House Purchase Advice

[HAULN-SS]

According to my handy-dandy salary survey tool that I use to build our billing rates, job-for-job is about a 7% delta DC to Richmond.

e.g. Applications Systems Analyst/Programmer with a BS and 5-7yrs, we would expect to have to pay 81K in Richmond and 88K in DC (higher in Fairfax). So, dual income family in NOVA/DC will have about 14K additional gross income to put towards a mortgage. With milk, cars, etc the same price, the extra income almost always gets put towards the hou$e.

That sounds like a low number to me. I work for a contractor as a programmer, and anyone with 7 years is going to be pushing 100K, and I am basing this based on performance increases and stuff that I have seen in the last 3 years, when half that we were supposedly in a recession.