You have to realize when you start talking your (CA) real estate prices, the rest of the country do a, "Say What?!" :eek:

True. Like the lovely starter home I saw in San Diego when I was there. 670 grand. Starter. Home.

Yikes!

yup. Even in this market, a 3+2 with a yard in a good neighborhood costs 750k. The plus side is, if you can make it work here, you can retire and take your equity anywhere and live like a feudal lord.

Yeah, you can buy a beautiful 3000 sf mountain chalet on 6 acres in Colorado for half that, complete with a breathing condition.

Colorado real estate prices are really interesting to me. I mean, our wages, here, really are not much different from any other place, but to buy a house seems unfairly matched. Of course, most areas here seem to have suffered from the decline in real estate values, but like Radar was saying about foreclosures...the really good deals are getting snatched up quickly and some areas are already starting to recover from the price decline.

We use to blame inflated home prices on Californians. So many from California migrated here in the late 80s and 90s and could afford to put half down or pay for a house in cash and end up with a house 3 times the size of their multi-milliondollar bungalows they sold in CA. This seriously drove our real estate values up during that period. Good for those of the previous generation who bought before that time. Bad for those of us who grew up here and suddenly could not afford to purchase a home in our own hometowns.

Good point. I wondered what the pay was like in that area for people in my career...could it possibly even come close to getting a small apartment?

How much would you have to make to afford a small place there, comfortably? It just seems it would be hard to do.

I would think it's hard to buy into LA making less than 100k/year.

I'm a bit skewed maybe, because there are certain properties that we're not considering because of schools, wanting a yard for the kids, proximity to studios, etc. If those are things you can be flexible on, and you are looking at condos or town homes, you can probably make it work on less.

I'm under 100k, but with my wife's income we're slightly over 100k, and we're scraping by. If I was earning this money and living in Pennsylvania or Ohio or something, I'd be living it up.

It's still cheaper to buy in CA than it is just about anywhere in australia.

I'm thinking we should sell up and invest in America!

An American dollar is worth 1.52 Australian dollars. My guess is when you adjust the price accordingly, Australian houses will be cheaper. I could be wrong though since I don't really know the going rate for a house in Australia.

Also, I'm guessing big cities like Perth, Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne are more expensive than more rural areas.

Alia, what would a nice 3bed, 2bath house on a quarter acre (1,000 square meters) in an upscale suburb of Melbourne go for? In the most expensive parts of LA, it would still be over $1million USD, in the mid-range suburbs, probably 500-600k.

Radar, my wife is home with the little ones right now, and we are eagerly anticipating the additional income when she returns to working full-time once they hit school age. Being the sole income is just killing me.

We recently paid $520k in a semi rural area for a 3+2 on 800 square metres which is quite a large block over here.

To get something like that in Melbourne near the city you're looking at $3mill plus apparently. Here's a link to a property which fits the description.

In my experience, it's hard to get the wife to go back to work once she has had a taste of staying home for several years. And it's very convenient to have one parent at home, so you might not feel like pushing too hard. But you will be making more by then, and the mortgage will be the same, so you just might be able to swing it with her home.

My income isn't linear, it fluctuates pretty wildly from month to month and year to year, based on how much and what kind of work I'm getting. It's not necessarily the case that I'll be making more in 4 years than I am today.

You can obviously get homes that cost less, but not if you want a decent yard within a half hour/45 mim drive of the city. If you're really interested, check out realestate.com.au and do a search. There are a few that look much more reasonably priced (less than a mill) but no yard hardly (which is fairly common in the closer suburbs of Melbourne unless you're mega rich.

I'm at $85k right now which is less than what most IT Directors make, but I'm in a really cool environment, and I am building their network up from scratch. Most IT guys will tell you, it's really nice when you get to do things your own way instead of being forced to work on something someone else setup, especially when you know you can do it better.

Once I get everything up and running, and automated as smoothly as I want, we'll be developing our own web enabled inventory system for our props warehouse. If I can pull this off, my resume will look so good, I can go just about anywhere and make a lot more money. It might be hard to walk away from my baby after I've built it exactly the way I want it though.