What does your income mean in terms of buying a house?
Income as it pertains to buying a house is huge. Income and credit combined with your debt ratio is going to determine exactly how much home you can buy. So the more income you have and the lower your debts, the more home you are going to be able to buy. The more income you have and the higher the debt you have; the less home you are going to buy. So if you have a moderate income and low debts, you are probably going to be able to afford the home that you want but everything in the mortgage industry works on what we call a ratio.
You have a Front Ratio or a Housing Ratio which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have come to a conclusion that 28% of your income can be used for your house payment and 36% of your income can be consumed by all of your debts. That could be your house payment, your credit cards, your car payment and your student loans.
So the more income you make, the higher those numbers are going to be. But the most important factor in all of this is with the advent of technology, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have, they used automated underwriting and you are going to take your particular loan situation, submit it to their automated underwriting process in their engine and it's going to come back with findings and those findings may or may not be higher than 28% or 36% so you might be able to buy a house with really good credit and have your house payment consume 40% of your income.
But you might have marginal credit and it only might be able, your house payment might be only able to consume 28% of your income. So income and credit together are going to be able to come out with how much home you can afford.