Before producers built a replica of Dexter’s apartment in a Hollywood studio, they filmed at a real apartment in Miami’s Bay Harbor Club Condos (1155 103rd Street, Bay Harbor Island, Miami Beach), a gated community with a private car park, shared heated pool and impressive views of Biscayne Bay. In March 2019, Dexter’s second-floor apartment had an estimated value of US$240,000.

Dexter Morgan worked as a blood spatter analyst for the fictitious Miami-Metro Police Department. As a point of comparison, data from the American Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that a forensic science technician working in Florida can expect to earn an annual salary of around US$49,400.

Canstar’s calculations assume that Dexter would put 30% of this pre-tax salary towards saving for a deposit and repaying his mortgage. Doing so would mean paying US$1,235 a month, assuming a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, and result in Dexter being mortgage-free after 19 years and four months.

Supersleuth Sherlock Holmes might be able to solve the most perplexing of crimes, but even he might struggle to find a way to pay off the mortgage on his central London flat using the modest earnings of the average private investigator today. Let’s look at the evidence…

221B Baker Street is a famous but fictional address; a comparable place on the same street would be Flat 10 at 99 Baker Street, which has a current value of £1,675,800, according to UK site Zoopla. That means a 20% deposit will cost Sherlock £335,160, and take him 30 years and six months to save up for, if setting aside 30% of his monthly income.

Speaking of income, you might think that being a world-renowned private investigator would come with a suitably hefty wage but, according to payscale.com, the average annual salary for a detective or criminal investigator in the UK is £36,712, as of March 2019. This, combined with a property of that value, means that paying off a 30-year home loan with a 4.44% p.a. interest rate is going to be anything but elementary for our eccentric, but brilliant detective. In actual fact, he’d never pay it off on our estimate of his earnings – the only way he’d be able to do so would be to see his salary multiply by more than seven times to at least £269,805 a year.

With this in mind, perhaps he and Dr Watson will be paying rent to Mrs Hudson for some time to come…

Before relocating his family to the Ozarks, Marty Byrde was a financial adviser in Chicago (apart from being a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel, of course). He continues this role on a freelance basis in his new home in Missouri and, according to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median earnings for this profession in this state are US$66,200. This would give Marty a gross monthly income of US$5,517.

Incidentally, the house used as the Byrde residence in Ozark isn’t actually near Lake Ozark, or even in Missouri – it’s in a small city called Flowery Branch in the state of Georgia, more than 700 miles (about 1,200km) south-east of the lake that the Netflix show is centred around. The precise location is hard to pinpoint, as the house is on a track road off Gaines Ferry Road, but a similar-sized house next door is worth approximately US$704,144, according to Zillow, in March 2019.

But, just as in Ozark itself, saving for a deposit and getting a mortgage is only going to add to Marty’s already lengthy list of financial woes. If he sets aside 30% of his earnings each month, it will take him around seven years and two months to come up with a 20% deposit, but that’s nothing compared to the mortgage repayments. Assuming a home loan with a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, he’d actually need to pay US$2,834 a month to clear his debt over 30 years, but that’s more than half his gross monthly earnings. That means that based on his current estimated salary alone, he’ll never be mortgage-free.

If he wants to pay off his mortgage in 30 years, Marty will have to increase his income to at least US$113,367 a year, which he may think he can manage in the short term, if he factors in the proceeds of his illicit side-hustle. However, given the drug dealers and government authorities taking a keen interest in his finances, keeping up those home loan repayments for very long seems unlikely…

The BBC’s Bodyguard series centres around two characters, Home Secretary Julia Montague and her protection officer, sergeant David Budd.

The block of flats used for David’s home in the show was Stoneleigh Terrace, which forms part of architect Peter Tabori’s well-known Whittington Estate in Highgate, North London. Publicly available data shows that the most recent property sale in Stoneleigh Terrace was a flat which sold for £815,000 in October 2018.

