Op thinks we can afford a house by 30 if we go to college.
36 and counting…
42 and counting… I actually have some small hope of trying to buy a house next year though. Not in my home of America though, it’ll be as an expat, and contingent on a foreign bank extending me credit. Not a sure thing at all, but… I’m hoping? There might actually be a path forward? Maybe?
I think the non-college route yielded better than college for my age cohort. First dude I knew who bought a house was like 19 and he’d been working at Costco for 4+ years. 2008 happened and suddenly this young man had a stable job and savings and looked great on paper 🥲
People I know with most real estate are 2 kinds.
- inherited everything.
- stayed in hotel Mama for free for years while not studying, but working as plumber/contractors/mechanic etc starting age 18-19. By the time they moved out age 26-30 they were already loaded, renting out multiple apartments.
Both required parents, either they had to be wealthy and die early or decided to gift capital early; or to be super supportive, fun (tolerable) enough to keep living with after 18 and not asking you to pay rent.
Yea I hope I put enough emphasis on the 2008 crash being responsible for his luck. I think he paid around $100,000 for a condo in California.
I grew weed for 20 years which was the only way I got on the housing ladder at 26. I’ve been forced to downsize already but haven’t fallen off yet
Also you could still rent a house back in 2008 for like $400-$1000 so the living with the parents thing wasn’t a necessity back then. We’d have 4 dudes in a 2 bedroom housing paying 2-$300 a month
Going to college doesnt allow you to buy a house at 30 either lol
I majored in buying houses
thats usually called flipping houses, or you are well off enough to buy and rent out houses or apartments.
NOT IF YOU DRINK THE STARBUCKS EVERY DAY.
I found a blurb that Americans spend an average of $22/week at coffee shops. That’s nearly $1200 per year!
With a median US home price of $410,000 and a minimum FHA loan down payment of 3.5%, all you need to do it save that for twelve years and never have anything go seriously wrong in the meantime. Then you too can pay about $3300 per month for 30 years, ultimately spending nearly $900,000 for your $410,000 loan.
💲 Fine auntses 💲
I CAN LIVE WITH THAT AS LONG AS YOU I CAN STILL HAVE MY AVOCADO TOAST.
Rather, it puts you in debt. And now you have even less power. We should normalize everyone being able to live and not force college on everyone. But also make it free/super cheap so people can attend if they want without having to suffer financially
It did the opposite for me!
What makes you think people with degrees can afford a house by 30?
I think people with degrees are less likely to own a house by the age of 30, because they studied longer and have to pay off debt first. The only reason i own a house is because i found one for super cheap and renovated it myself.
That’s probably the best strategy. Or buying a duplex and renting half of it. Either way now-a-days in America you gotta be willing to put ALOT of sweat equity in the get a shelter
Or buying a duplex and renting half of it
That’s just buying two houses to rent one though
Right, but you’d try to find a distressed duplex for the same price as a single family. If you’re gonna risk buying a shitter and fixing it, might as well get an additional income.
Is that a thing? I’m in Canada and I’ve never seen a duplex sell as a single house. If you could find it that would be a pretty sweet deal
Most people use this trick when they have friends or family and the rental is a mutually beneficial situation. but when you get into larger homes and commercial redesignation, we’ve turned a lot of old mansions and warehouses into 4+ unit condos.
Varies by town ordinance; but if it’s within standards usually you can get a deed for each unit and it becomes a condo association basically. Part of the zoning reforms we are fighting for.
Not a fan of capitalism? Just exploit the working class duh!
I usually hear people say US wages are great, and yet we managed to buy a house in our 20s when I was on near UK minimum wage. That was a couple of years ago as I am not in my 20s anymore. But I can still save up hundreds a month without even trying very hard.
No degree, no driving licence. The internet gave me the impression it wasn’t this easy. I would acknowledge only having unstable work at best must suck a lot more though.
I live in a European capital, and house prices have outpaced wages a long time ago.
Capital cities are always more expensive though
Yeah that doesn’t take away from how they shouldn’t be. The only reason they are expensive is because we are not responding to the rising demand because regulation prevents it causing speculation exacerbated by mortgage subsidies.
