Prices aren’t the same in every location. In real estate it is “location location location”.
He’s got a job and a family; how does he do it?
Balances work with his wife’s underwhelming cooking
He’s got all the answers that I wanna know
How can I be what I am, but 40 years ago?
Gee whiz, he got it and he flaunts
I am the thing he is, but he is it when I want
I guess it’s true that some people really got to fight to survive
And some people are white guys in 1985Bo Burnham - 1985
Amazing song like pretty much everything else in that set.
Yeah, I did not expect the deluxe edition to be 25 additional bangers. lol
I don’t wanna pay for anything
Clothes and food and drugs for free
If it was 1970
I’d have a job at a factory
I am a man that’s made of meat
And you’re on the internet looking at feet
I hate almost everything that I see
And I just wanna disappearViagra Boys - Man Made of Meat
If it was 1970
I’d have a job at a factory
I recommend anyone nostalgic for the factory jobs of the 1970s to watch the movie “Blue Collar”.
The frustrating thing about nostalgia is that it’s got you pining for the rotten deals of yesteryear instead of organizing for a less-shitty sandwich next year.
I don’t think there writer is really nostalgic for factory work, labor was already in decline by then, but it did allow a middle class to buy homes and have pensions. There aren’t any entry level jobs that offer that three days, and we’re still trading our bodies for money in similar ways (Amazon warehouses, door dashing, forgoing health and dental because of costs, etc).
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Just finally landed a “starter” home. 325k. During comparisons we looked at old listings of it being half that a decade ago. I still feel lucky because that’s “cheap” for a good neighborhood where I am. Mortgage and all rolled together comes in ar only $200 higher than my current rent, which will surely continue to rise every year unlike my fixed mortgage. But saving up that down payment in this economy took everything I had even with a decent salary.
We just did the same thing, it’s crazy. How can rent be SO EXPENSIVE, when, now that we finally got into a house, our payment is only a few hundred more, but we’ve tripled our square footage, and we have a garage, and a little bit of land. It’s crazy.
That payment includes insurance and taxes too. Wild.
Granted house upkeep takes money, and effort. But still.
Right? But you can do those projects and know you own the thing. And if you can save for a down payment, you can set money aside for those projects along the way as well.
Great job though. Persistence really pays off. My wife and I bought a house in an ok neighborhood and struggled to pay it off for almost ten years. When covid hit and they were offering 2% loans we had about $20k left to pay on it. By the time we found the next place we wanted and saved a down payment, prices had shot up, interest rates were higher, but we ended up buying points instead of using all of our money for down payment and got our current interest rate below 3%. Our old house, which was paid off, sat on the market for almost 3 months before we sold it, put all the money toward our current home, and did a refinance for the same interest rate for six figures less.
Starter homes are especially great when you know it’s a starter home. You don’t dump a ton of money into it, everything becomes “will this decision add value when we sell it” and you don’t get emotionally tied to it. It’s a stepping stone to get you where you want to be.
I respectfully disagree with that final statement. At least, my opinion on it differs from yours. Which is fine.
We’re in our first starter home right now, and we definitely have plans to make changes that will potentially drop its resell value. Why? Because we live here now, and probably for the next decade, and we want to fix things that annoy us.
Namely we plan to knock out a wall to make the kitchen/dining more open, and it’ll flow better into the living room too. But then it goes from a 3 bedroom house, to 2 🤷♂️
My in-laws just built a house, and I kind of hate it. They even dislike a lot of things about it, but everything they did to build that house, every decision, was 100% about resale. I don’t even mean big stuff, I mean every little detail. Like they’re living in a showroom. That’s just not for me.
I can understand your point. We did some minor changes for my wife’s peace of mind, but we bought the home with the idea that it wasn’t our forever home. The one we’re in now we are keeping though. We’ve remodeled the previous owners remodeled kitchen… Added things to the house that do nothing for value, but the pressure of knowing we’re going to have to resell it is completely gone.
We had a 15 year mortgage on the old house and the whole point was to pay it off and get rid of it while we looked for something better. We never even painted the walls, it was still contractor beige when we left. Our house was livable though and already open concept, so we didn’t really have to make any major changes to it. We just turbo cash dumped into the principal at every chance.
