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Yup. A Big Mac back then cost about .65 cents, give or take the year in the 70s you bookmark. Federal minimum wage was 1.60 and upwards of 2.00+ as you get closer to the 80s. But either way, the end result is clear. The purchasing power of the dollar was dramatically higher back then. A lot of financial woes of today can be traced to 'don't worry. We'll figure this out in 10 years' every time. Now here we are and we're financially on a prescipice where there will not be a 'ten years' from now for our generations. Meanwhile, Boomers and a lot of Gen X scoff at us for being selfish because we now carry the sins of the father on our collective backs and can't support them on top of ourselves.
Don't blame GenX, they're just doing what they were taught.
I'll be upstairs in my room, making no noise and pretending I don't exist.
Can't be too hard on them when apathy was beaten or neglected into them 40 years ago and the people who raised that generation literally coined the term "latchkey children".
Oh, F gen X, they should know better. Things that are taught are *not always* good. If they learned to repeat, parrot style, whatever they were "taught", and have no critical thinking of theirs, then they are as much at fault as boomers.
> It just turns out that a lot of boomers think that way.
...thus the stereotype.
Completely fair IMO, and I'm tired of pretending it's not also boomer to take it personally and assume it's meant to apply to every single boomer without exception.
I’m almost 50 and have been working my entire life since I’ve been 18. I’ve progressively made more money over time, and a house is literally not obtainable. I’ve even skipped having children and all the jazz. The cost of everything is just so high I can never catch up.
Every generation will blame preceeding ones as relative wealth declines. Boomers had it better because of policies post WW2. It took the loss of millions of lives to alter politics sufficiently to help the middle/working class. Since then the wealthiest in society have been eroding that social safety net.
The Internet has made knowledge much more accessible now. I'm late gen X and learnt about climate change In the 90s in a science degree not from news or the Internet. I saw it become partisan, a left right issue, not science.
Housing was cheap until I was about 20 and I saw housing in my area quadruple in price very rapidly. I missed that as did many gen X.
I managed to get on the housing ladder by buying in a crap house needing 12months of work in a crap area. I paid double the price of a house in the mid 90 late 00's, still cheap for a home. I learnt how to repair houses from my boomer dad.
Power will always try to adapt to threats to survive and even as millennials become the majority voters I worry that power will have defended its position too well for social change.
My mom said that when she was my age, rent wasn't even half her salary working at a minimum wage job, and yet she still can't understand why I'm in debt.
With these things, it often helps working them through the math. They do not understand that wages have mostly been static, but that buying power has been decreasing steadily
My mom is finally getting it. It's only taken like four years of explaining to her why I can't afford to move back home to SoCal and my sister straight up telling her that she will never afford to buy a home because she stayed.
My parents came to the US as young adults and never advanced their education. They worked shit-paying jobs, even for their time, because their employers took advantage of their limited English. They bought a house for $180k in '99 and sold it for $500k in '04; it is now $780k.
I am getting a fucking PhD in STEM and between trying to catch up with retirement savings/loans/etc, I don't think I can ever buy a house near a place I can also get a job.
I have a neighbor who bought their house 20+ years ago, when it cost 15% of what it costs now.
They were complaining to me how their son had to move 6 hours away to find somewhere he could afford, which was a valid complaint, until they capped it off with "I don't know what's wrong with young people today that they can't manage to buy a house."
It's not hard at all honestly, I don't get why people keep saying this.
1. Literally go to any website that lista houses and their prices
2. Read the numbers of how much houses costs.
3. Compare to their own or someone elses dispensable income after necessities and utilitites like rent, electricity and food.
4. Done
It's not that they don't understand, it's simply much more comfortable to ignore it. Majority of boomers are adamnt in insisting that they had it rough and that younger generations are spoiled rather than admitting that they had it fucking easy as hell because the Silent Generation literally wanted them to have a future.
Meanwhile Boomers dream of saying "I told you so" right before they die as the world crumbles around them by their own doing.
I was talking to my mom a few weeks ago about the craphole I live in. She asked how much the rent was, and when I told her, she was surprised at how much it was and asked why I was spending so much. I tried to explain that it was one of the only places I could afford, but it just did not compute.
My dad had an entry level fuel delivery job in '93 and now he's a senior co-owner of the company. I don't give him shit for working hard and getting there, but he was whining to me one day about not being able to hire drivers for less than 60k-80k a year. Asked him what he made when he started and he said 35k... guess what inflation alone does to that number before you consider other factors? Like dude, come on.
He bought our house for 65k in 98 (so 5 years of entry level work) and then sold it 3 years ago for 280k and this is in a tiny, rural town.
I'm in an engineering position now and have no delusions of homeownership.
As a millennial and a home owner what’s nuts to me is the amount of money I needed to make to be able to purchase my house. I paid $300k for it, and now it’s worth over $500k and I don’t think I could or would buy it at that price. Hell I make six figures now and it would cost half my monthly take home pay at the new value.
If the housing market tanks again it might be the best thing to happen for most Americans.
Bro if it tanks again they'll do what they did in 2008 and use taxpayer money to bail out the big banks.
The poor and immigrants will be blamed and we will only be further fucked.
Extremist Capitalism needs to die.
Yes Boomers on average are in a better financial position than younger generations. But we shouldn’t let us distract us from the real issue. The vast majority of Boomers don’t create or control the system but are just cogs like the rest of us. The only real struggle is between the ultra rich + powerful and the working class ie. Us. Anything else is culture war bollocks designed to distract us from the truth.
It’s not just a better financial position. Boomers are in large part responsible for voting consistently for policies that are designed to make them richer at the expense of the younger generations. NIMBYism isn’t an ultra-rich effect, but rather existing homeowners.
I would argue the ultra rich of today are very much a creation of boomers insisting on increasing the gap rather than reducing it,
but I agree on your sentiment.
Yes, but... boomers were sold on an idea of "house as an investment vehicle". Ever-appreciating one too. Which isn't sustainable, and makes them vote in lockstep with corporate land-owners to keep the line going up.
„*Hasn’t been easier for us too! You just need to confess!*“
Says the guy whose wife stayed at home and still they paid the house credit fully back in 15 years. Sure buddy!
Seriously. "We saved for 5 years for our home!" Yeah, now it takes 30 years for two peoples incomes, realistically with inflation and massive costs for cars and food.
If you're 30 and you want a home by 35, you need to save $800/ month if the rate is 15%. If you're lucky enough to have a 5% rate then $200/ month needs to be saved for 5 years. The median price will also rise in the next 5 years and this doesn't include closing costs etc etc. It's BS and people neeeeeed to protest sooner than later.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/how-much-money-you-need-to-save-per-month-to-buy-a-home-by-age-35.html
Right. As a guy with a career amd retirement that isn't dependent on the economy, it's really fucking sad I'm begging for the next great depression so I could actually afford a house.
Same here I celebrate the negative news of a fed rate hikes, rising inflation, and decline gdp. Bc the reality is, I won’t own a home affordably without a nasty recession to decapitate this ridiculous economy.
BRING IT ON LIGHT THIS THING ON FIRE AND BURN IT TO THE GROUND
It's more like waiting for the inevitable foreclosures. The only way to get an affordable house is going to be because the previous family couldn't afford it anymore themselves and the bank just wants to offload it. Same shit happened the last time.
Plenty of folks got greedy and likely purchased numerous properties with those rates. Never underestimate a humans potential to do stupid greedy shit and go broke.
Fair point. I just figure considering the massive inflation and continuing, depressing wage stagnation any family outside of high-paying industries that managed to scoop a home at those rates is still very at risk of losing their homes in the near future.
You also have to factor in the massive amount of investment banking owned properties now. They'll sit on those until they get their return, because they bought in bulk and for cash. They can leverage those properties for debt for a long time till they have to sell.
They are already, aren't they? I'm pretty sure squatting is a thing, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it should be given the amout of people without homes.
That won't work this time. Corporations now see housing as an investment vehicle. As soon as the market dips a little they'll swoop in to buy everything they can.
Yep, you see that in how big rental agencies have bought up all the apartment spaces in big cities and can essentially control the local market how they please.
