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80% of Millennials Say They Want To Buy a Home -- But Most Have Less Than $1,000 (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Millennials aren't buying homes in the same numbers as previous and older generations, but it's not because they don't want to. The vast majority of millennials do indeed aim to buy someday, or would even like to now if they could. Unfortunately, the numbers don't look good. New data from Apartment List shows that, although 80 percent of millennials would like to purchase real estate, very few are in a good position to buy, largely because they have nothing saved. According to the report, '68 percent of millennials said they have saved less than $1,000 for a down payment. Almost half, or 44 percent, of millennials said they have not saved anything for a down payment.'
You specially little stars can do anything you want have a participation trophy.
I'm sure this is completely unrelated to the previous article about our booming gig economy
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All of the smug old losers will run their mouths and call the millennials snowflakes. Get over yourselves. You had government social programs to help you get where you are, but then you've fought to take those social programs away from later generations. Millennials are stuck with student loan debt because older people have fought to take funding away from higher education. Also, "kids these days" is bullshit, because it's the older generations that raised these kids and encouraged the behaviors that they now complain about.
"68% of millennials have saved less than $1000 towards a down payment on buying a house."
But probably 100% of them have spent twice that much for a smart phone and data plan within the last year.
Not to mention games.
I'd prefer to wait till this new bubble pops. Millennials being this poor is a bad omen for the future economy, and prices will fall accordingly.
but I look at the turnover rate at companies these days and I realize stable employment is nearing a thing of the past, especially for younger people starting out. I don't care if they want stable employment, they're probably not going to get it. I look at what percentage of my own income rent is, then my health insurance which is nearly as high as that. Even without any revolving entertainment bills like over-priced cable there's not a huge amount left if you're regularly employed, and if you're someone who has to constantly search for the next gig and have to be prepared for a dry spell there's even less.
We need to get a little government out of employment, the rates companies have to pay big brother (which includes healthcare and other mandatory funds) to actually employ people makes it difficult to keep someone around when you don't have a specific pressing need.
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The article talks about a 20% down payment. But I don't know any first time home buyers who actually pay that much. FHA loans require 3% for a down payment. Many cities, counties and states have additional programs that will provide additional assistance. Washington state has a down payment assistance program that will give you a second mortgage loan up to 4.00% of the total loan amount with 0% interest and payments deferred for 30 years.
Yes, but they have all the latest gadgets and monthly service subscriptions. I'm sure they will make good use of their Bachelor of Arts degree in Video Game History very soon.
As A Gen-Xer, I gotta say that the Millenials are doing a helluva lot better job at living than our generation ever did. Lay off 'em.
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The correlates well with the statistic that 100% of Millennials are entitled whiners.
Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.
How does "wanting something but not having the money for it" count as entitled whining? Especially when it is a response given to a survey explicitly asking people if they want to own a house some day?
I hope to one day see the Grand Canyon, but I don't currently have any free time to do so, does that make me a "whiner"?
You, on the other hand, seem to be making an awful lot of high pitched noises about how you think millennials behave.
Can't wait to put them in shitty nursing homes since your generation raped us of any chance at the quality of life you enjoyed. Better hope that 401k keeps climbing!
I didn't have significant savings until I was way over 13. I don't remember if I could afford a down payment for a house at age 35 but if I could, it would've been a small one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Disclaimer: I'm one of these terrible, no-good, lazy, overspending millennials. I have actually a pretty good job situation, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to myself that somehow I've done better because I'm somehow a better person. I've been very lucky, and a lot of millennials are being screwed over through no fault of their own at all.
They're entitled, yes, but there is a deeper problem in many of the major, western real estate markets. Interest rates have just been absurdly low since the big market meltdowns and still are borked. As long as that persists, the younger generations are completely screwed.
Actually, the behaviors you dislike in millennials are behaviors that their parents tolerated, rewarded, and instilled in their children. How about you take some responsibility for how you raised your children? Of course, it's easier to just whine about kids these days. Get over yourself and take some responsibility.
Wow. The G.N.A.A. sure has changed.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Yeah, we should go back to more prosperous times, the kind of time that allowed the boomers to afford their own homes. Oh, wait - there was more, not less, taxation you say? Remarkable!