That being said, if my wife would have had any major issues, we would have changed things. It was just “acceptable” enough for us to treat it like a long ass lease and leave it almost like we found it.
Thank you! It’s definitely been a process. Even if I never move beyond it I know having a home is a privilege now.
which will surely continue to rise every year unlike my fixed mortgage
Pretty much the #1 reason to buy a home. I got into a $350k house in 2014, knocked my mortgage down to 3% during the COVID shock, and have been happily paying under $1/sqft for the last twelve years. No idea what I’m going to do when my son outgrows his tiny bedroom. But that’s a problem for 10 years from now. Maybe we’ll see another housing crash before then.
I can get roughly 3000 square feet house built in the 2000s for 325keuros. In a stable neighborhood with good schools and lots of nature.
As a Texas resident, I’ll say one of the ugliest turns of the last decade has been the hollowing out of the local schools and parks. What used to be some of the biggest selling points of our neighborhood is gearing up to be an absolute blight.
Note that if property values continue to increase, then your property tax will also increase. Therefore, your monthly payments on your mortgage can increase.
When I bought my home in 2020, my mortgage was a flat $2,600 to the penny. Now it’s $2850.
The one good thing about that though is that property tax is deducted from your income, so you get 30 or 40% of that back at the end of the year depending on your overall tax bracket, and depending on where you live and what your property taxes are once you sum up the entire year, even though your mortgage is $200 more, you could actually be paying less in total.
When I bought my home in 2020, my mortgage was a flat $2,600 to the penny. Now it’s $2850.
Okay, but $250 over six years is a pittance compared to the equivalent hikes in rent.
Like, I agree, property taxes keep creeping up on us. But so do fuel and food costs, utilities, etc. That’s inflation for you. I’m also getting COA in my annual wage, so you could argue that I’m “part of the problem”.
Compare that to some landlord who can spike your rent because the market gets a bit tight, because the interest on their debt ticked up, because they want an excuse to renovate and are looking to scare people out of their leases, because they think they can squeeze us a bit harder, or for no reason at all. I watched my $800/mo rent balloon to $2000/mo over the five years before I bought a home.
Getting a fixed rate mortgage is pretty much always better than renting, unless you need to change addressed every couple of years anyway.
I agree, I was just letting them know that a mortgage not going to stay at the same price throughout the entire length of the loan regardless of how it’s set up.
It could also decrease, like if there’s a massive housing value crash and your house is now worth 20% of what you paid for it, then upside is your property taxes should also only be 20% of what they were.
And the only reason why I even thought to share was because I myself was shocked when my mortgage increased after the first year, even though it was only like 60 bucks, I was like, man, I thought a mortgage was not supposed to change.
Why would the mortgage payment go up if property taxes go up?
You typically escrow your property tax payments based on an estimate from your mortgage lender.
So, if you were paying $1200 in taxes last year and $1320 this year, the extra $120/year (aka $10/mo) would get tacked onto whatever you’re paying the mortgage lender.
I’m speaking from an American perspective, but usually, when you have a loan, the loan requires that your property tax be paid and that you keep house home insurance on the property. And so to prevent difficulties, what they’ll do is the mortgage company will bundle your choice of home insurance and the payments for your property tax into an escrow account.
If your property taxes rise, then the mortgage company will tell you, hey, you either have to pay a lump sum to keep it at the same amount, or you have to start paying more every month.
And since property taxes are a fairly set value, it honestly doesn’t matter whether you pay them over each month or all as a lump sum, you’re going to be paying the exact same amount because that’s the amount of money that has been charged to you for owning the property.
Ok so it’s not the mortgage itself
Yes, it’s your mortgage payment, but the actual debt you owe on the property has not increased.
Not if you don’t make enough to itemize deductions. Ask how I know 😮💨
It’s not about how much you make. It’s about your deductions.
All of your property tax is deductible. All of the interest on your mortgage is deductible. If your income is low enough, all with the interest paid on your student loans is deductible. Health care costs are deductible.
If those plus your other deductions cross whatever the threshold is, then you itemize and if it doesn’t, you take the lump.
