How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

How does anyone afford to buy a home in LI with 2 kids?? I feel like daycare alone makes it prohibitive. My husband and I make an ok salary but b/w car payments, daycare and student loans I feel like we can't afford anything in a decent school district. Putting it all on paper with estimated bill costs makes it seem like we can never buy a house. Words of wisdom?

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

We bought a 3BR co-op instead. It allowed us to be able to stay in Smithtown schools, plus its 3 BRs, so it has just as much space as a ranch would.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

I know for us - we don't have car payments. that helps immensely!! My car is 4 years old; DH's is 8 years - and both are going strong.


We also started with a townhouse.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

hmm... we have the opposite problem. We bought a house first but now we're thinking we can never afford to have kids with the mortgage payment.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

everyone's financial situation is different. We bought before we had kids, and even though we now have 2, we don't have daycare expenses and are fortunate to live quite comfortably.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

We were fortunate to buy 6 years ago before having kids. Neither one of us had school loans or car loans and my husband is a super-saver, so all of this helped out a lot.

However, buying a house meant putting off starting our family for 5 years. We're older than we want to be for just starting our family, but these are the sacrifices we have to make.

A lot of my friends are having trouble buying houses on LI - we've lost 2 couples to North Carolina and the rest of our friends rent.

Did you look into foreclosures, fixer-uppers or short sale houses? Perhaps you can find something that will suit your needs. There are lots of great places to live on Long Island.

Good luck!

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

we are buying the biggest fixer upper, we have no kids, one car loan, and no student loans (paid them off) but we do not make much. I would say co-op at least it is better then paying rent, I wanted to do this but we wanted to stay in one town and they have no co-ops there so we found a great fixer upper!

We have to put off kids as far off as possible even with me being 30 and he is 37, he will work OT and I will have a second pt job outside of my freelance work that i do pt just to have extra cash flow to save up to fix up the house. Sucks honestly since our salaries are not comparable to what the average makes on LI/NY.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

IMO, I hear the same SDs mentioned over and over again on boards and in conversation. I can understand not living in the bad SDs but I think if people widened their searches to include good and better districts, they might find more in their price range.

Even good districts on LI are better than the best districts in other states. (I'm from OOS.) Schools here offer so much more.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

DH and I have the same situation (minus the school loans)
What we did was pay off all of debt and then we leaned to live off of one paycheck and bank the other one. He works as much OT as they offer and last year I began my own business to make some extra money as well. We both work WAY too much, but we make it work and now we are buying a house in a GREAT school district. We will both have to work OT and the business for a few years (cause DD will be in before and after care), but it is what it is.

Good Luck (the idea of a townhouse or co-op sounds pretty good too, my GF did this and now she rents it out with the idea that it will pay for her kids college someday)

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

we searched high and low to find a home in a good school district that would not break the bank - as far as i know it's not a "popular" choice because i'd never heard of this town until we started looking!

we are also getting an FHA loan so we don't have to spend as much $$ on a down payment.

we have one baby and another on the way and it will be tight, especially with the cost of day care, but we'll make it work.

Re: How do you afford to buy a home in LI?

We are planners so we did the house and school stuff first so we weren't balancing those expenses and activities with kids.

Means in the end we'll be parents in our mid 30s instead of mid to late 20s but in the end I think it makes for less stress.