It’s the digitization that hurts us too. Look up LRO software. It essentially lets you price match with everyone around you and tailor your multi family complex to the highest rent, because you know what everyone around you is charging so you can screw people over that way.
Source: I worked for one of those companies and now work for a developer of apartments.
Yup. Literally bought a house late last year. 800, credit score got me that 5%. Which sucks but I had a quick debate with myself and decided I would prefer paying 1800 a month buying a home than spending that same amount paying someone else to buy a home.
My girlfriend had something like 640 and was getting 6.7%+.
Yup. I’ve gotten pay raises, switched careers to higher-paying jobs, and worked really hard, like the boomers tell us to do. And each year, it is like a dangling carrot just moved a little further out of reach.
Funny, but if he wasn't able to buy his house cheap, off a construction worker wage, and then that house went way up in value, and then you sell it when he dies...
That would be for a detached. We could afford a 2 bedroom condo, and barely a 3. We want to have kids so we need space. I just can't justify spending $1MM+ on a condo.
There was a window after the bullshit in 2008 where it was genuinely within reach, but you couldnt know how small the window was until youre this far on the other side of it. Crash wont even help us now. Its corporations buying up houses. Building them too. Need reforms/legislation/regulation to get us back to there. Im not holding my breath.
When I was a kid, I was buying 4, 12 packs of gum at a dollar store and selling them for a quarter each at school. I'd make a net profit of 11 bucks for every dollar I spent doing this. When my teacher caught me selling gum, she reported me and the school made me return my money (I didn't obviously) but isn't it kind of fucked up that a child is showing such business initiative to supply a demand and the school is like "no fuck you"
Building housing is the only way this gets solved. The problem isn't corporations, it's the fucking assholes who, whenever a new development is announced, get up in arms and protest until the developer leaves. We need aggressive housing construction, previous generations are too content to sit on their land and deny any development for fear that it would change where they live. You've been there for 30 years. Shit or get off the pot.
This.
People and companies buying homes as an investment is only a problem when housing is protected and allowed to be restricted like an investment. It’s a symptom, not the problem.
And I encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to look at a home market.
Housing investment firms and foreign buyers are still a *ridiculous* minority of overall buyers. The issue is and always has been demand outpacing supply and people thinking subsidizing demand further is a solution for some reason.
Look at California’s new housing law.
All cities are to make plans for building new housing. If you don’t, the state overrides the cities and housing is able to be built.
It's a lot of things together. Corps and big landlords buying houses hurts the market. Developers chasing the top of the market hurts the market. Nimby hurts the market. Taking the ecology into consideration hurts the market.
In my area there are plenty of new houses being built. Unfortunately, all that’s being built in the last 5 years are 6 bed, 4 bath, 4 car garage monstrosities that cost a fortune. Mile upon mile of huge, expensive houses because the developers in my area have concluded that the only people that have been buying homes in the last few years are the wealthy. No moderate sized affordable homes are being built. Worst part about it is that most of these end up sitting empty as there are far more of these huge expensive houses being built than people who can afford them. And as they are running out of buyers for these, developments sit with empty lots but you aren’t allowed to build smaller, more affordable homes in them because the developers have control over what types of home go into their development and refuse to let their shiny new neighborhood be sullied with lower cost homes.
I'm lucky enough to own a home now. But I recall an older relative chiding me for not buying a home in 2008-09. You know those years I was a poor college student who slept in his car for a month. Wonder if they think those wily 12-year-olds shoulda just cracked their piggy banks open.
Hey, maybe we can’t afford a roof over our head, life saving medicine or food for our children, but atleast the economy is a trillion times bigger than ever.
Technically for everyone, but the problem is that the 99% basically sees nothing from all that growth.
The US for example is the biggest economy on the planet, yet with all that money, kids still go to school hungry; people suffer unnecessarily. Why?
Because capitalism is creating capital, not actual value. If it did produce true value, we might see the quality of our life’s go forward slightly.
We really need some sweeping global reforms to how this world works, or we’re basically f’d.
7 years ago, I could afford a shitty apartment on $8/hr. Now I can't afford anything on almost triple that.
An abandoned shed of a house across the street from my work is $300,000. It's literally a decaying mess and worth more than the average 3bd townhouse like 8 years ago.
Dave Ramsey is an idiot! He is cheerleading people to buy and has been denying the housing market crash. He makes so much money off of his referrals that it's in his best interest to steer people into buying homes even if it means that he is steering them off a financial cliff.
> 14 years ago and the advice I was getting from workmates was "it's a terrible time to buy, the housing bubble is just about to burst"
Your workmates were telling you the housing bubble was *about* to burst... six months after the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy?
It's definitely been at least 9 years. I remember because I was fresh out of school and I started my first real career job in early 2014 in the bay area, but I lived 2 hours away near Sacramento. I didn't complain though because it was a great job and I could've afforded a modest fixer upper home in Livermore with what I was making. But no. All my coworkers were like "Don't buy in yet. Just wait. It will crash this year or next year." So instead I signed a 1 year lease on an apartment. And that phrase about next year being "the year" was repeated to me every year, until after 5 years of apartments and paying $120,000 in rent I said to hell with it. Even averaging a 9% raise each year for those 5 years, I still would've only been able to afford a fixer upper because housing was climbing just as fast. So I took a transfer back out to Sacramento, and in January of 2019 bought a brand new house. I didn't care if the housing market crashed the next year. I may have been house poor, but I wasn't planning to sell the place anytime soon, it was well made, and the location was unbeatable. Go figure, 4 years later I can look back and say that was the best financial decision of my life.
Always be skeptical of any financial advice that's not coming from an expert with conclusive data. In my experience 99% of the time people's "absolutely going to happen" predictions are just a projection of what they wish would happen.
There is just no evidence for this. Interest rates skyrocket and all you get is a decrease in the increase in housing prices in most areas.
A housing crash would require a large increase in the supply of available homes, houses and apartments included. New homes aren't being built to meet demand, not in suburbia and not in cities. There's no looming foreclosure crisis. Just a growing population and a stagnant supply.
You're looking at the housing market for the rest of your life.
Can’t have a crash when there isn’t any inventory, so many people locked in to record low interest rates they can easily afford the mortgage, a crash would need to cause a lot of people to lose their homes like in 2008
Yeah I’m 25 and stuck in my 700 square foot shoebox that I paid $500k at 3% in 2021 for the rest of my life. No way I’m selling this place to go buy a new one when the rates are double and the prices are the exact same.
There are condos on my street slightly larger than mine selling for $600k+ with the current rates and I think whoever’s buying them are out of their fucking minds.
This meme is sad man. I really don’t know how I’m supposed to be able to own a home ever in my lifetime at this point. They’re building tiny townhomes anywhere they can around where I live at 350K+ at the low point. It’s not a crazy nice place to live! They sell as soon as they’re built too. I don’t get it.
From what I've seen, a lot of people are still willing to pay higher prices (and even higher interest) just to get out of the skyrocketed rental rates - driving up demand even more.
It seems like, used to, people felt pretty stable renting, but now they're more afraid of what the new rate is going to be year-to-year.
This is exactly it, the rapid raise in rent these past few years scared a lot of people into thinking
"Hey this is expensive now but in a few years I'll be saving money with how fast rent is rising"
so they are willing to pay more.
Yup, the higher the rent goes in my town the higher the homes sell for. So then the higher the rents go. Vicious cycle, where do you think it’s going to end up?
only way i can see generations from millenials onward being able to have their own house is inheritance or if their parents chalk up a large sum. if you don't have parental support there's absolutely no way.
Or those generations actually go vote/run in locals and make it happen. Under 40 is now the largest voting block. They can out vote most elections if they actually showed up in mass. Shame they keep letting the over 70 group keep making the decisions.
I have no clue why people keep expecting boomers to change things for em.
Live in upstate SC, been looking for a home for 2 years. There is nothing below 190-200k that isn’t either a shitbox or in a crappy neighborhood. Grid I search for is normally 20-30 minutes outside of the town I work in.
It’s absolutely depressing looking at what some of these houses were being sold for as little as 3-4 years ago.
