Holiday Weekend Open Thread

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1. For those of you who own in areas with a high cost of living, what percentage of your take-home pay are you spending on housing? I’m hearing different things locally – that the old 30% rule isn’t current for today’s reality, that it’s best to be even MORE conservative, etc. What are you all doing? We currently pay just under 20% but we’re moving next year and it will definitely go up.

   Side note: it’s so much easier to calculate on pre-tax income – we’re not sure how much our take-home pay might change if we adjust our withholdings, 401K contributions, etc. The possibilities seem all over the place and if I’m honest, taxes bamboozle me. We’re going to talk to a CPA and try to outsource it.

   1. We bring in $4k-$6k month most months and about $100k per month once a year and about $50k per month one other time. So about $190k-220k take home but wildly inconsistent. (The large lumps are guaranteed, at least!)

      We pay about $5k/month for housing, and it feels high to me relative to the income. But we are both pretty leaned out right now while kids are young, and our retirement is also already fully funded.

   2. About 6% of our gross; roughly 15% of our take-home (aside from taxes, this includes maxing out our 401ks and maxing out our family HSA).

      House is a downtown major city townhome. We were lucky to buy in 2015 when rates were low (our mortgage is at 3%) and intentionally under-bought so that we could comfortably carry the house if one of us wasn’t working – we purchased a 1200sf fixer rather than the 1600sf renovated homes we qualified for, and have improved over time.

   3. Double income family in a MHCOL area (Northern Jersey). We intentionally bought under what we could afford so that one of us could carry the mortgage on our own if needed. At the time mortgage/taxes were about 20% of our joint income. We’ve paid off big chunks of the mortgage, and refinanced so currently our housing/taxes are 5% of our joint income. We would not even be able to rent a one bedroom apartment for what our current payments are.

      1. This was my rationale to buy in a place that wasn’t ossified: not so much to build equity (nice also) but to freeze the P&I part of my payment (real estate taxes go up also, but a 2015-era cost would be such a gift now).

   4. Not exactly what you asked but ~45% of my takehome pay is spent on rent in Manhattan. Would be much easier to hit the 30% metric if I had a partner and we split costs, but I’m single and it is what it is. I’m not going to have a roommate at this point in my life.

      From what I’ve seen when I looked into buying, owning is even more expensive than renting in Manhattan. For example, I looked at buying my same apartment on a different floor, but if I put 20% down, my mortgage + taxes + HOA would be 1.5x what I pay in rent.

      1. Are you me? I also live alone in Manhattan, pay 45% of my income on rent. It sucks, but I don’t know that I could find a cheaper place.

      2. Same! I live alone, and have to say that owning, while it brings its own stresses, really alleviated the very high renter stress that comes from living in a VCOL city. Where I live, your rent can go up 30% and there’s nothing you can do about it. It was also a good financial decision for many reasons, but not having to constantly worry has been worth it.

   5. I rent with several roommates in a kinda grungy housee because I’m trying to save up for a down payment, and am currently paying ~10% of take home on housing. But buying even a small fixer upper here would be 45% of takehome as a mortgage payment, and feels very scary with the labor market uncertainty

   6. I think you also need to know when people purchased. Housing prices and interest rates have gone up so much in the past 5 years. And honestly, gross income is relevant too. If you make $1m a year, maybe you spend less than 20% of your take home but that’s because the take home is so high and you still have an amazing house.

      For me, I purchased a year ago and spend 41% of my take home. But that’s after maxing out my 401k, which I could lower if I needed since I also have mandatory contributions, I have to make to a pension. My take home is just over $8k per month.

      1. I also wanted to add that I don’t find accountants or CPAs helpful with these types of questions of how much can I spend on X. So much of it depends on the rest of your life situation — do you have kids/college loans, how often do you like to eat out, do you have expensive hobbies.

         I think it’s better to track you spending for a few months and create a budget based on your priorities that accounts for the higher housing prices you would be comfortable with. Then, you could put the different between your current mortgage and your estimated higher mortgage in savings until you move. Either you find out that you can’t live in that budget and adjust what you are looking to buy. Or you find that you are fine living on that budget and have increased your emergency fund/new furniture fund/downpayment fund/investment accounts.

   7. In Philly and single and I pay about 43% of my take home in rent. I have a good job with a decent salary and I pay below market rate for a 1BR and yet here I am…

      Never thought I’d be in my 30s, making 6 figures and watching money so carefully.

      1. I replied up thread about living in NYC but SAME. As a sociology grad without much career direction, never in my wildest dreams did young-me I imagine I’d be earning this much money in my 30s…and yet I have to carefully budget at this salary.

