I posted this survey before and its worth looking at. 40% of home owners saying their monthly housing expenses are more than they can comfortably afford is not a great number.

Anecdotally, my wife and I are house hunting and our lender has called me 2-3 times a week to see how the search is going. Every time they call the loan officer reminds me that I am approved for far more than I initially told them I wanted to spend and we can take out a much larger loan if we want to expand our home search. Maybe this is normal for a lender to push this on someone but as a first time buyer I was not expecting that. I expect RE agents to be pushy not lenders. There is no way I could reasonably afford even close to the max loan I have been pre-approved for.