I'm 33, and just bought my first house a couple months ago. I had $140k saved up for the down payment/closing costs. I saved that money while having a salary that slowly grew over 11 years from $48k to $75k. If you live frugally and make half-decent money, it's easy to save. Some people need a crash course on budgeting and self-control.
Replying to undo erroneous mod.
sudo mod me up
I wonder how much wage depression is the result of h-1bs?
I would mod you up for being reasonable and intelligent...
Though I disagree a little bit. There are places you can hide and stay stable for long periods of time. Try doing IT for a stable manufacturer. They are out there. That's what I did.
After spending time in the "big league IT world" in, or associated,with silicon valley, I decided my last job before retirement would be at a successful commodity manufacturer. It worked. There are people here who have worked for 40 years in this company.
Though I did a lot of research of the local companies before trying for a position. And when I got the position it was as a tech rather than my usual executive/IT Director type gig. It's a big pay cut. I have good benefits. And drive 12 minutes to work with no traffic in a small town setting.
Successful manufacturers are hurting for IT people.. especially outside of major cities. They regularly promote from within, pay a lot less, and exist in rural or semi-rural areas.
Seems to me my lifestyle is about the same as it was in San Jose or Cupertino. A movie, popcorn, and a drink is less than $10.00 at the first run theater.
But the fun part? If you've held some decent positions and come out to the country with a fat resume.... suddenly you are a very big fish in a small pond. It's nice. And if you are struggling in a major metro area.... the undiscovered hinterland is bleeding for talent.
Keep an open mind... It's out there...
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
You, on the other hand, seem to be making an awful lot of high pitched noises about how you think millennials behave.
Its going to suck when these smug boomers are out on their asses at age 70 because nobody has the money to buy their homes/stocks and nobody still in the workforce is paid enough to finance Social Security.
Most politicians say they want affordable housing, but when we started to get it during the so-called "crisis" of 2008, all everybody did was bitch.
The housing collapse was the very definition of housing becoming affordable--prices dropped dramatically.
The cognitive dissonance on this issue never ceases to amaze me. You can blame the banks, and they bear some of the blame but not all of it. You can blame the NIMBY phenomenon, but that's not the whole picture either. IMHO, the core of the issue is that housing is a leveraged "investment", and that creates structural issues that encourage it to be expensive.
If a significant percentage of your net worth is in your house, you are strongly incentivized to do everything you can to make housing expensive in your area.
The banks are encouraged to make housing expensive, because cash purchases are for the wealthy only, and the rest of us pay interest.
Local governments are incentivized to make housing expensive because property taxes are based on assessed value.
There is, IMHO, no *technical* barrier to supplying a house for less than $100k almost everywhere in the USA. In a few special places you can argue that flooding the market with a supply of cheap housing is not possible due to resource constraints; but that's not true in most parts of the USA.
Every once in a while, somebody does actually supply cheap housing. It's like an elm sprout in the forest. As soon as it springs up, the structural fungus of our NIMBY, Leverage, debt-financed, assessed value taxed housing system attacks it and it dies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Increase the H1-B visa cap and grant amnesty to millions of illegals. This certainly won't depress wages and drive up the price of housing.
I don't care what CNBC or the Wall Street Journal say. It's been a depression from about 2006 to maybe 2015. We milenials came into the workforce at the bottom of the rollercoaster. Things will change dramatically in the next 5 years.
When I grew up there was no Internet or smartphones. Nothing seems to drain money faster today than phone contracts, based on observing my kids. I am not sure that we had any equivalent expense leaching away at us back then. I did have a CB radio for awhile, but you bought the h/w then no monthly payments to any providers.
That upsets me. It must be hate speech. You have triggered me. I need a safe space. And a ball pit. And coloring books.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I've owned my house for about 15 years now, bought it when I was 26. Home ownership has a lot of disadvantages that I didn't consider when buying.
The amount of maintenance, both scheduled and unscheduled, that a home requires has proven to be a lot more than I expected or budgeted for. I'm a pretty handy DIYer, and even at that I get overwhelmed sometimes with deferred tasks. It eats your time if you DIY, or your money if you hire it out. I'm quite certain that I am not financially ahead, compared to if I had been renting, and I'd certainly have a LOT more free time.