         1. Yes! I’d never thought I’d be making 6 figures… and I also never thought a 6 figure salary wouldn’t stretch far at all…

   8. We pay 28% of take home at the start of the year (less later in the year when we’ve maxed out contributions).

   9. Bay Area – 18% of take-home (mortgage +prop tax) but not insurance etc. Mortgage rate is <2% though, which isn't a realistic number if you're buying now.

      1. WOW. You must be loaded.

   10. Where I live it’s $1000/sqft. I own the building and rent out half. My plan was to live in the whole building post divorce but financially that’s not possible.

       My advice is to think carefully about your long term plans. Buying the building in 2015, things were tight for the first 5 years. Rates went down, incomes went up and the divorce was financially low impact in terms of asset division.

       Right now my housing is 20% of my gross and 29% of net income. Ironically housing is not my biggest expense. My highest expense is taxes, followed by childcare and then housing.

       The plan was to avoid selling to move up the chain as I calculated it costs about 10% of the asset to buy-sell. Buying a multifamily has given me the needed flexibility to right size my home for my budget.

   11. 40% of take home pay.

   12. Live in Florida and only spend 15% on our mortgage. We bought a smaller home in an area that was being gentrified so not in the best neightborhood and spent 100K less than we could borrow in 2018. We refinances at 2.5% so our mortgate is 13,000 a month, less than what people are paying for apartments. We feel fortunate.

   13. More conservative?!?! That sounds impossible until you are in the 2%. I am a SAHM at the moment, so we don’t have childcare to factor in and that’s big, but we pay 35% of our take-home pay (401K, HSA taken out before this) and it’s been up to 45% when we first purchased a home and before raises. We are in NYC metro, so VHCOL. We spend a lot of time at home so having a nice place to live is worth splurging for us. Even still, we have to budget carefully – we have everything we need, but vacation is to a beach a short drive away and we cook every meal at home.

   14. We own in a VHCOL area, bought in 2021, 6.3% mortgage. About 40% of our take home is mortgage. Then add in property tax. Becoming empty nesters so we are selling this spring and will rent for just slightly more than half our current monthly housing costs. Cannot wait to get out of house handcuffs.

   15. We spent about 30% of gross HHI on housing when we first bought our house. We were young, not paid well, and that was a huge burden because the 70% that was left barely covered the rest of the necessities.

       Twenty years later we nearly have that house paid off and our HHI has quadrupled. Things are much more comfortable, and while we could upgrade and more easily afford a higher percentage of our income going toward housing, we have no desire to do so. Turns out we enjoy enjoying life.

2. related question – does anyone have a good resource on how to adjust your withholdings? my husband apparently hasn’t done it in a while.

   1. Following. I find all the calculators pretty confusing for a layperson.

   2. I got As in tax law and the economics of federal income taxation and have done many tax returns by hand, and I find withholding the most difficult part of dealing with my own taxes. I have not found any IRS forms or calculators that produce accurate results. The way I handle it is to use the tax tables to calculate our total income tax bill for the upcoming year, look at the withholdings from our January paychecks, figure out how short we’re going to be, divide that amount by 11, and then have it withheld as additional monthly withholding for the rest of the year.

   3. I have never been convinced it’s worth it if you are within +/- $2k on your tax bill at the end of the year.

      1. What about the underpayment penalty? We got this last year (after owing over $1000 the last few years) and so increased our withholdings to try and avoid this year.

         1. That’s $140 max if you’re $2000 short (and it’s not $140, because you’re probably underpaying $500/quarter, and the interest is calculated quarterly). I value my time at more than $100/hour, and it would take me more than 2 hours to sort this out. Juice ain’t worth the squeeze, especially since I’m probably getting a refund of $2000 next year because it seems to swing each year.

   4. The easy way: take last years tax bill, divide by 26 then 2, and each of you update your withholdings to include an extra withholding of that amount per paycheck. With that said, you need to remember that your payroll withholdings may be correct and your tax bill is coming from if your investment account is not withholding dividends, etc. Likewise, if your highest marginal tax rate is over 22%, your tax bill is coming from your bonuses which will only be withheld at a 22% rate.

      1. Payroll withholding is not likely to be correct in a dual-income household, especially if the incomes are similar.

      2. Some companies allow you to adjust withholding for bonuses – I always go with the highest to offset the taxes we’ll need to pay on investment gains for the year.

   5. I am a tax dunce, and have used the IRS withholding calculator to figure it out for myself and my husband (married, filing jointly, two jobs) several times with decent success. This is a good time of year to do it, because you’ll have your end of year pay stubs and various statements coming in, which you can use to fill it in. What’s tripped us up over time has been overtime, but we did learn to withhold extra in anticipation of it.

