that, of course, you could buy less home. You could make more than that, you buy more home. You just look on this on this flyer here, kind of run your finger across where you think your kind of your income level is, what your credit scores are, how much debt you have, and it'll tell you at any point in time roughly roughly how much house you can afford today. So, put there's a QR code right here. Now, uh hover over that if you would fill out there's only a couple little questions there. What your name is, email, and I'll email this little flyer to you every week. And uh hopefully we can stay in touch. If you've got any more complicated questions, I can figure it out your payments and so forth, how much house you can, you know, really can afford. But this is a good estimate, good starter for you. So, do that. Hover over that QR code and um let's get let's work together. I'm the mortgage patriot, Kevin Fagan, on your side. Make it a great one. END OF TRANSCRIPT