How much total "House" are you comfortable with?

[Frank Adams]

All of us are familiar with the "rule of thumb" ratios for how much your house payment should be as a % of your net income, used to be 25%, seems to have creeped up in recent years. But, how much of your net worth are you comfortable with as your RESIDENCE.

We've both always been pretty conservative financially. When we bought our last primary residence in Houston the Realtor and loan officer looked at us pretty funny as the purchase price was about 83% of one year's GROSS INCOME. Heck, we felt stretced as it was about twice what we paid for the place we were living in and the payment was going to reflect that!

Anyway now that we're considering relocating to OR we seem to have widely divergent ideas on how much we can afford to spend on our next house. I doubt that either of us would purchase until we've got a pretty solid contract on the TX house (not yet listed) although if a true "slam dunk" appeared we might!

We still have income, she gets about $1300/month SS and I get about $1K/month from the sale of my old company 7 years ago, about 3 years left on that but I'll be getting my (early) SS by then, about $1400/month. We also have about $4K/month income from seller financed mortgages and we'll either have that income stream or the payoff of those mortgages.

In addition we have pretty decent financial assets, stocks/bonds,mutual funds. We would likely just spend out of those assets to purchase the next place.

Give us some ideas here guys!

all cash