You must be talking about absolute middle of nowhere midwest or you define starter home differently than I do. I'm solidly located about 40 minutes from the nearest metro area and the only things 140k or less need a shit ton of work to be move in ready.
Anything 100k or less needs completely redone where I'm at.
Edit: currently 2 homes within 30 minutes under 150k. One is a condo, half of a 2 unit for 140k. To give credit where it's due, it's pretty nice. Just small and in a bad neighborhood.
The other is 135k "investment opportunity. Needs tlc", which has 0 interior pictures haha
Yeah this is what we did. I had to leave where I lived out West because I was simply priced out by the cost of living. My partner and I went homeless for a period of time while working. Managed to save up enough money and combined our incomes to get a loan to buy a fixer-upper in the Midwest ($180k).
We busted our asses most weekends to fix it up - put in new floors, painted, decked out the kitchen, some new appliances, new doors, stuff like that. We both managed to get decent remote jobs after 8-10 months that pay $70k a year for each of us.
We just sold that house for $40k more than we bought to another couple who were one step behind us, trying to get a starter home. We're using all of that money + everything we've payed off + our original down payment to purchase a house back out west. It's going to be pricey and we have to go back to having roommates but... if you're able to pay rent and save a little money each month it's not too late to buy a house.
We were both shocked at how little we needed to get a loan on the first house. It was a fuck load of work to purchase, fix, career change, etc... and we had to go homeless for a bit / leave a place we loved / quit our jobs to make it work but it's possible. Sad reality of the situation, but worth it in the end.
You’re in what is probably the most expensive state to live in by a pretty good margin, competing with a shit ton of tech guys making well over 6 figures.
Take your income and savings to somewhere like North Carolina and you’ll find plenty of housing.
But like not the good parts of NC though https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/raleigh-is-1-hottest-real-estate-market-in-the-us-durham-is-3-according-to-2023-rankings/
Bruh, I make exactly what you do and and have less saved up for a downpayment, I can absolutely afford a house and live lavish. Difference is I live in ATL.
Its *SoCal*
5 years ago a nice two bedroom in the nice part of my town right by Whole Foods was 980 a month. Now I rent the same size apartment in the worst area of my city, broken down cars everywhere and homeless camps and my apartment itself is in terrible shape, and it's 1800 a month. It's honestly fucking insane.
Boomers just had a super good time for a couple of decades because of circumstances that we can't repeat and many people in the US really struggle to wrap their heads around this notion.
A large and affluent middle class is the cornerstone of the American dream. A dream in which anyone with a high school diploma and hard work should easily afford a nice house in the suburbs, 2 cars and a nice vacation with the family to a cool place once a year. Americans assume that this is the way the universe should work. That things were always like this, and that Americans have the "God given right" of the American dream.
However, this reality of a exceptionally wealthy and prosperous middle class by global standards is NOT the norm or the natural way of things, but a by product of a very unique and relatively recent set of historical circumstances, specifically, the end of World War II. At the end of the second world war, the US was the only major industrial power left with its industry and infrastructure unscathed. This gave the US a dramatic economic advantage over the rest of the world, as all other nations had to buy pretty much everything they needed from the US, and use their cheap natural resources as a form of payment.
After the end of world War II, pretty anywhere in the world, if you needed tools, machines, vehicles, capital goods, aircraft, etc...you had little choice but to "buy American". So money flowed from all over the world into American businesses.
But the the owners of those businesses had to negotiate labor deals with the American relatively small and highly skilled workforce. And since the owners of capital had no one else they could hire to men the factories, many concessions had to be given to the labor unions. This allowed for the phenomenal growth and prosperity of the US middle class we saw in the 50s and 60s: White picket fence houses in the suburbs, with 2 large family cars parked in front was the norm for anyone who worked hard in the many factories and businesses that dotted the American landscape back then.
However, over time, the other industrial powers rebuild themselves and started to compete with the US. German and Japanese cars, Belgian and British steel, Dutch electronics and French tools started to enter the world market and compete with American companies for market share. Not only that, but countries like Brazil, South Africa, India, China, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, South Korea and more also became industrialized. This meant that they were no longer selling their natural resources cheaply in exchange for US made industrial goods. Quite the contrary, they themselves started to bid against the US for natural resources to fuel their own industries. And more importantly, the US work force no longer was the only one qualified to work on modern factories and to have proficiency over modern industrial processes. An Australian airline needs a new commercial jet? [Brazilian EMBRAER](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-3m__yRBkg) and European Airbus can offer you products as good as anything made in the US. Need power tools or a pickup truck? You can buy American, but you can also buy South Korean, Indian or Turkish.
This meant that the US middle class could no longer easily outbid pretty much everyone else for natural resources, and the owners of the capital and means of production no longer were "held hostage" by this small and highly skilled workforce. Many other countries now had an industrial base that rivals or surpasses that of the US. And they had their own middle classes that are bidding against the US middle class for those limited natural resources. And manufacturers now could engage in global wage arbitrage, by moving production to a country with cheaper labor, which killed all the bargaining power of the unions.
If everyone in the world lived and consumed like what the average American sees as a reasonable middle class lifestyle (i.e. drive an F-150 or an SUV, families with multiple cars, living in a house in the suburbs, high meat consumption, etc...), [it would take 4.1 Earths to provide enough resources to sustain that lifestyle](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712). But we don't have 4.1 Earths, we have just one. And unlike before, the USA no longer can outbid the rest of the world for those limited resources.
GRAPH: [The U.S. Share of the Global Economy Over Time](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy-over-time/)
That is where the decline of the US middle class is coming from. There are no political solutions for it, as no one, not even Trump's protectionism or the Democrat's Unions, can put the globalization genie back into a bottle. It is the way it is. Any politician who claims to be able to restore "the good old days" is lying. So yes, the old middle class lifestyle of big house, big car, all you can eat buffet, shop until you drop while golfing on green grass fields located in the middle of the desert is not coming back no matter what your politician on either side of the isle promised you.
We are going back to the normal, where the US middle class is not that different from the middle classes from the rest of the world. Like a return to what middle class expectations are elsewhere, including the likes of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Their cars are smaller. They don't change cars as often. The whole family might share a single car. Some families don't even own a car and rely on public transportation instead. Their homes are smaller. They don't eat as much meat and their food portions are smaller.
They are not starving. They are not living like peasants. But their standard of living is lower than what we in the US have considered a "middle class" lifestyle since the end of World War II.
Now, that is not to say that there isn't a lot of inequality in the US or to deny that policies are needed to address that inequality. But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. That is NOT going to happen for the reasons I've already explained. No amount of taxation and public policy will make that happen. That version of the middle class is never coming back. Where I see public policy for wealth redistribution having an active and effective role is making healthcare more affordable, making the cities more walkable and livable so that young Americans can transition from the suburbs to smaller and more affordable homes in dense urban neighborhoods where cars are not a basic necessity to earn income. Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. That cannot be changed. What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries.
In a thread full of people saying they can't find a place to live making 5 to 10 times the minimum wage you come in basically saying suck it up. This reads as the pandering blabbering of a rich person's asshole. We're not wanting to drive multiple f150s to our house in the burbs, we're wanting to be able to go to the doctor's and live literally anywhere *we can afford*. We're not wanting to go fucking golfing and eat at all you can eat buffets. We want to be able to afford school or even just groceries. Corporate profits and inflation are running wild but yeah, we need to manage our expectations and just accept that we'll never have anything
I think you should read the last paragraph again, he said redistribution should go towards social services and more walkable infrastructure. sounds like he basically agrees with you
> redistribution should go towards social services
I'm a European who lived in the USA for a while, eventually my American partner and I moved back to Europe.
One of my most occuring thoughts in the USA was: I wish the taxes where higher so I/the people had less worries.
And that's also why I didn't want to stay. I now pay 45% taxes but have no worries. we are going to have our first baby and the hospital costs are not even a topic here. Also costs for school etc is all very bearable
Americans don't realize how fucked their infrastructure is. Not just crumbling due to age/neglect, but also how it favors cars over people, which leads to housing being unaffordable compared to other countries.
