Salary $50,000 - What Does That End Up Being Monthly, Portland Family Of Four? (Beaverton: low income, renting)

[dent_arthur_dent]

Could anyone give me a rough estimate of how much I might expect to be taking home every month frmo a job with a posted salary of $50,000/yr? (I am married and have two young children, if that helps). I have tried using online calculators but they confuse me.

[jjpop]

Here's what I get when I plug $50k/yr with a monthly pay frequency (from http://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/):

Monthly Gross Pay $4,166.67
Federal Withholding $446.88
Social Security $258.33
Medicare $60.42
Oregon $266.00
WC $2.77

Net Pay $3,132.27

This is for filing as married with 0 allowances. Since you have 2 kids, you could file as married with 2 allowances, and then less federal and state taxes would be withheld. Also, this does not account for other items that your employer might withhold for, such as medical and dental insurance.

[oregonwoodsmoke]

And it will be a lot less than that if you have insurance and retirement taken out,

[EnricoV]

When I did the same calculations, with a monthly pay, married with 4 deductions I get:

Monthly Gross Pay $4,166.67
Federal Withholding $251.88
Social Security $258.33
Medicare $60.42
Oregon $220.00
WC $2.77

Net Pay $3,373.27

In my experience in bookkeeping (though it's been a few years now), the actual withholding vs. you annual taxes are fairly accurate. They used to be off quite a bit, so taking 0 deductions made sense. They didn't seem to anymore, the last time I was doing payroll for our company. And that's a difference of $250 a month.

[dent_arthur_dent]

Hm. Thanks. So with healthcare deductions it would end up coming in at just under $3,000 a month?

Is that livable for a family of four in Portland? We'd hopefully be owning rather than renting (we have a decent-sized downpayment, so our mortgage repayments would be around $900-1,000/mo)

[Hemlock140]

Last time I was making that amount with a family of 4, I took home about $1,500 every two weeks. That was with withholding for medical, retirement,
and federal taxes, no state income tax. It will vary depending on how much the employer takes out for retirement, and your medical contribution. With good credit that should allow you to qualify for a $1,000/mo home loan.

[NWGirl74]

If you live very simply, it might be but I think it would be hard with a family of 4. Depending on where you work, you may also have to factor in monthly parking or TriMet passes.

[crisw]

With that mortgage payment in mind, depending on what a "decent-sized" downpayment is, you are looking at a house in the $250-275,000 range. You may want to take a look at rmls.com RMLS.com™ Regional Multiple Listing Service - Residential Search to see what that will get you. Basically, you are probably looking at the suburbs if you want a decent-sized house with a yard. You can definitely get a nice house in somewhere like Milwaukie or Beaverton with that amount. Since you have kids (we don't, so I don't have a lot of school knowledge) you'll want to look at the neighborhoods you can afford and then the schools that serve them. Also, where you will be working. The commute from Milwaukie to downtown, for example, is easy. The commute from Milwaukie to Beaverton or Hillsboro isn't something I'd want to do.

[oldtintype]

It also depends on childcare. If one of you is staying home with the kids then it's definitely do-able. If both kids are in daycare, it's not. Are you going to have one car or two? If your kids aren't in day care, you have one car, and you're not going out all the time it's do-able. There are lots of free activities for kids, co-op preschools, community center activities, museum memberships, etc. to keep kids busy without spending a lot of money. As a grad student I have a pretty low income right now but my kids are kept busy and happy. Just depends on how you live. I have high speed internet, but we don't have cable TV, we watch netflix. Etc.

I disagree that you need to move to the suburbs. There are a lot of neighborhoods filled with young kids that are up and coming such as Foster-Powell, parts of north Portland, etc. where houses are still inexpensive and they're close to downtown/inner Portland and transportation. It depends on what you're looking for. Some people are more flexible than others in terms of what their neighborhood needs to look like.

[Steve Pickering]

It depends more on your lifestyle. I have lived fine (10 years ago) on $369 a month, and I have been broke on $100,000 a year. At one time I had $3,700,000 in the bank with interest at over 15% drawn monthly, and my cost of living was just as related to income as when I had $369 a month.