And especially after goibg to an US college.
All I heard so far, you will be even further away from reaching the house goal.
You kidding me dude? I’m past 40 and not chance to own a house. Grad and masters degree, working in IT. Ah and uni was good and free. granted that was in the developing world, now living in 1st world, but still no house.
When I was 7 my parents owned a house AND bought a beach house.
what happened to all the money your parents had from those houses?
If they’re anything like mine they squandered it on expensive shit they didn’t need. Mine even sold their nice old house to have a new smaller one built in a cramped housing development with an HOA and they broke even. I don’t know wtf they were thinking.
Mine even sold their nice old house to have a new smaller one
that’s exactly what my mother would do.
she has this mindset that we need constantly changing products. she says it’s like with clothing, if you always wear the same cloth, people will get tired of it and you need to buy new clothes all the time. she also says that spending a lot of money stimulates the economy. (she’s actually right about this, only that it’s her - no, our money that she’s spending and the rich peoples economy where it’s going to).
i hate these kind of people. in my experience, these are people who are unable to not buy unnecessary stuff and just be content with how things are today.
Yeah I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I talk to them a lot of the time. Seems like most people I know are similar to varying degrees too. It’s depressing.
I went to college, I’m way over 30. Buying a house is a vague dream.
I got lucky and bought a house in 2015 at 28, I barely pulled it off with roommates, barely pulling it off now with a fiancé. There’s no way I could buy a house now. I’m not even sure we could upgrade if we needed to.
something similar happened to my recently moved in neighbor, he thought it was because he had achild, no your PARENTS chipped for the house and renovations, you arnt paying for that almost 1.5-2mil hours on your own.
I’m 43 and only now buying a house. And that’s because I don’t have loans (not american)
38 with a masters degree. No house in sight. Good luck. Remember, there is always [redacted].
Squatters rights?
People have gone to college and still can’t even afford a single home, much less, a suitable apartment spot.
It took an MS for me, a BS for my partner, choosing to not adopt children, five years of saving, a minor inheritance from an unexpected death, and the housing market cratering due to the pandemic for us to be able to afford a house that we absolutely could not afford now without making 150% of our current income.
All it took was accruing nearly $100k in combined school loan debt, plus over three times that much in mortgage debt. That’s freedom debt! Murica!
or the job field is soo dismal , catch 22.
I got an MS in a STEM field and wasn’t able to buy a house until I was 36, supervising multiple employees, and married to someone who also contributed.
you’re lucky, what major was it, i had a friend who got the MS version of BS degree, no job, but she had a partner so shes pretty much fine, since she already gave up searching for a job like less than 6 months.
a lot of people it takes years to find a job. esp if they are picky. my brother has been unemployed for 3 years but only because he’s a snob and refuses to work for a non-elite company.
cherry picking yea is a problem too. does he have experience in the field, he shouldve gone for any job thats in field. some people have been searching for years but dint cherry pick and they left eh field as a result of the low job prospects. the longer your bro waits, the less likely he will get hired, because time between your school(job gap) only increases, if his study was in tech, it would be foolish for him to not take a tech job, lol. my bros are in tech and it took them at least 1 year to find a job in tech, this was pre-pandemic of course.
other stems have a much harder to time getting into.
I’ve interviewed people over the years in IT.
A lot of candidates are complete morons, regardless of experience or education. We hire the people who show competence in the interview… a lot of people simple have zero.
and in helping some friends/people over the years get job… usually the biggest issue is how they don’t actually properly apply or sell themselves. They blast out some generic shitty resume/cover letter for every job and just expect it will get them hired, instead of tactfully marketing themselves to the employer.
Applying to jobs is a skill, like any other.
you used to be able to afford a house on a single minimum wage job
maybe 60 years ago.
