I'm currently renting a cheap (but actually pretty nice) apartment with 2 roommates for $315 a month, so a mortgage payment on a ~$50,000 house wouldn't be much different from my current situation.

We got both of their applications (2nd roommate never looked at the place). 1st roommate has worst credit, 2nd roommate has absolutely perfect credit and makes about 8 times the rent in income.

Yeah, and actually I have a roommate in my unit that pays me rent also, so i'm only a couple hundred bucks shy of what I would see with all 4 rented!

I bought the house about 28 months ago as a primary residence (and financed it that way), but had a roommate live there and pay rent.

(Testing for antibodies would be a nice criteria for roommate selection.) 

Once I realized how stupid I was being, I moved into the ghetto of my city and went from paying 800 a month in rent to about 350-400 depending on the roommates that I had, I stoped going out when I felt like it and started being selective on the money I spent and went back to living like a poor college kid even though I was making 50K+ a year. 

For younger people sharing a house with roommates isn't that uncommon.With this approach you would be able to afford a slightly larger/better property (don't overdo it!)

(There was a series of roommates that didn't work out for various reasons, which is why he decided to find a cheaper place he could afford on his own.)I called it quits after that, and made my husband do the rest of the ceilings in the apartment, but he didn't come across anything unusual, just a lot of dirt and crumbling plaster. :-)

Mine is a tenant/roommate situation, so it's different since I'm looking for a good match.

.- This is a shared living situation, with me as a roommate.- Tenant is moving from out of state and just finished Ph.D.