You can afford a home period. I live inward of Anna, TX. When I bought my house in McKinney 20 years ago it was out in the boonies and therefore affordable. Now you can't get a house for less than $400k. So you look 10 more miles out of town. Remote work is not required. People drive from Anna to Dallas to work all the time. And the main traffic artery is jammed for hours because of it.

I got my copy of "The AWK Programming Language" at Half Price Books. It's got code to implement a relational database in AWK if you need joins. And AWK code should run in perl with minimal fuss.