The annual salary for a relatively experienced sergeant like David in the London Metropolitan Police would be around £43,134, plus a ‘London weighting’ of £2,373, based on the British Police Pay Award for 2018/19.

Assuming David saves 30% of his salary to put towards the £163,000 deposit, it would take him 12 years to get the cash together. Sadly, this would be a fruitless exercise because, on his current salary, there’s no way he’d even pay the interest incurred by the loan over his lifetime, let alone pay off the entire mortgage, assuming he’s charged a 4.44% p.a. interest rate. He’d need to earn at least £131,215 a year – pretty much triple his current salary – to be able to afford it within 30 years.

Malorie Hayes might want to keep that blindfold on, because these mortgage figures aren’t a pretty sight.

First off, the spacious house owned by John Malkovich’s character, Douglas, in Bird Box is located in 304 N Canyon Blvd, Monrovia, California, around 20 miles (32km) north-east of Los Angeles. US property site Redfin estimates its value to be US$1,848,980. That’s a fair bit of dough, and almost certainly more than Malorie’s artist salary could accommodate. According to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, artists in California earn a median salary of US$64,120 a year.

The US$369,796 deposit alone would take her 19 years and three months to save up for, but the monthly repayments she’d need to come up with to clear the mortgage in 30 years would be US$7,442 – pretty tricky given her estimated gross monthly income is US$5,343.

In fact, assuming her home loan had a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, there’s no way Malorie would even pay the interest incurred by the loan over her lifetime, let alone pay off the entire mortgage. If she bought the property from Douglas, the only way she’d ever be able to be mortgage-free within three decades would be to earn at least US$297,687, more than four-and-a-half times her current salary.

Joyce Byers’ house is a three-bedroom bungalow featuring a living room, kitchen, bathroom, hallway and porch, as well as a shed and dog house. The real house, where some of the show’s most pivotal scenes were filmed, isn’t in Indiana at all, but around 600 miles (almost 1,000km) south of the State in Fayetteville, Georgia – 149 Coastline Road, to be precise. Zillow.com estimates its worth at US$201,588, as of March 2019.

From what we can gather about Joyce at the start of the show, her determination to provide for her sons, Jonathan and Will, sees her put in significant hours working as a retail clerk in a local store in Hawkins, Indiana. A job which can expect to earn her a salary of around US$21,080 a year, according to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bringing in US$1,757 a month means that a 20% deposit of US$40,318 would take her more than six years to save, assuming she sets aside 30% of those monthly earnings.

As if Joyce hasn’t got enough on her plate, paying off her mortgage could cause her further headaches. Realistically she’d only be able to offer around US$527 a month for repayments, but assuming her lender charges 4.44% p.a. interest, she’d need to pay US$770 to pay off the mortgage within 30 years. In order to be able to do this, Joyce would need to get her boss Mr Melvald to agree to a pay rise to an annual salary of at least $32,456, and this is without factoring in any potential ongoing medical costs for her son Will.

“Maybe I’m a mess, maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m out of my mind,” Joyce once said in the show. These figures are unlikely to make her feel any better.

Since 2009, Modern Family has followed the lives of three families in Los Angeles, one of which is headed up by self-proclaimed ‘cool dad’ Phil Dunphy. Sadly, even taking into account his job as a real estate agent, the cost of Phil’s house and his potential income aren’t quite as cool as he might hope.

In his day job, Phil would have no problem selling the benefits of his house to potential buyers: it’s an impressive four-bedroom, five-bathroom residence in the west of LA, roughly halfway between Santa Monica and Hollywood. As of March 2019, Zillow reckoned its value to be US$2,849,472.

