How much installment can we afford?

In part-time and parental leave you have less than what you calculate and your living expenses will also increase with the child, I would check the insurances, that somehow looks wrong and the mobility costs are also not correct like that.

The savings rate for new cars is missing from the calculation. Generally very low mobility costs.
Insurance increases when you own a house due to building insurance, household contents, etc., quickly reaching 100€ (that's how much it is for me).
With a child both working 30 hours, I find that initially ambitious, but it could work.
My absolute pain threshold would be 2,500€ for the installment. And then the savings performance for other things already becomes tight. Preferably 2.1k€. I would roughly see that as a framework.

The absolute pain threshold for me would be €2,500 for the installment.

Please provide a serious justification why €4,000 monthly for living expenses is not sufficient? In addition, there is the unspecified bonus on top.

Preferably €2.1k. That’s roughly the range I would see.

Oh, so €4,400 monthly living expenses are then sufficient? In what world do you live where €4,000 per month is not enough? Serious question! What do you spend €4,000 + X on per month?

Thank you very much for your insights and assessment. Such values help me a lot.

I did ask for help politely, didn’t I? Why respond so snippily right away? It would be more helpful if you could contribute something to my actual question — how high the rate could be. You surely have higher additional costs, building insurance, and building liability in mind. What else comes to your mind? These are important points for me.

Thank you for your contribution. The costs have been listed over the years and the costs from 2023 were used as a guideline. If the expenses were lower before, I assumed the worse case. Still, you are of course right that the costs increase every year. At this point the question anyway: How would you calculate with inflation, but at the same time also upcoming salary increases?

In general, I have noticed that here in the liquidity forum, judgment is often made very quickly and in advance based on the little insight the thread starter gives. Accusations like "naive" or "Money is being burned without knowing what for" should perhaps be reconsidered. I am happy to discuss topics openly, but maybe ask first before you judge?

On the topics:
Our consumption
Is certainly not low currently. But that is why it’s consumption, right? This category includes pretty much everything you can imagine. Visits to cafes, technical equipment, bicycles, coffee machine, furniture, dishwasher, theater, hairdresser, subscriptions for Prime & Co., and and and... can that be reduced? Sure. Was that the point? Not at first. In this rate, for example, the initial equipment for our child is included.

Part-time income too high
The current income is the average of the last 3 years. We get annual salary increases and our TARGET working hours are not even 40h. Further information does not play a role here in my opinion. It is mainly about running through the scenario with €6,200. Whether it will really be like that — who knows?

Working with a child
Here too, I ask that you follow the assumption regarding equity. We are not buying a house now and pondering "what if?". Speculating now whether our child needs more attention or less or whatever... is... speculation! The assumption is: €6,200

Insurances
Except for household contents and liability, there are none. Also no disability insurance. I am aware of the risk of lost human capital. Also that this could cause financing to fail in case of burnout or similar. We will surely discuss this risk again when the time comes, but currently we accept it.

Savings/Reserves
There are still reserves >€50k, which are not supposed to flow into the house project.

Mobility/Cars
That is certainly a good point which I underestimated in planning. Background: Currently both cars are hardly driven, therefore also the low costs (which by the way are correct for the current situation). One of the cars is also almost new (16,000 km). Mobility costs would certainly increase when moving towards the countryside and a reserve for the purchase (of a used) car would make sense! Thanks for the pointers here.

Goal of the thread
As , , and others already show, I think it’s great that we can quantify possible rates. I will deal with what additional costs (including house insurances) would come up for an old building.

For us, a result of the calculations can very well be that we simply save longer, set the goals smaller, or or or. As said: what if? : )

Hello Abraxus, The tone of communication here is usually similar. Don’t be surprised. I would simply recommend going to your main bank for a conversation and checking what might be possible, even without a specific property. Ultimately, the financing bank decides anyway. Most people here have the 30% rule in mind, which in my opinion no longer really applies with high incomes, unless the lifestyle increases linearly with higher incomes. But that is not the case with your savings rate.

On the topic of working with children:
My wife works 40 hours/week and I work 35 hours/week. We have two kids, aged 2 and 4, and we manage everything wonderfully. Of course, the daycare/kindergarten is a great help, but organizationally it is always challenging. You don’t automatically have to live with reduced income for years if you are willing to face the challenges of this lifestyle. If the kids are healthy and develop normally, there is nothing against it. Of course, fate can always throw a wrench in the works. But the opportunities that arise for us as a family through two full incomes outweigh this.

btt:
A healthy payment rate at your income, in my gut feeling, is somewhere between 2-2.5k, maybe even 2.7k, IF it is a new building and accordingly energy efficient so that monthly costs remain manageable.
Regarding insurance, before we had kids we were in a similar position as you are now: only liability insurance to save as much money as possible. Today, with kids and a house, it looks different, life insurance, disability insurance, legal insurance, home insurance and a few others have been added, and with that insurance costs are about a factor of 10 higher per month compared to before. Please don’t forget that. Also, the topic of reserves for the house. We save 250€/month in a savings account – despite a new building. So that a defective heat pump or something similar doesn’t make the planned vacation financially impossible.
Expenses for food and the like will tend to increase as well. We last managed 400€ per month in 2020, although we were really frugal. Currently, with two kids, we are at 550-600€ per month for food/drinks and my wife cooks daily. There is no shopping at organic stores or the farmers market!
You can open a second calculation and include all these points that others or I have mentioned here and see where you end up. Is it still (easily) doable or would the 2.5k payment already not be possible?