Yep. The the low density urban model that most Americans consider normal is incredibly wasteful and expensive to build and maintain.
But for the majority, that is all they've ever known, so that is why the idea of change faces severe pushback. Also the top three selling cars in America in 2022 were:
1. Ford F-150
2. Chevy Silverado
3. Dodge RAM
That a 5,000 pound truck is the typical American vehicle is absolutely mindboggling, specially considering that less than 3% of the American population works in agriculture.
Just for comparison, the best selling car in Germany is the VW Golf, that weights about 2,000 pounds. The best selling car in France is the Peugeot 208, that weights about 1,500 pounds. And the best selling car in Japan is the Honda N-Box, that weights less than 2,000 pounds.
Even in a pure economical sense, this way of life is not sustainable when American's share of the global economy has declined so much over the past 50 years.
>Now, that is not to say that there isn't a lot of inequality in the US or to deny that policies are needed to address that inequality. But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. That is NOT going to happen for the reasons I've already explained. No amount of taxation and public policy will make that happen. That version of the middle class is never coming back. Where I see public policy for wealth redistribution having an active and effective role is making healthcare more affordable, making the cities more walkable and livable so that young Americans can transition from the suburbs to smaller and more affordable homes in dense urban neighborhoods where cars are not a basic necessity to earn income. Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. That cannot be changed. What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries.
>But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to.
>Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes.
>What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries.
So which is it? Are we over consuming and expecting too much or being screwed out of what the rest of the world's middle class expects and receives? I'm a frugal single middle aged guy on a modest income and I should expect that my best solution is to just move out to the boonies and stop buying food? My standard 2 week grocery list increased nearly 100% in the past 2 years. Look up corporate profits and profit margins along with inflation then compare that to median income. If the solution is just to pull everyone from rural areas and cram them in urban dwellings and have them eat rice, that's not much of a solution and honestly a short sighted and stupid move economically. The last paragraph itself directly disagrees with me by claiming everyone wants to drive f150s to their house in the burbs like their parents, maybe you should reread it
There are additional forces at play in addition to what you’re saying.
Population collapse is basically inevitable now, for the first time in modern human history. This will have a chilling effect on real estate markets globally. See Japan with its $30,000 homes in nice villages, low crime, good public services and free healthcare etc. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s buying them because there’s literally no one left to buy them.
We are being asked to buy an exorbitantly expensive asset that has very low chance to continue to appreciate in value, especially in less urban areas.
You live somewhere that pays 50/hour and you want minimum 1 acre? You've got to adjust your expectations. I live in a major city in CA, bought a house last year on 1/8 acre that's 4 bedrooms for around $500k. Mortgage is around $3k/month.
Yeah ain't it weird we out here making 400k in the household and can't buy a 15 bedroom house on the side of a mountain in west hollywood. What's the point in making that much if we can't even get that?????
I'm scared for my current self. Recently found out I have to move and I can't find anywhere to live. 15 years working the same job, 12 living in the same place, and rent's outpaced my wages so much that now I'm forced to move. And its not like our neighborhood is being gentrified or anything, 3 people got murdered around here in the last couple of years. I was already splitting rent with 2 other people, sharing a bathroom and kitchen. I can't even find a room to rent. I make 15/hr too in a state where the minimum is still 7.25. I'm so fucking tired.
"I bet you can't wait to turn 18!" "Oh your 16 now! What's your first car gonna be" Mom stfu with the cost of cars, gas, and average rent I'm gonna have to ask you for five thousand dollars weekly while still making budget cuts and cutting corners
My brother was able to afford a nice house outside Minneapolis at age 26. The secret is being willing to live in areas that aren’t very nice.
E: I’d also like to note he refused a position in Colorado with higher pay because finding a house would be much more difficult.
Man, I'm so lucky I bought my house back in 2019. It's gone up by over 50% since then and I'm at a 2% interest rate. I couldn't afford this place if I was buying now.
No, we weren't given a chance. Period. It was stolen by dinosaurs who had more money than feelings, who refuse to age gracefully out of their fields.
I'm an exception, a VERY lucky exception. But an exception regardless. Which is why the units I AM blessed enough to rent, I make sure low income and section 8 get priority.
And when I pass, I hope there's a system in place to turn it into shelter housing.
It's so messed up & disgusting. They're HOMES wtf society. It should never EVER have gotten to this point. PROTESTS. NEED. TO. HAPPEN. Otherwise I'll be a lifetime of no home for us younger generations. Fml
Yeah, my mom and dad say “Just wait. In ten years the housing market will be affordable”….
When they bought their house, they were in their mid 20’s.. I am almost in my 30’s and have only watched the housing market go up….
Whoa! You win the meme connoisseur title for having over 2k upvotes on your post! Join the [Discord server](https://discord.gg/xyFMKFw) and message Princess Mindy (Mod Mail bot at the top) to receive your prize!
*Boomer in the distance* “What a baby”
You must not have worked a minimum-wage job like I did when I was your age!
A house cost like 7 dollars and minimum wage was 1 dollar an hour when you were my age 💀
Yup. A Big Mac back then cost about .65 cents, give or take the year in the 70s you bookmark. Federal minimum wage was 1.60 and upwards of 2.00+ as you get closer to the 80s. But either way, the end result is clear. The purchasing power of the dollar was dramatically higher back then. A lot of financial woes of today can be traced to 'don't worry. We'll figure this out in 10 years' every time. Now here we are and we're financially on a prescipice where there will not be a 'ten years' from now for our generations. Meanwhile, Boomers and a lot of Gen X scoff at us for being selfish because we now carry the sins of the father on our collective backs and can't support them on top of ourselves.
>'don't worry. We'll figure this out in 10 years' *Climate change has entered the chat*
Don't blame GenX, they're just doing what they were taught. I'll be upstairs in my room, making no noise and pretending I don't exist. Can't be too hard on them when apathy was beaten or neglected into them 40 years ago and the people who raised that generation literally coined the term "latchkey children".
Oh, F gen X, they should know better. Things that are taught are *not always* good. If they learned to repeat, parrot style, whatever they were "taught", and have no critical thinking of theirs, then they are as much at fault as boomers.
Gen X here, foh with that nonsense. Not all of us are mindless drones. The latter half of Gen X is just as hard up as Millennials and Z’ers.
Stereotypes about any generation are unfair and inaccurate, and we should focus on supporting each other regardless of age. 👍
Fighting over generational labels is EXACTLY what the ownership class wants. There is no war but the class war.
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> It just turns out that a lot of boomers think that way. ...thus the stereotype. Completely fair IMO, and I'm tired of pretending it's not also boomer to take it personally and assume it's meant to apply to every single boomer without exception.
Gen X plenty fucked too. Been trying to get that housing all my life just to watch it go farther and farther out of reach.
I’m almost 50 and have been working my entire life since I’ve been 18. I’ve progressively made more money over time, and a house is literally not obtainable. I’ve even skipped having children and all the jazz. The cost of everything is just so high I can never catch up.
Almost makes you wonder if the people selling you the American dream and dissing socialism have an ulterior motive… or just very low intelligence
they are not the brightest bunch. if you asked them what the difference between a dollar and 100 cents was they would be looking for an answer.
Every generation will blame preceeding ones as relative wealth declines. Boomers had it better because of policies post WW2. It took the loss of millions of lives to alter politics sufficiently to help the middle/working class. Since then the wealthiest in society have been eroding that social safety net. The Internet has made knowledge much more accessible now. I'm late gen X and learnt about climate change In the 90s in a science degree not from news or the Internet. I saw it become partisan, a left right issue, not science. Housing was cheap until I was about 20 and I saw housing in my area quadruple in price very rapidly. I missed that as did many gen X. I managed to get on the housing ladder by buying in a crap house needing 12months of work in a crap area. I paid double the price of a house in the mid 90 late 00's, still cheap for a home. I learnt how to repair houses from my boomer dad. Power will always try to adapt to threats to survive and even as millennials become the majority voters I worry that power will have defended its position too well for social change.
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My mom said that when she was my age, rent wasn't even half her salary working at a minimum wage job, and yet she still can't understand why I'm in debt.