What people often glance over is that housing was heavily subsidized after WWII
What people often glance over is that housing was heavily subsidized after WWII
I think this post should be home that you own. I’m going to say something controversial in that, in the US, I actually think houses should be expensive. I think a single family dwelling >1500sqft on a half acre or more of land is a luxury, and most people don’t need to have that much land and space all to themselves. The problem is that that’s ALL that’s available for most regions in the US. The US is suffering from foolish post-war suburban centric zoning codes that prohibit building medium density housing (“the missing middle”). We need to change zoning codes across the country to encourage building up “gentle density” and mixed use areas, even in rural regions, because they use land and infrastructure much more effectively and efficiently. They raise more revenue for towns while bringing down home prices. If everyone had the option to buy a place of their own <1000sqft with a small land footprint, I don’t think there would be as much dissatisfaction with not being able to afford a “house”.
I totally would love a tiny house. Hell, land is still affordable where I live and it’s still feasible to put a trailer on it and chill.
I wouldn’t mind permanent apartment living either if they built the buildings better. I don’t want to fall victim to a neighbor who doesn’t take care of their home; basically if they have rats or make noise, I don’t want the rats nor do I want to hear the neighbor. It’s just too much to deal with the older I get.
I’m over 40 and could only buy a house somewhere in nowhere land with massive commute needs.
It’s not feasible and I earn way over average salary.
What is “way over average”?
i know people in their late 20s that are buying houses on salties of like 80k-120k. I make like 45ish on average, but people my age are buying houses
I make 150K and to buy an affordable home that isn’t a teardown, say under 600K, you need a two hour commute from the downtown area. Anything inside an hour of the downtown is more like 800K+ and being bought up by people with family money or 300-400K yearly incomes. someone making 45K in my city needs to live multiple people to a bedroom to afford rent.
But it’s all about where you live and the incomes. Where I live 150K income puts you only in the top 20% of households. And I don’t have family money backing me like most of my peers in the housing market. Most of my friends got 100-200K gifts from family to buy their homes.
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53% above average of my country.
Buying a house without signing up for a lifetime crippling dept is plain impossible in large cities.
To get into a cost range where my wife (same salary) and I feel comfortable to take on a loan requires us to move roughly one or two hours train travel out into the countryside.
Yeah, the debt is kind of just a given these days. My friends that have houses have 30 year mortgages. I personally prefer renting because i have pretty severe wander lust and hop around every few years
There was once a time when people educated themselves not because they wanted a particular job in the economy, but because they saw value in education and wanted to participate in the human tradition of advancing the specie’s ability to understand and use nature. You didn’t need school to be a blacksmith, for example, but perhaps just an apprenticeship (experience).
There’s a point to be made here, about how this degrades the value of education. It’s great for capitalism, making survival—or “living well”—contingent on qualifications derived from paid education. But what have we lost in this process? It feels, to me at least, like we’ve created a culture where education is a mere lineitem on a checklist. How might that change what education is, what it’s expected to be, and what sort of innovation comes from it?
You shouldn’t have to work to be able to live, period.
The right to live with dignity should not be dependent on productivity.
Anyone working full time should always be able to easily provide for themselves and a “reasonable size” family.
four people disagreeing because they think if people’s place in society is not tied to their productivity, then all the lazy foreigners are gonna come in and take our spot. only our heroic (self-sacrificing) eternal push to increase our bosses’ pockets are enough of an excuse to consume oxygen and continue to eat (massive /s)
I mean, someone has to work. How do you choose who the unlucky bastards are that get sent to the field to grow food for the people who don’t have to work?
How do you choose who the unlucky bastards are that get sent to the field to grow food for the people who don’t have to work?
Preferably, they’d be people without disabilities that prevent them from doing that kind of work. OP didn’t say, “Nobody should work,” just that being able to live shouldn’t be dependent on working.
For millions of people with disabilities, the difference between those two ideas is life-changing. It’s important not to conflate them.
You don’t need to. All you really need is to go for a walk in your desired neighbourhood, find a house you love, knock on the door and introduce yourself. Ask any questions you have about the property, then kill the occupants, flay them and wear their skin as your own as you lead your new charmed life, for as long as you can.
Depending on the field, going to college might not significantly improve your chances.
