<prompt> Human: Long time lurker here, first post. First, I want to thank this community. My wife and I 35 38 have used what youve taught us to get out of debt and save up an emergency fund! Were maxing out our 401Ks. We live in Seattle.We would really like to own a home. Do we try to buy in Seattle? Do we move and buy somewhere else?We have 3600 left over every month after all our other expenses. 65K in savings.More info:No children. Unsure if we want em. I work from home. My wife has to go into the office. My mother is about to retire and has only SS income. Well have to take care of her pretty soon, so our home needs to be big enough for the three of us. We used to live in NYC and are so burnt out on commuting that we refuse to do it ever again. If we buy in Seattle, wed try to do it within walkingbiking distance of downtown. Were looking at 700K.We can get a 667K 30 year fixed conforming loan at 4.5 with a 5 down payment 133mo PMI. After mortgage tax insurance PMI maintenance, thats 4065mo, leaving us with 1750mo left over after everything else we pay 2190mo rent. We could pay off the house in 15 years, after paying 250K in interest.We could also move to a better housing market where a similar home is closer to 250K, but that would mean my wife would have to leave her job. She makes 80Kyr. I can still work at home and continue making 120Kyr. Im in tech, so moving away from Seattle to another market is risky: if I lose my job, that means a large pay cut. Im also building a DevOps skillset that could land me a more lucrative job here. My wife works in a tech-related field as well, and has seen her salary grow from 65K to 80K in just 2 years. The job market here is amazing, but the home prices are bananas.Is it insane for us to spend 700K on a home? We need a sanity check. The Seattle market has completely made us lose touch with what is normal. The home prices are going up so fast that saving up 20 is literally a wash: the that we would save on interest PMI would be entirely canceled out by the growth in price of the home over the time that we save. Its now or never: by the time we have 20, the home we could afford would be too small for all of us possible children.On another note, isnt is quite mad that a couple making 200yr can barely afford to buy in Seattle? Im just happy that its even an option of us, though. Were extremely fortunate.So, rpersonalfinance, what do you think? Buy a less expensive house in a weaker economy, or stay here in Seattle and ride the gravy train?  <response>: I can tell you our Bay area experience. We bought our home just after we started our first real jobs, making a combined 120Kish. We purchased a 600K home within walking distance of my husbands job and within biking distance of the train to the city for me. We purchased in 2007, just before the crash, and our home lost almost half its value pretty much immediately after we purchased it. We didnt have PMI but we had used a piggyback mortgage with a 6.75 rate to cover some of the downpayment. So, were an example of the worst case scenario for you, only we were paying higher rates.It sucked at the time. We were so stressed out about making such a huge financial blunder and terrified of losing our jobs. Luckily, we both kept our jobs, and we just stayed the course. Were also in a nonrecourse state, so that made me sleep better. H walked to work, we stuck to one car, we doubled the household income, we saved cash for any work we wanted to do on the house, and we paid down the mortgage as fast as we could so that we could refinance into the new 2-3 rates instead of the great 5.25 rate we got on the main mortgage in early 07. We didnt dig ourselves out from underwater to get the refinance until 2013, but we did get there while funding retirement.Today, things are fine. Weve spent more than we should on renovations to make it perfect for us, but that can be avoided. H is still walking to work, Im still biking. Our house is worth more than we paid for it though not more than purchaserenovations, and we still love our home. We definitely couldnt rent something comparable now for our PITI amount after the refinance. Sure, we wish wed purchased in 2009 like our neighbors did. But my crystal ball was broken. Ultimately, it was the perfect location, it was a house we loved and fit our needs, it was a house we could afford because we had no other debt, and it was somewhere we planned to be for a long time. The only real danger for us was losing our jobs, but that is a danger even when renting. We werent speculating, we were buying a home for our family. At the end of the day, all the crash really did was give us an opportunity to refinance into lower rates, lowered the amount our architect and contractor charged for the renovations because they were begging for work, and lowered our property taxes for a few years.Im certainly not saying bad things wont happen to you if theres another crash, but just giving you an example of how someone similarly situated rode out the last one. 