The dream of owning a home is becoming more elusive for many Americans, with average monthly payments on a new mortgage spiraling to $3,322, a 90% increase from $1,746 just before President Biden took office, the New York Post reports.

Prices on everyday goods — from groceries, to rent, to gas— have also shot up, by a blistering 18.2%.

The CBRE real estate analysis is based on a $430,000 home, which is just about the average $416,000 price of a home in the U.S., with a 30-year mortgage at the going 7.03% average and a 10% down payment.

With average rents costing $1,000 less a month than a mortgage, renting is a wiser move for many — underscoring how unaffordable and bleak today’s housing market has become.

The Federal Reserve has increased the fed funds rate from near zero in April 2020 to a 22-year high of 5.25%-5.5%.

While Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com, expects mortgage rates to average 6.8% in 2024 and to tick further down to 6.5% by the end of the year — that will only mean a savings of $200 to $400 off monthly mortgage payments, hardly a deciding factor for hopeful homeowners.

“It is definitely a very, very challenging market to be a first-time homebuyer,” Jones admits. “First-time home buyers don’t inherently have a home sale to leverage into a home purchase and so it does make it very challenging to save for a down payment. Especially a down payment large enough to purchase a home at today’s prices.”

Those intent on moving or buying a home are making concessions, Jones says.

“For first-time home buyers there are a lot of creative solutions that we are seeing, such as moving to areas that are maybe a little bit further out or moving to areas that are a little bit lower priced,” Jones says. “We have seen the popularity of the Midwest and lower-priced Northeast markets really surge over the last year as home prices have gotten really high.”

Jones agrees with many other experts that renting is a wise choice for many right now, even though rents have surged more than 20% in the past three years to a median of $2,011 in October, up from $1,667 in October 2020.

“The rental market is still an okay place to wait things out if it is just not in the cards right now. The worst thing you can do is to get yourself in a situation where you purchased a home you cannot afford or it is not comfortable.”

As far as hopes for filling pantries, refrigerators and gas tanks at lower costs, “I wouldn’t count on prices broadly declining,” says Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi.