WHEN Janey Lee and Pablo Agüero were struggling freelance Web designers, buying an apartment in Manhattan seemed like a dream, one clouded by credit-card debt, student loans that had to be repaid and the bills for their wedding.

But now, five years later, they are about to move into a $445,000 two-bedroom condo in Hamilton Heights, in Upper Manhattan, with their 5-month-old daughter, Matilda. Their combined salaries of just over $100,000 qualified them for a mortgage, but it took a lot more for them to come up with the down payment.

In a city synonymous with luxury and spending, Ms. Lee, 30, and Mr. Agüero, 35, decided to do without.

They gave up smoking to cut costs, they stopped meeting friends after work for beers, they didn’t buy new clothes, and they stashed away tax refunds and as much of their earnings as possible. Whenever they wanted to buy drinks, gadgets or cookware, they asked each other: “Do I want an iPod or a house? Do I want a latte or a house?”

“It would be absurd for me to buy things when I wanted a place rather than a frying pan,” Ms. Lee said as she fed Matilda a post-nap bottle.

More impressive, perhaps, than their willpower was that they were able to save $90,000.

Still, Ms. Lee and Mr. Agüero are part of the shrinking pool of New Yorkers who have been able to buy apartments for less than $450,000, and the even smaller group who have done so without help from their parents or a Wall Street bonus.

“Most people that I’m working with are getting some kind of familial assistance,” said Tracie Hamersley, the Citi Habitats broker who helped Ms. Lee and Mr. Agüero find their apartment. “They were unusual in that they were doing this on their own.”

Mr. Agüero described it as “a mind-set,” adding, “If you want to own a place, you have to do everything to own a place and everything else comes second.”

Today, $450,000 is nearly the average price of a Manhattan studio, according to the Miller Samuel appraisal company. The number of Manhattan apartments that sold for less than that has shrunk drastically in the last five years, to 13 percent of total sales in the second quarter of 2007, down from 44 percent in the second quarter of 2002.

About 15 percent of the Manhattan apartments currently listed by the Corcoran Group and Citi Habitats, and about 30 percent of those in Brooklyn, are less than $450,000. In the Bronx, 38 percent of the listings are under $450,000, according to the Bronx-Manhattan North Association of Realtors; on Staten Island, the figure is 43 percent, according to the local Board of Realtors; and in Queens, 17 percent, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island.

Janey Lee and Pablo Agüero

Mr. Agüero and Ms. Lee say that losing their jobs in the dot-com collapse of 2001 gave them the motivation to save. Ms. Lee quickly found a new job but then was laid off again. Mr. Agüero said he spent a full year freelancing and living on $1,000 a month.

He survived each day on a $2.95 chicken special from a local restaurant; a 99-cent Coke; and a pack of cigarettes, before he finally just gave them up.

They both wanted a safety net.

“That was the initial thing that motivated us,” Ms. Lee said. “There is no job security.”

After they opened their own Web design business, they tried not to return to their old spending habits. The couple found that they spent the most money when going out in a group for drinks. So they would suggest meeting their friends for brunch or heading to Chinatown, where they could buy meals for less than $15 each. They also found that they could save by cooking at home for their friends even when their Fresh Direct deliveries cost $100 a week.

They slowly built up a nest egg. In 2002, they saved their $3,000 tax return and another $5,000 between them. They said that it was hardest not to spend in the beginning: in one case they missed shopping so much that Mr. Agüero splurged on a pair of $300 Prada shoes. After wearing them a few times, he realized they didn’t really fit, so he sent them to his brother in Spain.

Those shoes became a symbol of the perils of impulse shopping. Over the next two years, they each saved $15,000.

By 2005, they thought about using their accumulated $38,000 in savings for a down payment. When they realized that they couldn’t afford anything, Mr. Agüero got a job at a bank and saved his entire annual take-home income of about $40,000. They lived off Ms. Lee’s salary. That drove their savings up to $78,000.

By 2006, they had saved another $20,000, which pushed their savings up to $98,000. They started to search in their neighborhood, Washington Heights. They found the apartment in Hamilton Heights in November and put down $90,000. They hope to move in by the end of the year.

They are happy to be the first people they know to have reached their goal of buying an apartment. “We actually don’t have friends who own,” Ms. Lee said. “We’re really kind of taking that leap, which is different from everybody else that we know.”

Amy Wegenaar

Amy Wegenaar, 31, wanted her own place. But she found it hard to save because the rent on her Lower East Side apartment had crept up to $1,550 a month.

Ms. Wegenaar is an art director for the Publicis Groupe and her main client is Garnier beauty products. She worried that on her annual salary of about $85,000, she couldn’t buy anything for more than $250,000. She also wanted an apartment large enough to fit her lunchbox collection, her Spiderman collection and her collection of Jack Skellington dolls in coffins from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

She felt discouraged as her married friends bought apartments for more than double what she could afford, and as a single friend bought with help from her parents.

“I would look,” Ms. Wegenaar said. “I would print out the info, and then I would start to cry. I would say, ‘This is never going to happen as a single person.’ ”

In 2004, she started to save $400 a month from her paychecks, adding to that amount with raises and bonuses. By late 2005, she had saved nearly $10,000 and found a $160,000 apartment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. She had discovered Ditmas Park by searching listings in her price range on Craigslist. When she visited the area with her parents, she found out that her father had grown up nearby, and that made the area more appealing. But she still didn’t have enough money.

