Starting a home buying process means answering a lot of questions:

• Are you ready to buy a home?


• How much of a mortgage loan can you afford?


• How's your credit?


• What size house do you need?


• How are your cash reserves?

The more Q&A, research and soul searching you do in advance, the smoother the process will be later on. Let's look, then, at one of the key questions from this list.

What Can You Afford?

Before house hunting, you should determine how much of a mortgage you can comfortably afford. "Comfortably" means you can pay your mortgage each month and still have money for living expenses, savings, and quality-of-life niceties.

In other words, you don't want a mortgage payment that forces you to "squeak by" each month.

To determine your mortgage comfort-zone, you need three things: a budget, a price and a mortgage calculator. For the price, just start with the cost of a house you think you might be interested in buying.

At first, don't worry about whether the price is too high -- you'll find that out soon enough when you run the numbers.

Next, run the home price through a mortgage calculator at current interest rates and at a 30-year fixes mortgage. You might choose a different mortgage type later on, but this exercise is just to get a ballpark mortgage payment based on home price. So choose the 30-year fixed option for the sake of simplicity.

Mortgage calculators can easily be found on the Internet. Just type "mortgage calculator" into any major search engine, and you'll find several. Or, you can use the calculators we provide at HomeBuyingInstitute.com.

Once you've obtained an approximate monthly payment for various mortgage sizes, you can more accurately figure the price ranges into your budget. It's a quick and easy way to see what homes are inside your comfort zone -- and to find out exactly what your comfort zone is in the first place.

Brandon Cornett is the editor of HomeBuyingInstitute.com, one of the Internet's largest and most respected libraries of home buying information - more than 100 expert articles in 12 different home buying categories! Put this knowledge to use by visiting http://www.HomeBuyingInstitute.com.