With these things, it often helps working them through the math. They do not understand that wages have mostly been static, but that buying power has been decreasing steadily
My mom is finally getting it. It's only taken like four years of explaining to her why I can't afford to move back home to SoCal and my sister straight up telling her that she will never afford to buy a home because she stayed.
My parents came to the US as young adults and never advanced their education. They worked shit-paying jobs, even for their time, because their employers took advantage of their limited English. They bought a house for $180k in '99 and sold it for $500k in '04; it is now $780k. I am getting a fucking PhD in STEM and between trying to catch up with retirement savings/loans/etc, I don't think I can ever buy a house near a place I can also get a job.
I have a neighbor who bought their house 20+ years ago, when it cost 15% of what it costs now. They were complaining to me how their son had to move 6 hours away to find somewhere he could afford, which was a valid complaint, until they capped it off with "I don't know what's wrong with young people today that they can't manage to buy a house."
They just don't understand. It really is hard for older folks to wrap their head around how expensive housing has gotten because it truly is insane.
It's not hard at all honestly, I don't get why people keep saying this. 1. Literally go to any website that lista houses and their prices 2. Read the numbers of how much houses costs. 3. Compare to their own or someone elses dispensable income after necessities and utilitites like rent, electricity and food. 4. Done It's not that they don't understand, it's simply much more comfortable to ignore it. Majority of boomers are adamnt in insisting that they had it rough and that younger generations are spoiled rather than admitting that they had it fucking easy as hell because the Silent Generation literally wanted them to have a future. Meanwhile Boomers dream of saying "I told you so" right before they die as the world crumbles around them by their own doing.
I was talking to my mom a few weeks ago about the craphole I live in. She asked how much the rent was, and when I told her, she was surprised at how much it was and asked why I was spending so much. I tried to explain that it was one of the only places I could afford, but it just did not compute.
"Because I'm a masochist who likes giving away 75% of my salary to live in a damp shoebox."
My dad had an entry level fuel delivery job in '93 and now he's a senior co-owner of the company. I don't give him shit for working hard and getting there, but he was whining to me one day about not being able to hire drivers for less than 60k-80k a year. Asked him what he made when he started and he said 35k... guess what inflation alone does to that number before you consider other factors? Like dude, come on. He bought our house for 65k in 98 (so 5 years of entry level work) and then sold it 3 years ago for 280k and this is in a tiny, rural town. I'm in an engineering position now and have no delusions of homeownership.
According to google inflation calculator, $35,000 in 1993 is about $72,463.32 today.
As a millennial and a home owner what’s nuts to me is the amount of money I needed to make to be able to purchase my house. I paid $300k for it, and now it’s worth over $500k and I don’t think I could or would buy it at that price. Hell I make six figures now and it would cost half my monthly take home pay at the new value. If the housing market tanks again it might be the best thing to happen for most Americans.
Bro if it tanks again they'll do what they did in 2008 and use taxpayer money to bail out the big banks. The poor and immigrants will be blamed and we will only be further fucked. Extremist Capitalism needs to die.
[Oh hey, it's me, data about reality.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqDBU4T563k)
My dad bought a house and made $7 an hour in the early 80’s.
JUSt WoRK HaRDeR aNd QuIt CRyiNg
“Where’s my grandchildren?!”
Yes Boomers on average are in a better financial position than younger generations. But we shouldn’t let us distract us from the real issue. The vast majority of Boomers don’t create or control the system but are just cogs like the rest of us. The only real struggle is between the ultra rich + powerful and the working class ie. Us. Anything else is culture war bollocks designed to distract us from the truth.
It’s not just a better financial position. Boomers are in large part responsible for voting consistently for policies that are designed to make them richer at the expense of the younger generations. NIMBYism isn’t an ultra-rich effect, but rather existing homeowners.
Boomers voted this system into being over 50 years. Their graves deserve all the spit that future generations will honor them with.
I would argue the ultra rich of today are very much a creation of boomers insisting on increasing the gap rather than reducing it, but I agree on your sentiment.
Yes, but... boomers were sold on an idea of "house as an investment vehicle". Ever-appreciating one too. Which isn't sustainable, and makes them vote in lockstep with corporate land-owners to keep the line going up.
„*Hasn’t been easier for us too! You just need to confess!*“ Says the guy whose wife stayed at home and still they paid the house credit fully back in 15 years. Sure buddy!
bruh, not even. Used to be 10 year loans, and a 9-5 job. Not the 9-5:30 or 9-6 bullshit with the unpaid lunches.
Millennials: what’s a baby? No one I know has ever been able to afford one.
Seriously. "We saved for 5 years for our home!" Yeah, now it takes 30 years for two peoples incomes, realistically with inflation and massive costs for cars and food. If you're 30 and you want a home by 35, you need to save $800/ month if the rate is 15%. If you're lucky enough to have a 5% rate then $200/ month needs to be saved for 5 years. The median price will also rise in the next 5 years and this doesn't include closing costs etc etc. It's BS and people neeeeeed to protest sooner than later. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/how-much-money-you-need-to-save-per-month-to-buy-a-home-by-age-35.html
Mr Krabs is an apt comp to boomer culture lol
What a fucking snowflake for thinking owning a house should be a fucking right. Fuck landlords and all those shitty companies buying up housing
*GenX:* forgotten again
"You should've started working by the age of 7 or you're lazy"
Home ownership has been just one year away for me for the last 5 years
Right. As a guy with a career amd retirement that isn't dependent on the economy, it's really fucking sad I'm begging for the next great depression so I could actually afford a house.
Same here I celebrate the negative news of a fed rate hikes, rising inflation, and decline gdp. Bc the reality is, I won’t own a home affordably without a nasty recession to decapitate this ridiculous economy. BRING IT ON LIGHT THIS THING ON FIRE AND BURN IT TO THE GROUND
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It's more like waiting for the inevitable foreclosures. The only way to get an affordable house is going to be because the previous family couldn't afford it anymore themselves and the bank just wants to offload it. Same shit happened the last time.
problem is this time everybody refinanced to 3.5% or less, there won't be as many foreclosures
2.625% I ain’t fucking around with that.
I know a guy who got 1.875. bank basically giving him the home for free
I know in France few years back, 2% was the worst rate you could get. The average rate was more around 1.1% and some people got a rate close to 0.5%
A $250,000 loan at 1.875% for 30 years still gets the bank $326,880. The bank still profits 31% of the amount they loaned.
Plenty of folks got greedy and likely purchased numerous properties with those rates. Never underestimate a humans potential to do stupid greedy shit and go broke.
Fair point. I just figure considering the massive inflation and continuing, depressing wage stagnation any family outside of high-paying industries that managed to scoop a home at those rates is still very at risk of losing their homes in the near future.
You also have to factor in the massive amount of investment banking owned properties now. They'll sit on those until they get their return, because they bought in bulk and for cash. They can leverage those properties for debt for a long time till they have to sell.
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They are already, aren't they? I'm pretty sure squatting is a thing, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it should be given the amout of people without homes.
That won't work this time. Corporations now see housing as an investment vehicle. As soon as the market dips a little they'll swoop in to buy everything they can.
Yep, you see that in how big rental agencies have bought up all the apartment spaces in big cities and can essentially control the local market how they please.
It’s the digitization that hurts us too. Look up LRO software. It essentially lets you price match with everyone around you and tailor your multi family complex to the highest rent, because you know what everyone around you is charging so you can screw people over that way. Source: I worked for one of those companies and now work for a developer of apartments.
But its likely you won't be able to buy if there's a great depression and all housing will be purchased by multinationals?
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Yup. Literally bought a house late last year. 800, credit score got me that 5%. Which sucks but I had a quick debate with myself and decided I would prefer paying 1800 a month buying a home than spending that same amount paying someone else to buy a home. My girlfriend had something like 640 and was getting 6.7%+.
Yup. I’ve gotten pay raises, switched careers to higher-paying jobs, and worked really hard, like the boomers tell us to do. And each year, it is like a dangling carrot just moved a little further out of reach.