But with the American Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that the median salary of a real estate agent in California is US$52,380 a year, that doesn’t bode well for Phil’s mortgage. It would take him 36 years and four months just to save up a 20% deposit of US$569,894, while he’d never be able to pay off the mortgage due to the fact that the interest would be more than his repayment capabilities. This is hardly surprising when you consider that his gross monthly income would be around US$4,365, while the monthly repayments needed to repay the mortgage over 30 years at a 4.44% p.a. interest rate work out at US$11,469. In order to clear the mortgage in that timeframe, Phil would need to earn US$458,766 – over eight-and-a-half times his current salary.

New York has long been a source of amusement for movie and TV critics, some of whom point out characters who would most likely not be able to afford their homes in real life. Think of the cast of Friends with their spacious loft apartment, or Carrie Bradshaw, who lived in a swanky Upper East Side apartment on a writer’s salary in Sex and the City. Now, Netflix thriller You is the latest to pair a modestly paid character with a home that, on the face of it, appears to be well beyond their financial means.

In You, Guinevere Beck is a graduate writing student who also works as a teaching assistant. The American Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, as of May 2017, the average salary for this job in New York state is US$36,560. Meanwhile, her address in the show is given as 171 Bank Street in the West Village, and while that’s a real address, it is not a residential one. But a similar-looking ground-level apartment at 117 Bank Street is worth around US$935,990, as of March 2019, according to zillow.com.

Unfortunately for Beck, she could be into her 40s before she’s even saved up the 20% deposit of US$187,198 – it’ll take her 17 years and a month on those wages. In fairness to showrunners Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti, Beck does explain at one point that her housing is subsidised by her university employer, but if that ended and she kept her current salary, she’d also be incapable of even paying the interest incurred by the loan over her lifetime, let alone the mortgage. In reality, she’d need to earn at least US$150,695, more than four times the amount she does at the moment, to clear it in 30 years at an interest rate of 4.44% per annum.

In all probability, if Beck feels like someone’s watching her aside from Joe, it might just be her bank manager.

Coronation Street’s famous terraced houses are found in the fictitious area of Weatherfield, but given the set’s location in Salford, just outside Manchester in the UK, this is a good place to look for an equivalently sized and priced property. There are plenty to choose from – £148,000 for a four-bedroom house could be a realistic comparison, based on an estimate by British property website home.co.uk.

The current owner of 13 Coronation Street, Kevin Webster, is a car mechanic by trade, and co-owner of Webster’s Autocentre. Payscale.com estimates the average annual salary for an automotive service manager is £29,093.

By putting away 30% of his monthly salary towards the 20% deposit of £29,600, Kevin will have the deposit together in just under three-and-a-half years. When it comes to paying off his mortgage, he’ll have the whole thing cleared in 20 years and 10 months, assuming an interest rate of 4.44% per annum.

That’s good news, Kevin – maybe a celebratory evening down the Rovers is in order?

As many fans of the show would know, iconic EastEnders pub The Queen Vic is located in the fictional London area of Walford. Many pubs are available to both lease and buy in London, but we based our calculations on an outright sale and found the asking price for a comparable pub to The Queen Vic on Rightmove to be around £1,500,000 in March 2019.

A pub landlord’s typical income is also tricky to pin down, given that it’s influenced by the success of the pub, its location and the spending potential of people around it, but payscale.com estimates that a bar manager’s average annual salary in London is £25,275.

That means that, based on this estimate, if Mick wants this pub, he’s probably going to be in it for the long haul. The deposit alone will be £300,000, and if Mick sets aside 30% of his monthly earnings for savings, it would take him a colossal 39 years and seven months to pull together the deposit alone.

When it comes to paying off the mortgage, things don’t look much rosier. He’d need to pay off £6,037 a month in order to clear that mortgage over 30 years, based on a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, but his gross monthly earnings only come to £2,106.

This means, he’d actually need to earn at least £241,500 a year in order to pay off a mortgage of this size in that timeframe, which is nearly 10 times his actual estimated salary. Blimey, guv!

It’s no secret that the location used for Ramsay Street is, in fact, Pin Oak Court in Vermont South, Melbourne, and the house ‘belonging’ to Dr Karl Kennedy is number 5. It’s an attractive four-bedroom home in the east of Melbourne, about half an hour’s drive from the city centre.

