Why Everyone Else is Wrong!

Dear Kelly,
As most of the world now knows my Husbandy thing and I are hunting a house. As a direct result of this we have spent FAR too much time watching HGTV. After watching these shows and occasionally yelling at the people about to buy homes for being fools we sometimes turn to each other and ask "Is there something wrong with us?"
We are fully aware that we may be asking for too much in our first home and we've already made some compromises in that area but are going to hold firm until there is reasonable belief that the house we want is not going to come along in our price range. This is not the cause of our most recent insecurity...or not the one worth blogging about here anyway. :)
Last night I watched a couple put down a down payment only a few thousand larger than ours on a house over 3 times as expensive. Now true the couple was in medicine (with the attendant student loans) and it is a well known fact, that after each shift medical professionals roll around in large piles of cash to clean off the grime of their day.
This would account for the occasionally terrifying statistics on the types of scary impurities on your average dollar bill.
But since no one has managed to burn sarcasm as lantern oil let's just say that my husband and I were at once horrified and horrified. Someone here must be wrong!
Must be wrong...
Now the old MSN calculators are a fine place to turn in times of boredom and I have of course run their "How much home can you afford" calculation more than once. The number they come up with is 2 times the one that I've been using to hunt homes.
I know I know. The conventional wisdom would have it that if 95% of people hold an opinion then there's probably a good reason and they're probably right. However this opinion is on how much house I can afford so I have 2 good reasons to say they're wrong.
1 Have you seen the housing market lately? Apparently not run by Rhodes Scholars.
2 I happen to be me. I have a front row view of my life (whether I want it or not) and therefore happen to know more about myself than most other people. I'd like to think all but there are a few Doctors that might disagree.
The MSN Calculator performs some strange voodoo with numbers that I occasionally had to guess on (for example I don't actually know my credit score). There's multiplying, dividing and probably a fraction or square root thrown in somewhere.
Our calculations are much simpler and threfore easier to trust. Take monthly income minus bills. Some number less than this is how much we can afford a month. Take virtually all money available and call it a down payment. Now no matter how uncool it is that is 20% of what you can afford! PMI Insurance is an expense that you don't have to put up with.
Do not assume you will grow into your house payment you may also loose your job or your leg. Think of it this way, your down payment is how much you've managed to save without selling a kidney up until now. As such it is an ok estimate of what you can save in the future. Do you really want to be any more miserable in the future than you are now?
Sure, I'm oversimplifying but personally I'd rather get less house and know I can pay for it than more and loose it! I realize that the houses in my price range are more or less a mixed bag of feces. All I want is the one piece of...feces that will take a polish!
Now, I can only hope that realtors see it that way and don't try to sell us more house than we can afford. Oh, and for those of you who live in the Harrisburg area, where are the structurally sound crappy looking houses in neighborhoods that don't scare me? Realize that I'm only a little better than a hermit....

Forclosedly yours,
Althea