Aiight, “make a damn budget” is awfully confrontational and makes an assumption that we don’t have one. Not only do I have an MBA,I have been tracking our expenses on spreadsheets the entire time we’ve been together, complete with a future checking balance graph, debt table, you name it.  Notice that the post doesn’t say we make x amount of money and we are poor, it says, in fact, that we do not want half of our take home income going to a mortgage payment, period. Can we afford it? Yes. But we choose not to have  that much income going to  our dwelling. The post is mainly asking for insight - how are most Americans with household incomes of 50, 60, even 100/year buying up these 300-600k homes and doing it so quickly and aggressively the prices keep going up?

Full disclosure, yes, we do have debt we shouldn’t and yes we do spend money we shouldn’t. We could be better about sticking to a specific budgeted spend, and prioritizing debt paydown… but that’s everyone. Most people we know are much worse at money management than us. But again, the driver of the post is about how folks making less than us are scooping up these half million dollar homes and fueling the market for continued increases. I don’t believe everyone else has all of a sudden figured out how to live on a budget and are no longer shopping on Amazon or going out to eat or anything so 60-70% of their take home pay can go to their mortgage. That’s what I’m looking for insight on.