One of the biggest things you’ll do in your life and your marriage is become a home owner. It may not be the first thing you do, due to the finances and steps involved, but part of the American Dream is owning your own home. Right now, we’re renting, but we’d like to buy a home in the next few years. One of the most important things for us when looking for a home is how much house we can afford. Our rent is currently $1,000 per month, and our previous went was $1,270 per month. We’d like to stay within that range if possible. So how can we figure that out?

There’s an awesome calculator where you can type in the mortgage amount, the interest rate, and the repayment period. Once you hit “Calculate”, you’ll find out your monthly payment and how much interest you’re paying per month also. You can play around with the numbers, see how long it’ll take you to pay off the mortgage, and truly see how much you can afford to pay for a house. I’ve included a Currency Converter below so you can convert pounds to dollars.

One of the biggest issues from the recent housing bubble bursting was people buying homes they knew they couldn’t afford. Houses with price tags over half a million dollar had inflated worth. People had adjustable rate mortgages, and when the interest rate skyrocketed, they could no longer afford the payments. People were even buying houses with no money down! You can’t get that anymore. What we’re doing is saving our money to at least have a 3.5% down payment for a FHA loan, and for our budget, we’ll be able to afford $230,000 home (around £144,000), which is about $1,209.44 per month. Exciting!

Put your numbers in and see how much house you can afford. If the monthly payments aren’t comfortable, reduce the house price. If homes in your area are going for much more than that, start looking for areas with more affordable homes. The last thing you want to do is buy a house, only to lose it down the line because you can’t make the payments.

This is a featured on behalf of Emortgage Calculator.