My partner and I have been lucky these past couple years to have family members offering us places to live. But now we're trying to get out of the suburbs and move to the city so we have to find our own place to live. I've found places to live before but that was way before COVID and way before I had pets and I really don't want to get completely fucked by a landlord.
Are there any tips for finding a place to live, especially for people with pets? Any good websites/should we just use craiglist/does craiglist suck? What's the biggest percentage of our combined paychecks that should go to rent? What should we do? Please help lol.
We both make a couple dollars more than our local minimum wage but we're still working class if that helps. We'd love to rent a house but I doubt we could afford it
for budgeting purposes, in the US... anything less than 33% of the household's take home monthly pay is considered "reasonable" or "not rent burdened" according to social work metrics. people in MCOL and HCOL are unlikely to find a housing situation which is not rent burdened. obviously, any lower you can find than 33% is better. i had a place once that was about 22% of my household's take home and it opened up my life in terms of actually having savings, etc.
they may not know, but it never hurts to ask what typical utility bills are like in the hot/cold seasons.