% of net worth in home

What are your hypothetical age, income, and income outlook? What price home would you hypothetically be happy in for the next decade?

To inonada's excellent list of questions, I would add: what percentage of the purchase price will this allocation represent? (In other words, what percentage of the price do you envision as a down payment?) The smaller the down payment, the lower the percentage of your net worth it should represent, unless you have great income prospects and balls of brass.

Some answers: age 40, income 1M stable outlook. Home range is 3-4M. In order to keep payments under control and not feel like I am a mortgage slave I would be looking to put 40% down.

Apologies in advance for repost, but just moving my post from the original thread that got a bit off-topic to this one with a more clearly stated question.

Here is how I've thought about this. We are cautious, lived in much less apartment than we could have afforded for quite a few years and built up liquid assets. When we did buy, we paid cash and put about 40% of our assets into the apartment, which was still less apartment than we would have liked to have and obviously less than could have afforded (simply by taking on a mortgage, for example). So the circumstances are somewhat different from those of the OP, but let's focus on the 40%-of-net-worth-in-the-apartment aspect of it.

I feel that 40% is a high concentration in any one asset and not desirable/not comfortable for me over the long or even medium term. However, if the outlook for income and further asset accumulation is good then it can be OK in the short term. Ali's point is therefore an important one. In our case, we were confident in income prospects, so that 40% at closing would become ~35% after a year, ~30% after 2, etc. as the denominator got bigger. 25% in the medium term and trending down from there feels like a good level to me, but that is certainly more personal preference than science.

Eight years later, the apartment is worth somewhat more than we paid (having been worth quite a bit more than that a one point in between) but assets are up quite a bit and the apartment is under 20% of total assets currently. This feels very comfortable, even for a nervous nellie like me. We have been thinking of trading up but remain cautious - a caution embodied in my SE handle. I would not want to put 40% of assets into a trade-up situation because the reality is that assets are no longer growing at the same rate (base is bigger and harder to grow) so the path from 40% to my target of sub-25% would be longer than the 3-4 years that I would like to see.

again, a question for a financial planer, not RE brokers.

1) Financial planners I have talked to, including my accountant, are weak. They are the same guys that were boasting about buying a condo in Vegas in 2006 for 'investment' purposes. I prefer crowdsourcing an answer.

You are obviously talking to the wrong people.

Typically, the larger your net worth is, the smaller the portion housing represents. Like sidelinesitter, we bought 9 yrs ago but our apt was 80% of our net worth at the time. Today it is 26% because we paid down our mortgage, our apt is worth more, we saved money, and our investments have grown. Personally, I wouldn't be comfortable with housing being more than 30% of our net worth today because my job in finance is very precarious although my husband's job is very secure. I think the answer depends on the security of your income and your future prospects.

What % of net worth should be in purchasing an apartment.
at 50 with that kind of $ and stable income don't you think you should reach for the stars?
You have 25 yrs + income generating time and you have to live somewhere.
Live like a big wheel.

sorry at 40
50 is a different story

IMHO
you could put down up to 60% of net worth.