   6. I know I’m supposed to change my withholdings because I just got married, but I really don’t understand this.

      1. This whole thread is proof it’s too complicated.

      2. You can do but you don’t have to. You are over contributing so should get a refund check. File early. Just dont think of the refund check as a bonus from Uncle Sam. It’s your own money being used as an interest free loan to the government. Not the worst thing but I found it helpful to use the refund as forced savings.

         1. Yep, this is what I do. If I had more money in each paycheck it would somehow get spent. I like to have my refund high, and we use that chunk for our big 529 and savings contributions, as well as paying for bigger house projects. Between state and federal, we get back like $12K+ each spring and it’s great.

            1. I can’t imagine not having that much money working for me all year. Set up auto deposits into the 529 and savings and a house project fund, don’t just put the money somewhere out of your control.

   7. I’m a CPA but not in tax. I do my own calculations and check through chatGPT. It’s been accurate if you plug in the correct details.

      You can also call the IRS and ask an agent to help you use their online calculator.

3. My “just do the thing” thing for months has been to get a few things framed, but I didn’t want to shell out for custom framing for these particular things (they’re for my office) and they required custom mats. I finally went to target for some frames and while sitting in their parking lot ordered custom mats from Frame It Easy, which were cheap, arrived quickly, and look lovely. Just a PSA in case your “just do the thing” thing is also framing!

   1. Nice! I like Matboard and More for online framing. I’ll check out Frame it Easy too.

4. Those of you who’ve given your notice over Zoom, was it awkward? It seems like it’s going to be so much more awkward than in person, where you can naturally and elegantly leave when the convo’s over. But putting time on their calendar, coming up with anything to say beyond, “I’m leaving, bye,” probably talking over each other… I don’t know, something about doing this over Zoom has me mentally tripped up.

   1. Just put on your “that’s it” voice for something like “well, I’ll let you go now, but thank you for your support and I want to reiterate that it’s been such a pleasure working for you. Hope you have a great weekend.”

   2. Bruh you can just hang up. So much easier than in person IMO.

      1. I like the idea of saying “hey I’m about to drive into a tunnel” even if you’re very clearly sitting at your desk, and then hanging up.

   3. It will be fine! These conversations are always semi-awkward, but you will barely remember it in 12 months. People won’t be expecting you to make a big speech about it.

   4. It’ll be fine! Maybe you could draft out a few bullet points of things to discuss after “my last day” like “I definitely want to make the transition as smooth as possible – should we plan on meeting next week to go over my current projects and make a plan for them?” Or discuss how/when to tell the rest of the team, if you have any preferences there?

      1. that’s what I did. My boss actually was going to skip our 1:1, but I said I’d like to meet if we can. Then I said I had some big news and told her. Then pretty much discussed logistics.

   5. I did it over the phone and the other person did not want to draw the conversation out. They had to have seen it coming, though. I always do when I’m on the receiving end of such an announcement. The mysterious meeting is a dead giveaway even if there were no other signs.

   6. I got laid off over zoom. Quitting seems less awkward.

   7. Why aren’t you just sending an email? Doing this over zoom sounds like a lot of drama.

      1. Agreed, this is an email, not a zoom. The meeting is a follow up to the email to discuss any logistics/handover.

5. I need a new chair for my home office, which is visible from common areas and therefore an area that I’d like to keep reasonably attractive. Are there any ergonomic chairs that are not the typical rolly office chairs? I have a height adjustable desk so I don’t need a chair with that feature. If the answer is to get a standard desk chair, please remind me of recommended models for a petite woman.

   1. this strikes me as a “go to the store and try them” occasion. like staples has a lot and depending on where you live there may even be a specialized office supply store.

      1. OP here – let me reframe the question. If I get a well padded dining chair that feels comfortable in the store, will that be sufficiently supportive for sitting in all day? Or will I regret not getting a proper desk chair. I work from home two days a week.

         1. No this will be uncomfortable.

   2. For the spendy side, design within reach typically has the various sizes and styles of herman miller chairs for you to try out in store. I tried valiantly to fight the roller office chair, bought the HM Lino and have zero regrets. Look on HM’s website too, there are a lot of (relatively) aesthetically pleasing options and colors for the office chair.

   3. One of the best things I did for my mental health in 2025 was to commit to only checking the news once a day. I look at the NYT every morning unless there is something I need to act on (like weather in my area).

      I vote. I donate money. But me agonizing over everything wrong in the world is not helping them and is just making me crazy.

6. Y’all, there is a Sue Sartor archive sale going on right now with some good deals in it.

   1. Thank you!

7. How often do you check the news? Do you consider it doomscrolling or something else?

   I tend to read the NYT in the morning and then check it again at night but increasingly it feels like I’m punching myself in the head the second time.

   1. Rarely. I consider it doomscrolling at best, voluntarily being propagandized at worst.

   2. Mornings only, really. I have no alerts on my phone. If something truly major is happening, there are plenty of people that will tell me about it.

