So, can you buy your dream house if you have student loan debt?
The common wisdom is bleak: student loans are preventing borrowers everywhere from living The American Dream.
It doesn't have to be that way, however.
Here are 8 ways to maximize your chance of buying your dream home -- even if you have student loan debt.
Student Loan Debt Statistics
If you have student loan debt, you're not alone. There are more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, according to personal finance site Make Lemonade.
The same student loan debt statistics report also found that:
Nearly 2.2 million student loan borrowers have a student loan balance of at least $100,000. There is $31 billion of student loan debt
According to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) Seattle ended June with more than a month of inventory for the first time since September 2016.
In the Seattle city limits in June 2018, NWMLS saw 1,246 active listings, a 75.5 percent increase from the year before. Seattle ended last month with 1.2 months of inventory—a figure based on number of homes for sale and typical sales time—which is nearly double what the market had the previous year.
While this didn’t translate to a decrease in housing prices, they did rise less than last month or last year. Median closing prices rose 8 percent compared to June of last year—but at that time, home values had risen 17 percent. So although the median closing price for last month in Seattle was a
For the first time in 10 years since the recession, the number of homes for sale in the Seattle area has increased considerably, reports The Seattle Times.
"There aren’t as many bidding wars right now," said Beata Miklos, Managing Broker for Savvy Lane, a local online brokerage firm. "There isn’t as much urgency for buyers to place offers because they know that it’s softening up a little bit."
Fierce competition for low-inventory of homes for sale has led to extreme bidding wars and lightning-fast sales. Now, the total number of single-family homes on the market in King County has jumped 43 percent in June from a year ago. And condo inventory has risen to an eye-opening 73 percent.
The Times reports homes already on the market are sitting
SEATTLE - A new survey has found that homes in the Seattle metro area sold for an average of $123,000 more than their original purchase price last year - a gain of 44.7 percent.
Nationally, people who sold their homes last year made $39,000 on the sale, or about 21 percent compared with what they originally paid. Only San Jose, Calif., and San Francisco notched higher price gains than the Seattle metro area.
The survey, by real estate firm Zillow, also found that the typical seller in the Seattle metro area owned the home for nearly 10 years before selling it in 2017.
In the Seattle area, dollar gains on home sales varied greatly from one neighborhood to the next.
Sellers earned the most in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle, earning
