With 20% downpayment, a $30 year 800K mortgage at 3.75% is $3700/month. That's $44K per year. Not impossible on $150k yearly compensation. And even easier if the family is dual-income on top of that.

> With 20% downpayment...

Where on earth is someone on $150k, renting, going to get £200k in cash?

That's ~110k after taxes.

If you are young, you can easily live off $50k/year, if you don't have children, don't own a car, take the bus to work, and your employer provides health insurance. Food is not that expensive, and you can rent an apartment for 20,000-25,000/year.

If your take-home is 110k, you'd have saved up for a downpayment in 4 years.

Not a single person. But a couple earning $250k jointly can easily knock that out in 4 years or so.

By sacrificing and living frugally for a couple of years?

Short of sacrificing a roof over your head and frugally eating nothing I can't see how that adds up to $200k cash in a couple of years.

Let's do some back of the envelope calculation:

starting total compensation: 150K. If your partner works a similar job, your combined annual income is 300K.

No income tax in Washington State, so Federal + FICA taxes would be ~70K (look up any online calculator).

Rent ~1800 per month or 22K per year (based on Zillow's data for 1bd/1ba in Redmond, WA). Living expenses of 2K per month or 24K per year.

You are looking at 300K - (70 + 22 + 24)K, or >180K potential annual savings. Let's double the living expenses or throw in student loan repayments on top, but saving 100-125K per year is easily doable for such a couple. And in a couple of years, you have 200-250K for your downpayment.

Hmmm... does add up can't deny that. But in reality I don't see many of my professional friends saving anywhere near to this kind of cash. Childcare, loans etc seems to really eat into it.

Yeah, This leads to the general convention of getting a house before having children. It is easier to save and stack cash without them.

A spouse making another 150k is a big assumption. It's mostly males living in such places.

Save 50k a year for 4 years isn’t that hard making $150k. Take home is 100k. Rent with a roommate is 2000. Monthly expenses is 2000(mobile service, food).

Under these exact circumstances, it took my now-wife about 4.5 years when she was still single.

But you can make $135K-$150K easily in most major cities in the US a software engineer with 5-8 years of experience as just a SaaS CRUD developer.

You can also get a nice large (3000+ square foot) house brand new build in the burbs in a great school system right in Atlanta for around $300-$375K with an FHA loan and 3.5% down.

But then you have to live in Atlanta...

Note: I’m currently visiting my parents in Atlanta from Seattle and, by god, is it miserably hot here.

Who goes outside? With the big house in the burbs, you can have a home gym.....

But there are other cities with nearly the same salary vs cost of living ratio...Nashville, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, etc.

Is it really that bad?

I recently bought a quite big apartment (140 sqm, one balcony and a terrace with a view) at a minute walk distance from St. Peters in Rome for 460k and the mortgage rate is 0.73% at less than 12k/year

Mortgage rates in the US are much higher (though still low by historical standards) than in Europe.

You can get a pretty decent house in the Bay Area for $1M in areas like East and South San Jose.