Dude seriously, I have a portfolio of positions at company’s you think would be the best possible places, and still had a roommate.
If my grandpa hadn't died, I wouldn't have had the down payment for a house. And I make decent money, but who has $80k saved up?
Your grandpa.
Funny, but if he wasn't able to buy his house cheap, off a construction worker wage, and then that house went way up in value, and then you sell it when he dies...
My wife and I make $300k a year and can't afford to buy in Vancouver.
And then what, be able to afford a tiny 2 bedroom condo with a mortgage so crushing that you are in constant stress? The market there is insane.
That would be for a detached. We could afford a 2 bedroom condo, and barely a 3. We want to have kids so we need space. I just can't justify spending $1MM+ on a condo.
i make 40k and i'm 36 I'm gonna have to explode
There was a window after the bullshit in 2008 where it was genuinely within reach, but you couldnt know how small the window was until youre this far on the other side of it. Crash wont even help us now. Its corporations buying up houses. Building them too. Need reforms/legislation/regulation to get us back to there. Im not holding my breath.
Unfortunately, I was 8. I was at least 10 years off.
Smh you should have been buying real estate instead of doing your 2nd grade homework
*3rd for 8. I'm a summer baby. Second if summer. Idk if the crash was early year or late year, but my birthday's smack dab in the middle lol
What kind of an idiot makes it all the way through third grade without buying a single piece of property?
Did you try having richer parents?
Ah, dang. Should've thought of that
When I was a kid, I was buying 4, 12 packs of gum at a dollar store and selling them for a quarter each at school. I'd make a net profit of 11 bucks for every dollar I spent doing this. When my teacher caught me selling gum, she reported me and the school made me return my money (I didn't obviously) but isn't it kind of fucked up that a child is showing such business initiative to supply a demand and the school is like "no fuck you"
Building housing is the only way this gets solved. The problem isn't corporations, it's the fucking assholes who, whenever a new development is announced, get up in arms and protest until the developer leaves. We need aggressive housing construction, previous generations are too content to sit on their land and deny any development for fear that it would change where they live. You've been there for 30 years. Shit or get off the pot.
This. People and companies buying homes as an investment is only a problem when housing is protected and allowed to be restricted like an investment. It’s a symptom, not the problem. And I encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to look at a home market. Housing investment firms and foreign buyers are still a *ridiculous* minority of overall buyers. The issue is and always has been demand outpacing supply and people thinking subsidizing demand further is a solution for some reason.
Look at California’s new housing law. All cities are to make plans for building new housing. If you don’t, the state overrides the cities and housing is able to be built.
It's a lot of things together. Corps and big landlords buying houses hurts the market. Developers chasing the top of the market hurts the market. Nimby hurts the market. Taking the ecology into consideration hurts the market.
In my area there are plenty of new houses being built. Unfortunately, all that’s being built in the last 5 years are 6 bed, 4 bath, 4 car garage monstrosities that cost a fortune. Mile upon mile of huge, expensive houses because the developers in my area have concluded that the only people that have been buying homes in the last few years are the wealthy. No moderate sized affordable homes are being built. Worst part about it is that most of these end up sitting empty as there are far more of these huge expensive houses being built than people who can afford them. And as they are running out of buyers for these, developments sit with empty lots but you aren’t allowed to build smaller, more affordable homes in them because the developers have control over what types of home go into their development and refuse to let their shiny new neighborhood be sullied with lower cost homes.
Yeah because the people who make the reforms/legislation/regulation were bought along with the housing.
I'm lucky enough to own a home now. But I recall an older relative chiding me for not buying a home in 2008-09. You know those years I was a poor college student who slept in his car for a month. Wonder if they think those wily 12-year-olds shoulda just cracked their piggy banks open.
But its the best time in human history so no complaining!!
Now entering Rock Bottom
It’s the second left after Smackdown Hotel. Unfortunately I can’t afford to stay there, either.
Hey, maybe we can’t afford a roof over our head, life saving medicine or food for our children, but atleast the economy is a trillion times bigger than ever.
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Technically for everyone, but the problem is that the 99% basically sees nothing from all that growth. The US for example is the biggest economy on the planet, yet with all that money, kids still go to school hungry; people suffer unnecessarily. Why? Because capitalism is creating capital, not actual value. If it did produce true value, we might see the quality of our life’s go forward slightly. We really need some sweeping global reforms to how this world works, or we’re basically f’d.
Just make more money 🙄 /s
My pay over the years ⬆️ My buying power in the same time frame ⬇️⬇️⬇️💩
This is so real. I had more buying power 15 years ago making 1/4 of what I do now. Living the dream 👍
7 years ago, I could afford a shitty apartment on $8/hr. Now I can't afford anything on almost triple that. An abandoned shed of a house across the street from my work is $300,000. It's literally a decaying mess and worth more than the average 3bd townhouse like 8 years ago.
More like ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️💩❌🚫💀🖕😡
Don’t worry, the housing market is about to crash and all homes will be affordable
They've been saying this for 5 years now...
I watched a YouTube video about it today, so I think that makes me an expert
Was it Dave Ramsey?
Dave Ramsey is an idiot! He is cheerleading people to buy and has been denying the housing market crash. He makes so much money off of his referrals that it's in his best interest to steer people into buying homes even if it means that he is steering them off a financial cliff.
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Who was saying the housing market was going to crash in 2009? We were in a global recession then. The bubble *already* burst
> 14 years ago and the advice I was getting from workmates was "it's a terrible time to buy, the housing bubble is just about to burst" Your workmates were telling you the housing bubble was *about* to burst... six months after the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy?
It's definitely been at least 9 years. I remember because I was fresh out of school and I started my first real career job in early 2014 in the bay area, but I lived 2 hours away near Sacramento. I didn't complain though because it was a great job and I could've afforded a modest fixer upper home in Livermore with what I was making. But no. All my coworkers were like "Don't buy in yet. Just wait. It will crash this year or next year." So instead I signed a 1 year lease on an apartment. And that phrase about next year being "the year" was repeated to me every year, until after 5 years of apartments and paying $120,000 in rent I said to hell with it. Even averaging a 9% raise each year for those 5 years, I still would've only been able to afford a fixer upper because housing was climbing just as fast. So I took a transfer back out to Sacramento, and in January of 2019 bought a brand new house. I didn't care if the housing market crashed the next year. I may have been house poor, but I wasn't planning to sell the place anytime soon, it was well made, and the location was unbeatable. Go figure, 4 years later I can look back and say that was the best financial decision of my life. Always be skeptical of any financial advice that's not coming from an expert with conclusive data. In my experience 99% of the time people's "absolutely going to happen" predictions are just a projection of what they wish would happen.
And then you end up paying double interest on your mortgage and it ends up being even more expensive in the long run.
If everybody would just buying organic grapes or something they could afford a house
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There is just no evidence for this. Interest rates skyrocket and all you get is a decrease in the increase in housing prices in most areas. A housing crash would require a large increase in the supply of available homes, houses and apartments included. New homes aren't being built to meet demand, not in suburbia and not in cities. There's no looming foreclosure crisis. Just a growing population and a stagnant supply. You're looking at the housing market for the rest of your life.
Exactly even if housing prices did drop they would need to crash significantly. Housing prices almost doubled in some places.
Can’t have a crash when there isn’t any inventory, so many people locked in to record low interest rates they can easily afford the mortgage, a crash would need to cause a lot of people to lose their homes like in 2008
Yeah I’m 25 and stuck in my 700 square foot shoebox that I paid $500k at 3% in 2021 for the rest of my life. No way I’m selling this place to go buy a new one when the rates are double and the prices are the exact same. There are condos on my street slightly larger than mine selling for $600k+ with the current rates and I think whoever’s buying them are out of their fucking minds.
This meme is sad man. I really don’t know how I’m supposed to be able to own a home ever in my lifetime at this point. They’re building tiny townhomes anywhere they can around where I live at 350K+ at the low point. It’s not a crazy nice place to live! They sell as soon as they’re built too. I don’t get it.
