Their timing was lucky: Tim Anderson and his wife bought a house in Austin, Texas in late 2019, just before the pandemic hit and competition for houses got intense.
But as home prices have risen in the area and around the country, so has their monthly payment, especially in the last year -- their property taxes and home insurance combined have jumped almost $3,000.
"That kind of gave me pause," Anderson said. "And I said, 'Oh, well, this is something to kind of pay attention to.'"
A lot of people are having similar experiences all across the country.
Taxes and home insurance now make up about a third of the average single family homeowner's monthly payment, according to recent data from Intercontinental Exchange. That's more than at any other point since the company started tracking those metrics ten years ago. And a growing number of homeowners are putting upwards of 50% of their monthly payment toward taxes and insurance.
Insurance premiums, in particular, have been rising fast. Nationwide, homeowners are now paying 52% more for home insurance than they were in 2020. In New Orleans and several cities in Florida, they're paying upwards of 80% more.
"There are a number of different reasons behind it. One is the increasing frequency and magnitude of natural disasters," said Andy Walden, the head of mortgage and housing research at Intercontinental Exchange. "More than 10% of U.S. homes were directly in the path of a hurricane within the last six months. And then you can look at what's going on in Los Angeles with some of the largest, most destructive wildfires that we've seen in state history out there. Then you can look at the rising costs to repair and rebuild in the wake of those storms."
All of that has been driving many insurers to both raise rates and get more aggressive about dropping or refusing to cover homeowners in areas they perceive to be too risky.
In addition to climate change, Amy Bach, executive director at the nonprofit United Policyholders, said there's another big factor: technology.
"What I think is more driving the premium increases and the reduced competition across the country is the explosion in insurer tech tools that insurers are using to make their business decision," she said. "So for example, insurers are using drone images of people's roofs and properties as a basis for dropping them."
Many are also using artificial intelligence tools now, that mine databases with all sorts of information about homes and give them a "risk score."
"They are taking these tools, these risk scores," Bach said, "and they're using them to non-renew existing customers, they're using them to reject new applicants."
There's also the fact that home prices have skyrocketed in the last few years, since the pandemic began -- the more a home is worth, the more it costs to insure, and the higher property taxes are, too.
Most existing homeowners probably haven't had their taxes jump too much, even if the value of their house has, according to Jenny Schuetz, vice president of infrastructure, housing at Arnold Ventures. "There are a lot of ways that states and localities try to protect people against their property taxes going up."
Often this is done by capping how much the tax rate or dollar amount can go up each year. But there's no such cap when homes go up for sale.
"For long-term homeowners, this means you're effectively getting a really big discount on your taxes," Schuetz said. "But what that does is, it means that people who've bought homes more recently wind up paying a lot more relative to somebody whose house is identical, but because you bought it more recently, the market value and the assessed value are closer to one another."
On top of already-high home prices and mortgage rates, rising insurance and taxes are making owning increasingly unaffordable for many people.
"Among folks that are on the lower end of the income ladder, we've started to see mortgage delinquency rates start to creep up," said Andy Walden at Intercontinental Exchange. "Especially among folks that have bought over the last couple of years."
For many others, homeownership is just eating up a bigger chunk of their monthly income.
Kurt Allebach and his wife bought their house near Tampa, Florida, in the late 1990s. Over the years, their home insurance crept up, and then shot up -- it's now almost $11,000 dollars a year, double what it was just in 2020. Plus another nearly $700 for flood insurance. And even though they're paying a lot more, they have less coverage.
"I've kept the cost down by increasing my deductible, which, you know, not necessarily a great thing," Allebach said. "So now if my house gets blown away, I think I'm on the hook for the first $15,000. Where back probably in 2008, I was on the hook for the first $5,000. That makes a big difference."
Insurance costs are one of the reasons he and his wife are now planning to sell their house.
"I'm still working largely because, you know, what's going to happen next with insurance here in Florida," he said. "You know, I can't say, 'Hey, here's my income stream needed in retirement,' when my homeowners insurance may double next year."
So they're planning to leave Florida, and move to Little Rock, Arkansas. Mostly because that's where their daughter lives now, but also because housing and insurance cost less there, too.