That’s why I like FreeTaxUSA.com because it actually does all of your deductions and then tells you which one is the better choice for you.
Gee, thanks.
Your mortgage will likely stay the same but I have some bad news about insurance and property taxes
What does starter home mean?
A smaller/older/cheaper home, specifically in a country where it is expected to be sellable for a profit later to “climb the housing ladder” with a more expensive house (and repeat until maybe downsizing after retirement).
Single bedroom house that is supposed to be a lot cheaper than the “family homes,” that would be in the same area. A 2 BR home may qualify as well. The issue is that they haven’t built any of these type of houses in over 60 years, and the prices are jacked sky high.
Think it was a rhetorical question, that $800k figure is crazy even by modern standards for a “starter” home.
In my state, $800k is 3,000 square foot, 4 bedrooms, rooftop balcony, in the capital downtown.
$400k gets you about the same, just like 5 miles from that downtown with more yard.
$200k gets you a thousand square foot townhouse built in 2004…
$75k gets you a thousand square foot mobile home built in 2020 on the outskirts of the capital…
No that was a genuine question, I don’t think I‘ve ever heard that term before.
In this particular case a starter home is specifically an average of the bottom third of the housing market. Zillow recently reported that, using that as the metric, 242 American cities now have starter homes costing one million dollars.
The nationwide average for a starter home is about $200k, which is still a lot, but not the huge figure that’s been making the news this week.
Sadly, that’s not the norm - LCOL areas perhaps, but 800k isn’t a wild number for a starter home these days.
Ironic as they’re part of the reason they’re so costly now, but: https://www.zillow.com/news/242-cities-now-have-starter-homes-that-cost-1-million/
Well you say that’s the norm, but the map clearly shows this is predominantly a New York and California situation, and otherwise a relatively isolated scenario for one or two cities in some states.
That would seem to frame 48 states as low cost of living areas in general. It’s understandable to see why the figures would not be relatable to most folks.
I had a job prospect in the Bay area of California and the cost of living pretty much nixed it for me, that the relatively huge pay increase was more than erased by the housing costs alone.
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Prices aren’t the same in every location.
You know, we fixed this problem with Work From Home policies for tens of millions of people. But then we decided to drag folks kicking and screaming back to the office, having failed to expand transit capacity or build dense housing or do anything to make the urban centers accessible. And now we’re worse off than before COVID.
People just don’t want to work. 😶
Jobs aren’t the same in every location either.
My job is the same in every location.
I work remote.
My first apartment, in the early 80s, was $300, and I couldn’t afford it on my $3.35 minimum wage salary, so I had a roommate.
After about 2 years, I got a real job, and my roommate decided to move out at the same time. I was stressing about finding a new roommate when I realized I could afford to pay for the entire place myself. I haven’t had a roommate since.
Well, until I got married, and later had a kid. I’m still not convinced it was the better move.
In 2020 I was lucky that I had the opportunity to live rent-free with my girlfriend’s parents for a year to save up the 5% down payment required for first-time homebuyers. I had to get the cheapest, most run-down house with bars on the windows because the town was that bad. Still, living there for 4 years let me build up capital, and now I sold it and got a pretty nice place to live instead.
I thought I’d never get a house for all the reasons you posted, but it was possible, if only barely after a year of embarrassment and the luck to even have that. I hope you get the opportunity to save up that money somehow, too. It changes your life to have a house that basically puts your monthly housing money to paying off an investment rather than paying off your landlord’s investment instead.
Every single millennial homeowner I know managed to get their house one of two ways: get married in 2008 to a Gen-X doctor who can afford to buy a foreclosure when the market tanked, or get massive financial help from their parents.
That’s it. Those are the options. And unless you’ve got a time machine, I think the first one is off the table by now.
I moved to another country, but it still took until my early 40s.
Basically, yeah. If you don’t already have money saved up, and you don’t have someone who can cover the down payment for you, you need some method of living rent free for enough time to get $15-20k, at least in Minneapolis, where I live. The starter home I got for $200k in 2020 is now worth $250k, so the $10k down payment I saved up would now need to be $12.5k for first-time homebuyers.