Realestate.com.au estimates the value of the house at somewhere between AU$900,000 and AU$1,300,000 as of March 2019, so let’s go right in the middle and work on a value of AU$1,100,000. Meanwhile, an experienced medic like Dr Karl could expect to be on a salary of around AU$350,000, according to a calculator provided by General Practice Registrars Australia.

If Karl is going to put down a 20% deposit on his Ramsay Street house, he’d need about AU$220,000. He could save A$8,750 a month if he put aside 30% of his income. This means if he had no existing savings, it would take him just over two years to get the deposit together.

Assuming Karl took out a home loan with a fixed 4.44% p.a. interest rate on the remaining AU$880,000 and wanted to repay the mortgage over three decades, he’d need to pay about AU$4,427 a month. But if he put 30% of his salary towards the mortgage it would take him just 10 years and seven months – that’s just under 13 years if you factor in the time to save for the deposit as well. That’ll leave him plenty of time to monitor the blood pressure of Erinsborough rogue Paul Robinson…

The dysfunctional Bluth family are no strangers to financial problems, with patriarch George having been imprisoned for fraud. As such, it’s left to his son Michael, played by Jason Bateman, to take responsibility… but would he be able to manage a mortgage on the model home?

The real house used for the exterior shots in Arrested Development can be found at 23155 Dolorosa Street, Woodland Hills, California, about 20 miles (32km) north-west of central Los Angeles. As of March 2019, property website Zillow estimated the value of this five-bedroom, five-bathroom house to be US$2,169,802.

Meanwhile, Michael Bluth took over as president of the Bluth Company, following his dad’s sentencing. The American Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 2017 figures show the average salary of chief executives in California to be US$222,950; this means a 20% deposit on this house would take Michael around six-and-a-half years to save.

Unfortunately, the prospect of paying off the mortgage is going to be another thing added to the Bluth family’s list of monetary woes. If we assume he took out a home loan with an interest rate of 4.44% per annum, then, on his current salary, Michael would never be able to pay the interest incurred in his lifetime, let alone the entire mortgage. He’d actually need to earn at least US$349,339 in order to do so.

Never mind Michael, there’s always money in the banana stand…

Mad Men’s suave main character, Don Draper, is a creative director at a Manhattan advertising agency. At one point in the show, his salary is stated to be US$45,000 plus a US$2,500 bonus. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI inflation calculator, that total of US$47,500 in 1962 works out to be an income of almost US$400,000 in 2019 and a healthy gross monthly income of US$33,212.

The property used in the show to portray Draper’s house is actually in Los Angeles – 675 Arden Road, Pasadena, to be precise. Zillow estimates that the value of this spacious, four-bedroom house, as of March 2019, is US$2,255,563, meaning that a 20% deposit will cost Don US$451,113. Assuming he puts away 30% of his earnings a month to save for it, which is US$9,964, it’ll take him the best part of four years to get that deposit ready.

In good news for Don, his earnings will afford him a repayment period of just over 25 years for the remaining 80% of the property, assuming he has a home loan with an interest rate of 4.44% per annum.

You’re unlikely to find many cooler properties than the one used as Hank Moody’s house in Californication. With seven bedrooms, a media room, roof deck, fire pit and a swimming pool set in a futuristic design across nearly 5000 square feet, it’s no wonder this Venice Beach property sold for US$14,600,000 in 2017.

Estimating Hank’s salary is a little more complex. He drives a Porsche so it’s fair to assume that, along with the house he lives in, he’s doing well career-wise and reaping the rewards financially. We’ve estimated he earns around US$102,050 a year, based on data from the American Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If Hank puts away 30% of his estimated monthly income, it’s going to take him about 95 years and five months just to save for the US$2,920,000 deposit on the property. As for the mortgage, Hank wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the monthly repayments of US$58,765 if he wanted to pay off the mortgage within 30 years at an interest rate of 4.44% per annum, given that the total he brings in every month is US$8,504.

