Where on earth is someone on $150k, renting, going to get £200k in cash?
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.
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.
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.
Note: I’m currently visiting my parents in Atlanta from Seattle and, by god, is it miserably hot here.
But there are other cities with nearly the same salary vs cost of living ratio...Nashville, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, etc.
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
You can get a pretty decent house in the Bay Area for $1M in areas like East and South San Jose.