Crazy that such a piece of crap house is worth so much more when the neighborhood has only gotten worse, but it shows that even just sitting on the house for a few years doing nothing to it like I did will net you some hefty capital. I sold my house after only 4 years, and after paying off the rest of the mortgage and the realtor fees, I had a nearly $50k check to show for it, thanks to what little of the mortgage I’d managed to actually pay down combined with the $30k increase in the price of the house in that time.
Gen Z here, bought a small home with 3% down first homeowners loan.
Honestly the only thing going for me was being married. Dual income was a big step up, but other than that it was just me and my wife. We don’t even make all that much, I have a degree in anthropology lol. No money from either of our parents.
We did rent the cheapest place we could find, and that neighborhood was rough. I will say if we tried to buy our house again today I’m not sure we could. Interest rates and home values have shot up like crazy. It only taken about 4 years for things to get that crazy.
I got curious to see what it would be like if I refinanced my house.
My current mortgage that I’m paying $2850 on would be over $4,000 with today’s interest rates.
I literally could not afford to live where I’m living if I hadn’t moved when I did.
Yeah I got lucky my parents were able to rent me and my wife the garage for about 4 years at a discount. Then since my in-laws were renting a house we decided to team up and go half on a house. This way we both got out of renting and we can all pitch in to cover the mortgage, we converted the garage to be our living room/kitchen and put a wall in the hallway so essentially the house is cut in half. Our commutes increased a ton to go to work, but its so much nicer on the weekends being away from a major city
The spirit of this is absolutely correct, but where is a “starter home” $800K?
Thanks. Yeah I figured this was a weird definition thing…
Zillow defines a starter home as one in the lowest third of home values in a given region.
To be sure, the typical starter home still costs far less than $1 million at just under $199,000, Zillow noted. Overall, the median home costs nearly $418,000, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Again I am not doubting the point, but my personal definition of starter home would be basically “the cheapest livable home with minimal standards applied”. Given that I live in a metro area but have seen homes for $450-500K which are decent, reading $800K was a starter was surprising to me.
Is it a metro area with significant sprawl?
Median list price in Massachusetts is $716,000 and most houses still go from listed to pending in around 8 days.
Yeah there’s some sprawl. It seems like it’s a competitive market. Haven’t been seriously looking and I know most homes go for more than listing price but the listing prices at least are sometimes much less than the cited $800K.
Yeah starter home should be based on median salary for the area, not the product itself. That just becomes inconvenient because then 95%+ of homes would fall out of that range and fuck the narrative even harder.
I live in Adelaide Australia, I have approval for a 800k loan and have been unable to buy anything. Every house always sells for 50-100k more than the asking price and it’s just stupid - and building new is even worse (just as expensive and the quality is terrible).
Gonna look at some crack shacks next.
If you are paying that much for a starter home, you are paying for the location. Not saying houses are cheap, but they are only that crazy in a high cost of living area. It’s not really surprising that houses are expensive in places where everything is expensive. I bought a 2 bedroom home for $175k a few years ago in a city with a population of 10k.
Jobs are in population centers, though
The problem is finding a cheap house in a place where you can also get a job. The smaller the town, the less jobs (ymmv)
My sister recently moved from The large city where we both lived to South Carolina. When I visit she takes me to look at houses that I could buy for less than what I’m paying now. That’s all great for her, who works remotely and makes the same salary she made here, her husband works for the same company as me and he took a massive payout to transfer there. He made about twice what I do and now he’s making less than me for a job with more responsibilities.
I bought my 2400 sq ft on a half acre built in 1994 with no major issues, in one of the highest quality school districts in the state for 450k about 3 years ago.
🤷♂️ Not everything is giant ass city pricing
“I’m an outlier and it worked for me so anybody that can’t just buy a home clearly needs to stop with the avacado toast”
National median is 400k. The meme is the outlier 🤣. Why is this stuff so hard for people to understand?
Median household income is $83k so you’re either trolling or incredibly dishonest and in either case get fucked.
Median home price. Jesus Christ guys, we’re talking about home prices not salary 🤣. What in the love of God made you assume that it was salary ?
Cool story bro.
I thought so. Much better than the fake news doomers.
