Figure out how much of a loan amount equals your desired payment

I would say the first step in seeing how much of a house that you want to
buy is to determine how much of a payment that you want and then play with
a mortgage calculator to see how much of a loan that equals. I have a mortgage caculator at the bottom of this blog. For example you can put in $100,000.0 at 5% and see that the payment is $537.0 per month. You will need to add in a monthly amount for taxes and homeowners insurance. That will vary by the amount of the purchase price. I used 5% because that is
the average 30 yr fixed rate now. You can always get an average of the current market interest rates at websites like www.bankrate.com to use in the financial calcualtor. I will also be updating my blog with the current market rates. So go ahead and put in different loan amounts and even put in different lenghs of loans like 20 years and 15 years. You would be surprised that there isnt much of a difference by lowering the term of the loan down to just 20 years.