You loose a lot of flexibility by owning a home. The transactional costs of buying and selling mean that it is difficult to justify moving to a new job in a different area, or even to relocate to a more convenient location in the same metro area, unless you know for sure it will be at least a 5 year gig. I have turned down interesting job opportunities for this reason. At the time I bought my home, I was a 10 minute bike ride from work. Then my division of the company "temporarily" relocated (We were told 2 years, then 3, which turned into 5) my department to the other side of our metro area (25 miles), and I had a 1 - 1.5 hour car commute. If I were a renter, it would have made sense to lease in the "temporary" location for a while.
Finally, as a homeowner you are more exposed to swings of the market. I got lucky when the bubble popped, as I had bought in a good bit before it, and had no need to sell at the low point.... but I had friends who lost their jobs, and had to relocate across the country, and HAD to sell when the market was depressed. Some lost over a hundred thou on that deal.
Graduate from college, and rather than buy that $6 latte every day, put it away in a DJIA index fund. When you retire at 65, you'll have over $1 million. Then you can retire wherever you like...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Stop less time complaining how unfair life is to your "buddies" on FB and quit using all the other social time-waste apps, work (get a 2nd or 3rd job) more and save... You should be able to buy something eventually.
Yet they lease 30-40K cars right out of school ?!?
Part of the problem is that the housing market is out of whack.
Using data for 1972, when you compare median household income and median house price, the house price is ~325% of the income.
Using data for 2015, when you compare median household income and median house price, the house price is ~525% of the income.
Just a bit of difference there. Now, part of that is different (more exacting) house construction standards, increased costs of construction materials, and so on, but that much of a difference?
Yes, some millennials have poor spending habits and poor savings habits. But the increased cost of houses also plays a part. Not to mention student debt. (And DeVos seems to give not a single fuck about that.)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
FTFA:
As the report puts it, "millennials face a severe shortage of affordable entry-level homes in many parts of the country."
I've been watching the real estate development and most of it is McMansions - just like in 2007. Rents - apartments - aren't much better. In my county, one needs to make $18.92 an hour working 40 hours a week to afford a place to live - I'm outside Atlanta, GA.
And unlike me who was able to get a 4 year degree for $10,000 - yes, $10K for four years at state, these kids have to deal with obscene tuition costs.
Yeah, it's fun to poke fun at them for buying video games and iStuff - which may be true in some cases - but our economy isn't what it was when I graduated,
I didn't have to compete with folks in Third World countries. Offshoring and H1-bs were unheard of. There were training programs. The Hartford insurers at the time all had programmer training programs and path to better oneself. So did many other companies And there were opportunities for the liberal/fine arts grads. You were educated and they'd train you for the vocation.
Now, college is vocational training.
OK, I'm going off here - but things are much different and kids today don't have the opportunities I had when I was their age. Yep, I'm the old guy saying that, yes, I DID have it better.
So surely you don't have a smartphone then, since they are such a waste?
This. Whatever happened to buying a home and then living in it until you die? I understand that you may have to relocate to find work, but that's different than just buying a house that you're treating as a financial instrument instead of a place to sleep.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
What the hell is this supposed to mean? I had to ask my parents for help with my first down payment on a house & paid them back over time. I couldn't 'afford' a down payment for a house on my own until WAY late in life. I moved to Silicone Valley 11 years ago & was being paid WAY better money than I'd ever made but I couldn't buy a house until the crash due to STUPID home pricing. I then sold that one & moved to Vegas where I got a MUCH bigger house for way less money.
At best, all this says is that Millenials are like everyone else I've ever known. They recognize 'apartment living' isn't all its cracked up to be, want their own home & have to save to buy one. 'News at 11' this is not.
at $5 a day it'll only take 20 years to save up the $40k downpayment for a typical 3 bed/2bath house (good thing housing prices aren't going up faster than inflation so that $40k won't be the equivalent of $20k in 20 years...). Or if you're Australian skip the Avo-Toast.
.com style unicorns like Uber pushing the gig economy and whathaveyou.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering the reason home prices are sky rocketing is cuts in government infrastructure spending. The government was putting up the money to do the expensive stuff to get the land ready for home building so that companies could throw up cheap houses and make billions. As soon as the government stopped doing that (thanks, 30 years of tax cuts and trickle down econ) home building screeched to a halt and that investment capital shifted to
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With no money down, it's still possible to get a USDA loan for a home. The "catch" is, you're going to have to select a home that's in one of the designated "rural" parts of America (as well as meeting some other criteria like having a reasonable debt to income ratio).
