I lived in Portland, one of the most expensive places to live compared to the average income, My GF worked before the baby came which was not exactly planned, and I'm not a piece of shit so I stayed and didn't force her to get rid of it, going from one income to two is hard, you know the feeling. is 220,ooo too much house? I lived in the hood, my house was a 3 br no bath w/o a garage made and made in the 60's, mortgage might not go up but the property taxes do, especially when you have the conservatives in my area passed a law requiring your property taxes to go up even if your house is losing value. So when your mortgage starts out 1200 a month when you first buy your home and then slowly creeps up to 1700 over the course of a few years, so like most americans I thought that refinance would be the answer, take advantage of those low interest rates you know, got it back down to a manageable number and we did, just to watch it rise up again to 1,700. They call it a incentive I call it a hustle, Their big thing about was that " The harder you work the more money you will make" ok sounds great, except when they tell you how your incentive is calculated. I was a framer, we had a production that we were expected to meet which we always met, but then they say if you meet this number we will give you extra this amount, and the higher the production number the more you make O.K until you get that first incentive check and ask how was this calculated and they tell you your incentive is based on the hours that you worked on that task. wait, what? let me break it down for you if you still don't get it after that. There's 1000 lineal feet of wall on a floor, our normal rate of production is 8 LH/hour so it should take 125 MH to complete the floor. but what if I was to frame 10 feet an hour, that would be 100 hours. 1000/8LF= 125 mh 1000/10LF=100 mh * $1.00= $100 1000/12LF= 83 mh* 1.00= 83.00 as you can see the harder I work, the less Incentive I make, so where is the incentive, so they can make a killing off of me. It would have been different If they would have been all up front about it, instead when I bring it up and they tell me if I don't like it they can get someone else to do it... O.K see yah, there's no one else in the company that framed faster than me and my partner so have fun with that. I have more dignity than to let someone take advantage of me like that, but you probably would have stayed and let them rape your hard work like that huh. My GF wasn't ready to be a mother at that time and was having trouble with it, postpartum depression sucks, and it was getting worse her staying home all day, so for the sake of the family WE made the decision for me to stay at home while she worked and it has been that way ever since.