To put it another way, seeing as Hank’s property is worth 143 times his estimated annual salary, he’ll probably never be able to repay his mortgage. The only way he’d be able to do so in 30 years would be to see his salary jump to at least US$2,350,607 – that’s 23 times more than his estimated salary.

Quit the partying, Hank – you’re going to have to write a lot more scripts to cover that.

“It’s not a house, it’s a home,” says Darryl Kerrigan in cult movie The Castle, which centres around the Kerrigan family and their house in the Coolaroo district of Melbourne. The actual house where filming took place was located just south of Coolaroo in Strathmore, next to Essendon Airport. And while the Kerrigans saw it as priceless, the real-life dwelling was recently sold at auction for just AU$40,000.

Kerrigan supports his family through his job as a tow truck driver, which payscale.com estimates has an average salary of AU$46,192 in Melbourne today. That means a gross monthly income of AU$3,849, and working on the basis that he could save 30% of it, it’s going to take Darryl a mere seven months of tow-trucking to gather together an AU$8,000 deposit, or two years and 11 months, if he wanted to save up the full purchase price rather than taking out a home loan.

On the other hand, if he did take out a home loan on the property, Darryl would take two years and six months to pay off a mortgage of AU$32,000, assuming he committed 30% of his income to repayments and had an interest rate of 4.44% per annum.

In real life, Tony Soprano’s spacious house in New Jersey, built in 1987 and packing a triple garage, has a value of US$1,603,557, as of March 2019, according to Zillow. That’s small change to a prominent mob boss like Tony, but it’s a different picture if we look at it solely through the salary of Tony’s ‘legitimate’ job – a waste management consultant. According to salary.com in March 2019, waste management managers in New Jersey have an average salary of US$118,635 a year. Bada bing!

But if Tony’s going to get his 20% deposit of US$320,711 together, without the use of underhand mob tactics like money laundering and fraud, he’s going to have to do it the old-fashioned way and save. If he puts away 30% of his monthly income, that means it’ll take him just over nine years to come up with the deposit.

The bad news is that, even on this tidy salary, Tony would never be able to pay off his mortgage at an interest rate of 4.44% per annum. So Tony, whatyagunnado? Well, he’d need to more than double his salary to at least US$262,199 in order to be able to clear this mortgage in 30 years.

Just as well he’s got another income…

The Brady Bunch home is so famous around the world that it’s been described as America’s most-photographed residence after The White House. The five-bedroom, three-bathroom home from the series sits on Dilling Street, North Hollywood, and sold in October 2018 for US$3,500,000.

In The Brady Bunch, Mike Brady is an architect – the American Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the median annual salary for an architect in California is US$88,780, or US$7,398 a month. So setting aside 30% of this (US$2,219.50) to save for the 20% deposit of US$700,000 would take poor Mike more than 26 years.

But that’s nothing compared to the rest of the mortgage. Mike would need to pay US$13,368 a month in order to pay off a home loan with a 4.44% p.a. interest rate over 30 years. Even if he put 30% of his income into mortgage repayments, he’d only be able to pay US$2,219.50 a month.

In short, the only way Mike Brady is going to pay off this mortgage within 30 years, based on these assumptions, is if he somehow manages to score a pay increase to at least US$563,502 a year. Given that’s more than six times greater than his estimated salary, that would be one impressive pay rise!

The house from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is, in fact, in the neighbouring area of Brentwood – still a very sought-after location but without quite the same amount of prestige as Bel-Air. That probably accounts for the fact that, while the home, built in 1937, is an impressive property with five bedrooms and five bathrooms covering nearly 6,500 square feet, its value, as of March 2019, according to realtor.com, is around US$5.9 million – considerably less than it likely would be in Bel-Air.