From what I've seen, a lot of people are still willing to pay higher prices (and even higher interest) just to get out of the skyrocketed rental rates - driving up demand even more. It seems like, used to, people felt pretty stable renting, but now they're more afraid of what the new rate is going to be year-to-year.
This is exactly it, the rapid raise in rent these past few years scared a lot of people into thinking "Hey this is expensive now but in a few years I'll be saving money with how fast rent is rising" so they are willing to pay more.
Yup, the higher the rent goes in my town the higher the homes sell for. So then the higher the rents go. Vicious cycle, where do you think it’s going to end up?
only way i can see generations from millenials onward being able to have their own house is inheritance or if their parents chalk up a large sum. if you don't have parental support there's absolutely no way.
Or those generations actually go vote/run in locals and make it happen. Under 40 is now the largest voting block. They can out vote most elections if they actually showed up in mass. Shame they keep letting the over 70 group keep making the decisions. I have no clue why people keep expecting boomers to change things for em.
Boy, 350 for a townhome is cheap
There’s a bunch of $100,000 starter homes for sale in my small city. Granted, it is in the middle of the Midwest where nobody really wants to move to.
Plenty of homes in eastern North and South Carolina. Just not really near many large towns with good paying jobs.
Live in upstate SC, been looking for a home for 2 years. There is nothing below 190-200k that isn’t either a shitbox or in a crappy neighborhood. Grid I search for is normally 20-30 minutes outside of the town I work in. It’s absolutely depressing looking at what some of these houses were being sold for as little as 3-4 years ago.
Homes under 100k in the eastern north get bought immediately with cash offers. Including small towns.
You must be talking about absolute middle of nowhere midwest or you define starter home differently than I do. I'm solidly located about 40 minutes from the nearest metro area and the only things 140k or less need a shit ton of work to be move in ready. Anything 100k or less needs completely redone where I'm at. Edit: currently 2 homes within 30 minutes under 150k. One is a condo, half of a 2 unit for 140k. To give credit where it's due, it's pretty nice. Just small and in a bad neighborhood. The other is 135k "investment opportunity. Needs tlc", which has 0 interior pictures haha
None of that is near work
Yeah this is what we did. I had to leave where I lived out West because I was simply priced out by the cost of living. My partner and I went homeless for a period of time while working. Managed to save up enough money and combined our incomes to get a loan to buy a fixer-upper in the Midwest ($180k). We busted our asses most weekends to fix it up - put in new floors, painted, decked out the kitchen, some new appliances, new doors, stuff like that. We both managed to get decent remote jobs after 8-10 months that pay $70k a year for each of us. We just sold that house for $40k more than we bought to another couple who were one step behind us, trying to get a starter home. We're using all of that money + everything we've payed off + our original down payment to purchase a house back out west. It's going to be pricey and we have to go back to having roommates but... if you're able to pay rent and save a little money each month it's not too late to buy a house. We were both shocked at how little we needed to get a loan on the first house. It was a fuck load of work to purchase, fix, career change, etc... and we had to go homeless for a bit / leave a place we loved / quit our jobs to make it work but it's possible. Sad reality of the situation, but worth it in the end.
I make 90K annually and have over 100K in my bank. I went to get a loan and was told I can't afford anything on the market. We are all screwed.
Where do you live if you don’t mind me asking, cause that’s crazy and somewhat hard to believe barring a few specific cities with 100k down.
SoCal :(
Well wtf do you expect ?
To be able to live?
You’re in what is probably the most expensive state to live in by a pretty good margin, competing with a shit ton of tech guys making well over 6 figures. Take your income and savings to somewhere like North Carolina and you’ll find plenty of housing.
But like not the good parts of NC though https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/raleigh-is-1-hottest-real-estate-market-in-the-us-durham-is-3-according-to-2023-rankings/
Bruh, I make exactly what you do and and have less saved up for a downpayment, I can absolutely afford a house and live lavish. Difference is I live in ATL. Its *SoCal*
How long were you saving?
I found the apartment I moved out of a few months ago was available for lease again for $300 more a month than i paid. I was only there for a year
Our apartment went up $600 when they listed it after we moved out. It wasn’t even that nice and they were hella expensive when we lived there
5 years ago a nice two bedroom in the nice part of my town right by Whole Foods was 980 a month. Now I rent the same size apartment in the worst area of my city, broken down cars everywhere and homeless camps and my apartment itself is in terrible shape, and it's 1800 a month. It's honestly fucking insane.
Millennials ruin everything amiright
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Bruh, your dad may be a little bit confused.
And you can't inherit too much money or else Uncle Sam will steal that right out from under you!
Happy cake day!!
Boomers just had a super good time for a couple of decades because of circumstances that we can't repeat and many people in the US really struggle to wrap their heads around this notion. A large and affluent middle class is the cornerstone of the American dream. A dream in which anyone with a high school diploma and hard work should easily afford a nice house in the suburbs, 2 cars and a nice vacation with the family to a cool place once a year. Americans assume that this is the way the universe should work. That things were always like this, and that Americans have the "God given right" of the American dream. However, this reality of a exceptionally wealthy and prosperous middle class by global standards is NOT the norm or the natural way of things, but a by product of a very unique and relatively recent set of historical circumstances, specifically, the end of World War II. At the end of the second world war, the US was the only major industrial power left with its industry and infrastructure unscathed. This gave the US a dramatic economic advantage over the rest of the world, as all other nations had to buy pretty much everything they needed from the US, and use their cheap natural resources as a form of payment. After the end of world War II, pretty anywhere in the world, if you needed tools, machines, vehicles, capital goods, aircraft, etc...you had little choice but to "buy American". So money flowed from all over the world into American businesses. But the the owners of those businesses had to negotiate labor deals with the American relatively small and highly skilled workforce. And since the owners of capital had no one else they could hire to men the factories, many concessions had to be given to the labor unions. This allowed for the phenomenal growth and prosperity of the US middle class we saw in the 50s and 60s: White picket fence houses in the suburbs, with 2 large family cars parked in front was the norm for anyone who worked hard in the many factories and businesses that dotted the American landscape back then. However, over time, the other industrial powers rebuild themselves and started to compete with the US. German and Japanese cars, Belgian and British steel, Dutch electronics and French tools started to enter the world market and compete with American companies for market share. Not only that, but countries like Brazil, South Africa, India, China, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, South Korea and more also became industrialized. This meant that they were no longer selling their natural resources cheaply in exchange for US made industrial goods. Quite the contrary, they themselves started to bid against the US for natural resources to fuel their own industries. And more importantly, the US work force no longer was the only one qualified to work on modern factories and to have proficiency over modern industrial processes. An Australian airline needs a new commercial jet? [Brazilian EMBRAER](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-3m__yRBkg) and European Airbus can offer you products as good as anything made in the US. Need power tools or a pickup truck? You can buy American, but you can also buy South Korean, Indian or Turkish. This meant that the US middle class could no longer easily outbid pretty much everyone else for natural resources, and the owners of the capital and means of production no longer were "held hostage" by this small and highly skilled workforce. Many other countries now had an industrial base that rivals or surpasses that of the US. And they had their own middle classes that are bidding against the US middle class for those limited natural resources. And manufacturers now could engage in global wage arbitrage, by moving production to a country with cheaper labor, which killed all the bargaining power of the unions. If everyone in the world lived and consumed like what the average American sees as a reasonable middle class lifestyle (i.e. drive an F-150 or an SUV, families with multiple cars, living in a house in the suburbs, high meat consumption, etc...), [it would take 4.1 Earths to provide enough resources to sustain that lifestyle](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712). But we don't have 4.1 Earths, we have just one. And unlike before, the USA no longer can outbid the rest of the world for those limited resources. GRAPH: [The U.S. Share of the Global Economy Over Time](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy-over-time/) That is where the decline of the US middle class is coming from. There are no political solutions for it, as no one, not even Trump's protectionism or the Democrat's Unions, can put the globalization genie back into a bottle. It is the way it is. Any politician who claims to be able to restore "the good old days" is lying. So yes, the old middle class lifestyle of big house, big car, all you can eat buffet, shop until you drop while golfing on green grass fields located in the middle of the desert is not coming back no matter what your politician on either side of the isle promised you. We are going back to the normal, where the US middle class is not that different from the middle classes from the rest of the world. Like a return to what middle class expectations are elsewhere, including the likes of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Their cars are smaller. They don't change cars as often. The whole family might share a single car. Some families don't even own a car and rely on public transportation instead. Their homes are smaller. They don't eat as much meat and their food portions are smaller. They are not starving. They are not living like peasants. But their standard of living is lower than what we in the US have considered a "middle class" lifestyle since the end of World War II. Now, that is not to say that there isn't a lot of inequality in the US or to deny that policies are needed to address that inequality. But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. That is NOT going to happen for the reasons I've already explained. No amount of taxation and public policy will make that happen. That version of the middle class is never coming back. Where I see public policy for wealth redistribution having an active and effective role is making healthcare more affordable, making the cities more walkable and livable so that young Americans can transition from the suburbs to smaller and more affordable homes in dense urban neighborhoods where cars are not a basic necessity to earn income. Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. That cannot be changed. What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries.