   3. I read weekly print journalism (the Economist, a couple others), and that is enough news for me. Filters out the inflammatory stuff.

      1. ^This is the ideal I want to get to. But I end up checking several times throughout the day. It’s not quite doom scrolling I think, more a “brain wants dopamine hit of something new” thing

         1. I’m the person you’re replying to, and I use the comment section here for that, haha.

   4. I listen to Up First (NPR) every morning while I get ready. I skim the AP website a few times a day.

   5. Very rarely. I get NYT news alerts so I hear about breaking news that way.

   6. Whenever I’m bored at work and then I regret it.

      1. +1

   7. Mornings only.

   8. Read the news in the morning.

      1. Meant to say that *I* read the news in the morning.

8. Probably not super helpful as a Canadian (and interest can’t be written off here so that is one major difference) but in a HCOL city we spend 16% of our net income on mortgage plus taxes. Our interest rates also don’t get locked but renew every few years and ours is 2.8% and due for renewal in 2027.

9. I tried to find old threads on this unsuccessfully, but I’m starting a GLP-1 soon and am looking for practical tips to manage side effects – did you change how you ate initially or anything tips for the newbie?

   1. I found it makes everything easier because it removed food noise and cravings. I also started losing pretty quickly without a huge calorie deficit.

      I tried to eat healthy and exercise before, but on the compounded sema my sugar cravings were lower, my need to snack less, and I couldnt handle as much alcohol. I was trying to eat a lot of protein and strength train when I started and have continued.

      In terms of bad side effects, I had some abdominal (like lower right ab) pain the night of injection for awhile. I’ve also never had constipation (usually the opposite problem) but the GLP slows everything down so I’ve had to eat more fiber. I take psyllium husk or chia seeds most days now.

   2. Check out Reddit for this!

   3. Reddit is your friend.

   4. Yes–avoid white stuff (flour, crackers, tortillas, etc.), avoid fried stuff, avoid very rich stuff (creamy cheeses, creamy sauces, etc.) and avoid large portions. Dose yourself at night before bed. Drink a ton of water. Up your protein. All of these will help, but you may still have side effects still. GL!

      1. Also, if you drink, know that alcohol will affect you very differently, so take it very easy. I did not find drinking pleasant on a GLP-1. Alcohol didn’t make me very buzzy or whatever it used to, and the hangovers were extreme even if I only had a glass of wine. YMMV.

   5. Some things that worked for me:
      – time your dose so you can get some rest. Some people get fatigued, so you want to give yourself some runway.
      – injecting in the thighs and arms have the least side effects, but you should try all 3 locations in the first few months to see how your body reacts. Everyone is different.
      – drink a LOT of water. For me, it’s averages about 108 oz a day. (three 32 oz bottles + a can of sparkling water/diet ginger ale). I did get dry mouth, and a lot of people find it helps with constipation issues.
      – for the love of all that is holy, do not eat fried and fatty foods. They will absolutely make you painfully sick. Remember, this medication slows your digestion. I ate some chips and spinach dip, then went to bed thinking I was fine. Ended up in pain the next morning, and threw up. The pain reminded me of gallstones.
      – Lay off alcohol. Many people get just as sick from alcohol.
      – some folks find the chewable papaya enzymes help with digestion.
      – make sure to get fiber. I haven’t had issues with constipation, but it’s a common side effect.
      – make sure you get enough protein to maintain muscle. My goal is 110g a day.
      – track: track your food so you can learn what works for your body, track your measurements and non scale victories.
      – make sure to eat! Sometimes it’s hard, and I’ll resort to soup, a protein bar, or even a shake to get my calories and good nutrition in.

      Good luck OP!

      1. I’m not familiar with GLP1s specifically, but ordinarily fiber and slowed digestion are usually not considered a good combination (fiber can slow things down even more and make the issue worse).

         1. My doctor and drug manufacturer recommend adequate fiber for good bowel movements. Some folks take Metamucil or equivalents. I track my fiber and it’s fine. For some constipation is common, for others they only have it for a period of time, others like me don’t have issues. Also why drinking plenty of water helps. YMMV.

            1. Intestinal motility is different from stomach motility, so I guess it’s for intestinal! I always worry a little when such a minority of doctors are familiar with delayed gastric emptying in general.

   6. I find that I can go from being hungry to uncomfortably full extremely quickly, which then makes me nauseated, so it helps me to eat small meals or a small portion of an entree at one time.

      I also get bad acid reflux so tums have been my best friend. Agree with the no fried foods, no white flour foods, and nothing too rich. Spicy foods also irritated my digestive system when I first started on the meds too!

   7. Thanks everyone! Most appreciate the insight.

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