In the famous ’90s sitcom, Philip Banks (or ‘Uncle Phil’, as he’s known to Will Smith’s character) is a judge in LA, the average salary for which these days is US$185,120, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite this being a relatively high salary, it will still take Uncle Phil some time to save up for a deposit of US$1,185,960 – about 21 years and five months, to be exact.

It’s a similar story when it comes to Uncle Phil paying off this home over 30 years, using a home loan with an interest rate of 4.44% per annum. He’d need to contribute US$23,868 a month to clear this, but his gross monthly take-home is only US$15,427. The reality is that he’d need to see his salary multiply by more than five times — to at least US$954,701 — to be able to pay off this mortgage over that timeframe.

In reality, Tony Stark’s incredible glass-panelled house in the Iron Man movies was generated digitally, but The Razor Residence comes quite close appearance-wise. It’s located not in Malibu but about 150 miles (240km) south in San Diego, and it’s a stunning property: six bedrooms, six bathrooms, a detached guesthouse, a rooftop terrace, outdoor kitchen and incredible views of the Pacific Ocean are just some of the reasons why, as of March 2019, online real estate site Zillow rated its value at US$30 million (March 2019).

When it comes to the man who runs the fictitious Stark Industries Tony Stark, calculating his likely salary is a tricky exercise, but here’s a rough estimate. Back in 2007, Forbes calculated Stark Industries’ annual revenues as US$20.3 billion in its list of ‘The 25 Largest Fictional Companies’.

So, if we imagine Tony Stark with the average salary that a CEO can expect to earn in California, which is US$222,950, according to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, his gross earnings each month would be US$18,579, but the 20% deposit on the US$30 million house will be US$6 million. With Tony saving 30% of his monthly pay, that deposit will take him 89 years and nine months to put away. And there is no way he’d use his company’s massive revenues to help pay off his mortgage – he’d probably put it towards building his superhero suits and fighting crime instead.

Problems worsen when it transpires that Stark would need to repay US$120,750 a month over 30 years to pay off the property with a home loan that came with a 4.44% p.a. interest rate. In fact, he’d need to increase his salary by more than 21 times to at least US$4,830,014 to be able to afford it within three decades.

James Bond’s plush apartment in the film Spectre is found at 1 Stanley Crescent, in the sought-after West London district of Notting Hill. According to UK property website Zoopla, as of March 2019, its current value is £6,323,000. Sadly, a look at the average earnings of spies at MI6 might leave Bond shaken and stirred if he’s thinking about getting a mortgage.

As befits his mysterious reputation, information in the film series about Bond’s salary is limited, but in the book Moonraker, we’re told his annual income in 1955 was £2,500. Using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, that puts his yearly gross salary at around £64,432 in today’s money, which probably won’t do him much good saving up to buy his swanky Notting Hill apartment. A 20% deposit works out at £1,264,600. If James could put aside £1,611 a month – 30% of his monthly income – it would take him nearly 66 years to save that up, although given his access to an apparently unlimited expenses account, this may not be as much of a concern for him as one might expect.

Things don’t get much better when it comes to paying off his mortgage. If James had a home loan with a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, he’d most likely never pay the interest incurred through the loan in his lifetime, let alone pay off the entire mortgage. In fact, he’d need a salary of at least £1,018,006 – more than 15 times his current one – in order to afford it in 30 years.

Melrose Place was a 1990s American TV show that centred around a group of people who lived in an apartment complex of the same name in Hollywood, Los Angeles. This being Hollywood, a bit of artistic licence was applied – the apartment block used as the exterior for Melrose Place is actually 4616 Greenwood Place in the neighbourhood of Los Feliz, about four-and-a-half miles (7km) north-east of glitzy Melrose Avenue. According to realtor.com, average prices for an apartment there, as of March 2019, were US$1,608,700.