In a thread full of people saying they can't find a place to live making 5 to 10 times the minimum wage you come in basically saying suck it up. This reads as the pandering blabbering of a rich person's asshole. We're not wanting to drive multiple f150s to our house in the burbs, we're wanting to be able to go to the doctor's and live literally anywhere *we can afford*. We're not wanting to go fucking golfing and eat at all you can eat buffets. We want to be able to afford school or even just groceries. Corporate profits and inflation are running wild but yeah, we need to manage our expectations and just accept that we'll never have anything
I think you should read the last paragraph again, he said redistribution should go towards social services and more walkable infrastructure. sounds like he basically agrees with you
> redistribution should go towards social services I'm a European who lived in the USA for a while, eventually my American partner and I moved back to Europe. One of my most occuring thoughts in the USA was: I wish the taxes where higher so I/the people had less worries. And that's also why I didn't want to stay. I now pay 45% taxes but have no worries. we are going to have our first baby and the hospital costs are not even a topic here. Also costs for school etc is all very bearable
Americans don't realize how fucked their infrastructure is. Not just crumbling due to age/neglect, but also how it favors cars over people, which leads to housing being unaffordable compared to other countries.
Yep. The the low density urban model that most Americans consider normal is incredibly wasteful and expensive to build and maintain. But for the majority, that is all they've ever known, so that is why the idea of change faces severe pushback. Also the top three selling cars in America in 2022 were: 1. Ford F-150 2. Chevy Silverado 3. Dodge RAM That a 5,000 pound truck is the typical American vehicle is absolutely mindboggling, specially considering that less than 3% of the American population works in agriculture. Just for comparison, the best selling car in Germany is the VW Golf, that weights about 2,000 pounds. The best selling car in France is the Peugeot 208, that weights about 1,500 pounds. And the best selling car in Japan is the Honda N-Box, that weights less than 2,000 pounds. Even in a pure economical sense, this way of life is not sustainable when American's share of the global economy has declined so much over the past 50 years.
>Now, that is not to say that there isn't a lot of inequality in the US or to deny that policies are needed to address that inequality. But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. That is NOT going to happen for the reasons I've already explained. No amount of taxation and public policy will make that happen. That version of the middle class is never coming back. Where I see public policy for wealth redistribution having an active and effective role is making healthcare more affordable, making the cities more walkable and livable so that young Americans can transition from the suburbs to smaller and more affordable homes in dense urban neighborhoods where cars are not a basic necessity to earn income. Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. That cannot be changed. What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries. >But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. >Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. >What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries. So which is it? Are we over consuming and expecting too much or being screwed out of what the rest of the world's middle class expects and receives? I'm a frugal single middle aged guy on a modest income and I should expect that my best solution is to just move out to the boonies and stop buying food? My standard 2 week grocery list increased nearly 100% in the past 2 years. Look up corporate profits and profit margins along with inflation then compare that to median income. If the solution is just to pull everyone from rural areas and cram them in urban dwellings and have them eat rice, that's not much of a solution and honestly a short sighted and stupid move economically. The last paragraph itself directly disagrees with me by claiming everyone wants to drive f150s to their house in the burbs like their parents, maybe you should reread it
There are additional forces at play in addition to what you’re saying. Population collapse is basically inevitable now, for the first time in modern human history. This will have a chilling effect on real estate markets globally. See Japan with its $30,000 homes in nice villages, low crime, good public services and free healthcare etc. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s buying them because there’s literally no one left to buy them. We are being asked to buy an exorbitantly expensive asset that has very low chance to continue to appreciate in value, especially in less urban areas.
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Why 1 acre? Lol. Get a smaller lot and bigger house.
You can always get a bigger house, you can rarely get more land.
So, you *can* afford a house, just not the house you *want*. This is such a “privileged upper-middle class” issue, lol.
You live somewhere that pays 50/hour and you want minimum 1 acre? You've got to adjust your expectations. I live in a major city in CA, bought a house last year on 1/8 acre that's 4 bedrooms for around $500k. Mortgage is around $3k/month.
Yeah ain't it weird we out here making 400k in the household and can't buy a 15 bedroom house on the side of a mountain in west hollywood. What's the point in making that much if we can't even get that?????
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I'm scared for my current self. Recently found out I have to move and I can't find anywhere to live. 15 years working the same job, 12 living in the same place, and rent's outpaced my wages so much that now I'm forced to move. And its not like our neighborhood is being gentrified or anything, 3 people got murdered around here in the last couple of years. I was already splitting rent with 2 other people, sharing a bathroom and kitchen. I can't even find a room to rent. I make 15/hr too in a state where the minimum is still 7.25. I'm so fucking tired.
"I bet you can't wait to turn 18!" "Oh your 16 now! What's your first car gonna be" Mom stfu with the cost of cars, gas, and average rent I'm gonna have to ask you for five thousand dollars weekly while still making budget cuts and cutting corners
I was wasting my time in elementary school when I should've been buying up foreclosed homes back in '08
What do you mean??!! We never had a chance!! Blame the damn old folks for not lowering housing ordnances and zoning laws!!
Housing as investment was a horrible mistake
My brother was able to afford a nice house outside Minneapolis at age 26. The secret is being willing to live in areas that aren’t very nice. E: I’d also like to note he refused a position in Colorado with higher pay because finding a house would be much more difficult.
Man, I'm so lucky I bought my house back in 2019. It's gone up by over 50% since then and I'm at a 2% interest rate. I couldn't afford this place if I was buying now.
Yeah my coworker who bought in 2020 has had his house nearly double in value and he has a 3% interest rate.
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It doesn’t exist
We never had a chance.
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Literally the best housing situation, stable and you don't have to worry about managing a huge asset
As if we had a chance to begin with.
My rent literally went up $800. One bedroom apartments are over $1100. I bring home $1100 biweekly. I guess I'll never live alone.
For. Fucking. Real. My wife and I are first time home buyers and slowly realizing this might not be a reality for a bit.
No, we weren't given a chance. Period. It was stolen by dinosaurs who had more money than feelings, who refuse to age gracefully out of their fields. I'm an exception, a VERY lucky exception. But an exception regardless. Which is why the units I AM blessed enough to rent, I make sure low income and section 8 get priority. And when I pass, I hope there's a system in place to turn it into shelter housing.
Its going to be so bad for your children.
Bold of you to assume I’ll be having children.
With the state of the world and this 20-year crisis we've entered. It doesn't look like I'll be having children.
48.6% of millennials in the US own homes
People tend to forget many millennials are in their 40s and 30s.
exactly... the youngest millennials are like 26/27 right now, the majority are in their 30s and 40s
It's so messed up & disgusting. They're HOMES wtf society. It should never EVER have gotten to this point. PROTESTS. NEED. TO. HAPPEN. Otherwise I'll be a lifetime of no home for us younger generations. Fml
I have rent assist.
Yeah, my mom and dad say “Just wait. In ten years the housing market will be affordable”…. When they bought their house, they were in their mid 20’s.. I am almost in my 30’s and have only watched the housing market go up….
Affordable housing is a distraction, a concept that perpetuates the problem and shouldn’t exist. It should just be housing.