So she went into savings overdrive: she went grocery shopping only with a list and cut out luxuries like expensive juices. When she went out with friends, she ordered the happy-hour drink specials and often chose Mexican food so they could munch on free chips and split a cheap entree. She shopped the sales racks at Urban Outfitters and sewed dresses from discounted fabric she bought on the Lower East Side.

By October 2006, she had saved $17,000. When she found a $220,000 one-bedroom co-op in Ditmas Park that required only a 10 percent deposit, she wrote a $6,500 credit-card check to cover the shortfall for the down payment and closing costs.

“I can’t let $6,000 stand in the way between me and a home,” she said. Her mother, sister and married friends who owned their apartments encouraged her to take the leap. Makeba Lloyd, a broker at the Developers Group in Brooklyn, sold her on the deal. Ms. Lloyd had moved into the same building in Ditmas Park several months before and talked about how happy she had been moving from Manhattan.

“She actually showed me her apartment, and she showed me what you could do with it,” Ms. Wegenaar said. “It felt so right.”

Obi Onyejekwe

It can be harder to find what feels right for buyers who don’t want to stray far from Manhattan’s most central neighborhoods. When Obi Onyejekwe moved from Atlanta in 2003 to work as an art director, producing commercials for SpikeTV, he thought he would quickly be able to buy an apartment with the $50,000 he had saved.

Mr. Onyejekwe (pronounced on-yeh-JECK-weh) had been saving and investing in a 401(k) since his first $7 an hour job at J. C. Penney. After college, he saved more than half of his salary from his early jobs by living at his mother’s home in Atlanta.

So when he arrived in Manhattan, he was determined to save and buy even while making less than $100,000 a year. He rented an $800-a-month apartment in Harlem and limited nights out to once a week. He spent less than $6 a day for lunch in SpikeTV’s cafeteria. While he never entirely stopped dating — an expense he calculated could cost him $400 a month — he said that he kept his eye on the larger goal of homeownership.

“It’s great to date, go out and have fun,” said Mr. Onyejekwe, 30. “But you have to be established first.”

He soon found it was harder to save in Manhattan than in Atlanta, especially as he made friends. In 2004, he moved to a $1,350-a-month one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to be closer to his friends. He also found himself going out three or four nights a week. He considered moving to Brooklyn, where he could afford to buy, but he wanted to hold out for something centrally located in Manhattan. Karen Fornash, his sales agent at the Corcoran Group, helped him narrow his search.

He finally saved enough by making friends with people at work who shared his obsession of buying their own apartments. They chose to eat out at places with entrees that never cost more than $15 and went to events like the Warm Up dance parties at P.S. 1, where the only thing they bought was beer. They also became regulars at a bar near Times Square where they could get five drinks for the price of four.

In February, Mr. Onyejekwe closed on a one-bedroom on East 24th Street in Gramercy Park for $420,000. He put down $84,000, and he showed the co-op that he had an additional $84,000 in investments. His eight co-workers also bought apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn that cost $320,000 to $550,000.

“A lot of pressure to spend and splurge wasn’t around because everybody was saving to buy real estate,” he said.

Carina Katigbak

And Michael Lenton

Sometimes, buying an apartment for less than $450,000 is simply a dream deferred, like Carina Katigbak and Michael Lenton’s plans for an expensive wedding with 130 guests. When the newly engaged couple moved into Ms. Katigbak’s 400-square-foot basement studio in Gramercy Park last December, they quickly realized they both needed more space.

Their rent, $1,600 a month, was rising rapidly, and they were battling leaks and mice. Ms. Katigbak, 27, still held out the hope that they could put the $45,000 they had in savings toward their wedding. But she realized that if they didn’t use it to buy an apartment, they would spend their newlywed years in a shoebox. Mr. Lenton, a 33-year-old nurse, needed to sleep after shifts, and Ms. Katigbak needed room to study for her Ph.D.

“We talked about ‘Do you want to have a fancy wedding, or do you want a place to live in,’ ” she said.

They put their wedding plans on hold. They budgeted for a $300,000 apartment on their combined annual income of about $100,000. They saved money by walking instead of taking the subway, by eating dinner at home and attending free events like Shakespeare in the Park. They also tried to talk each other out of anything over $50.

“We wanted a bedroom with a door and sunlight,” Mr. Lenton said. “We were willing to compromise on everything else.”

They quickly learned that $300,000 apartments sold fast after they lost three of them to other bidders. Their broker, Maggie Leigh of the Corcoran Group, suggested that they keep their standards simple. They considered sixth-floor walk-ups, not doorman buildings. In June, they found a $365,000 one-bedroom condo on St. Johns Place in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. They plan to move in September.

They would still like a scaled-back version of their dream wedding. They’re saving for a reception in the Toronto suburbs, near where their families live, with a much smaller guest list. But they have become more flexible about purchases they once obsessed over.

“They’re passing fancies that you need at the moment,” Ms. Katigbak said. “Then you find something else to fulfill what you want.”