Dr Michael Mancini is the only character to appear in the entire run of Melrose Place, and according to the May 2017 numbers from the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, a physician or surgeon in California could expect to earn an average annual salary of US$214,730. That means that a 20% deposit of US$321,740 on this apartment would take Michael five years to save up for, assuming he set aside 30% of his salary each month.

However, it’s paying off the mortgage that might raise Dr Mancini’s blood pressure. It would take the sneaky specialist almost 50 years to do so, based on a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, if his lender agreed to give him an extended loan term and he contributed the same 30% of his salary to repayments. Alternatively, a pay rise of at least US$259,001 would allow him to be mortgage-free in 30 years.

If it seems implausible that the central premise of Notting Hill is the coming together of self-effacing English book-seller William Thacker and a famous Hollywood actress, that’s nothing compared to the likelihood of Hugh Grant’s character being able to pay off the mortgage on his West London flat.

The flat used as the front for Thacker’s home in Notting Hill is located on 280 Westbourne Park Road, London W11, and was bought for £4,575,000 in June 2014, according to property websites nethouseprices.com and zoopla.co.uk. Given that the former estimates average house prices in the Notting Hill district at £2,294,346, it seems there’s a premium attached to this famous flat and its iconic blue door.

It’s tricky to pinpoint what Thacker’s precise salary would be as the owner of an independent bookshop, but figures from 2011 on thebookseller.com indicate that, according to a survey of bookshop owners, they paid themselves an average annual salary of £22,200 in 2010. Even once we adjust that number for inflation, using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, that still only leaves Thacker with a salary of £27,962 in 2018’s money.

All this means that, just as in the movie, Hugh Grant’s character is going to be doing an awful lot of bumbling, frowning and head-scratching as he comes to terms with the figures. Firstly, it would take him more than 109 years just to save up for a 20% deposit of £915,000, meaning if he started saving in 1999, the year that Notting Hill was released, it would take him until 2108 to pull the money together.

Sadly, on his current estimated salary William would never be able to pay the interest incurred through the loan in his lifetime, let alone pay off the entire mortgage. The only way he’d be able to afford to repay a 30-year home loan, assuming a 4.44% p.a. interest rate, would be to see his salary multiply by 26 times to £736,577 at a minimum. He might need to pick up a serious amount of freelance writing for Horse and Hound magazine to cover that…

The house in Mrs Doubtfire is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom property set over three storeys, located three miles (5km) east of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Zillow estimates its value to be just under US$5 million, as of March 2019, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, estimates that a housekeeper’s median salary in California is around US$25,630.

If Mrs Doubtfire harbours any ambitions of buying the property, she’s going to have to get used to the idea of some serious overtime. Saving 30% of her income towards the deposit means she can put away US$641 a month, but the 20% deposit is a hefty US$977,635. It’d take her more than 127 years to save for that.

Sadly, our cheery nanny will never be able to repay a 30-year mortgage, at an interest rate of 4.44% per annum, on this property, or anything remotely like it. She’d actually need a salary of at least US$786,999 in order to afford it – more than 30 times the amount she earns currently. That would be one highly-paid housekeeper!

Sam Baldwin’s waterfront houseboat in Sleepless in Seattle is arguably the most famous rom-com address on earth, so it’s hardly surprising that it sold for approximately US$2 million in 2014.

As an architect in Seattle, Baldwin would probably be able to earn a decent salary, with the American Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating the average wage in this profession to be US$72,480 in Washington state, as of May 2017.

Sadly for Sam, that’s not going to work when it comes to buying his waterfront pad. The 20% deposit alone would be US$400,000, which would take Sam 18 years and five months to save up. He might also need to point out to Annie that on his current estimated salary he wouldn’t be able to pay the interest incurred through the loan over his lifetime, let alone pay off the entire mortgage at an interest rate of 4.44% per annum. He’d actually need to see his wages multiply by nearly four-and-a-half times to at least US$322,001 if he wanted to do so within the next 30 years.

To put it another way, it’s not just his love life that’s going to make Sam sleepless…