But USDA loans aren't just for buying farm-houses .... You might be surprised how many places qualify for one. You just have to consider a home that's outside a major city to have a shot at it.
You can't really avoid "closing costs" because the parties doing all the paperwork and making the sale happen want their cut. But this is negotiable too. Many times, a motivated seller of a pre-owned house will agree to pay all closing costs as part of the deal.
Student loan debt is so high because the cot of university has skyrocketed. Go have a look at what a state school costs now as opposed to what it did when you went, and adjust for inflation.
The problem is all you "muh bootstraps" types (and by the way you benefited from plenty of things, even if you don't realize it) want to keep cutting spending and a popular area is assistance to public education. So the state aid to universities go down, but costs do not. Universities can't just "make cuts and do more with less" so they have to get more money at some point, and that is done by increasing tuition.
You can't shift costs from the government to the individual and then hate on the individual for having trouble bearing those costs.
I would like to go to a more rural place. Even with a pay cut I could do better than if I continued to live in a metropolis. I seriously considered some "stationed" out of the country rotate in and out work, but with a toddler I can't, and with a child from a previous marriage I'm pretty much held hostage in the city I'm in. I've given some serious thought to finding a place in flyover country, some old has-been town that happens to be on some fiber backbone and setting up my own data centric business where location doesn't matter, but building your own business isn't always a "just out of the gate" thing the millennials need.
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Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer? I know that's not what you said, but it's the sentiment you're expressing. I hear it over and over and over again. I once worked for a company that cut everyone's pay and said (with a straight face) it was OK because they were cutting the starting pay even more. And I can't tell you the number of minimum wage earners I know who oppose a rate hike because they happen to make $11/hr and feel that somebody else starting there makes their struggle to make it to $11/hr worthless. It cheapens them and lowers their standing.
What you're doing is measuring your quality of life subjectively instead of objectively. E.g. the "Starving kid's in China" thing. It's been used for thousands of years by the ruling class to divide the working class into groups at each other's throat. There's an old joke about it that nails it pretty well.
TL;DR. Stop looking down on the Millennials for having it marginally less worse than you and start organizing with them to demand better. You deserve it. They deserve it. Everybody deserves it.
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Houses ARE cheap to build and ARE cheap.
What is so expensive is THE LAND. Especially in metro areas in any of the big cities.
I live downtown SF. A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is limited.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I have a nasty feeling that by the time I retire, with inflation, $1 million won't buy quite as much as $1 million will buy today.
Make America grate again!
I wish I could upmod you but I've already posted upthread. This is the most insightful post in this thread.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
80% of Millennials Say They Want To Buy a Home -- But Most Have Less Than $1,000
The correlates well with the statistic that 100% of Millennials are entitled whiners.
Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.
Your post correlates perfectly with the statistics that people get more grumpy/needy/whiny with each passing year.
Now go give yourselves more tax-breaks and add trillions to the National Debt the "entitled whiners" will have to pay off
I do get the point. People waste money. But really they don't. For instance my cell phone bill isn't much more than a land line cost me 30 years ago. In 1970 I can see people paying a buck for a cup of coffee, which is what is costs now inflation adjusted at Starbucks.
On the other hand, people regularly bought houses for $25,000 in 1970. Today such a house should cost no more than 150,000. For such a house you need to scrounge up $10,000 and maybe $700 a month. But how many houses are on the market for that price? The median home price is more like $200,000. Here is another thing speaking for an older generation. While i do know people who make six figures who saved for the down payment of their home, almost everyone else I know got money from their parents That is a truth that most people won't admit to you. Along with the amount of drugs they do/did. The older you are, the more cash you have on hand. So middle class parents, who are no longer paying for kids, not longer paying for school, often have several grand that they are happy to give to the adult child to help them start life and a family.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.
I'm GenX and even I know that believing their parents and especially their grandparents is absolutely useless for Millennials. The economy their grandparents participated in that got them all their nice things doesn't exist anymore. Nothing like it exists anymore.
Nobody drops out of high school and goes to work and builds a nice middle class lifestyle for themselves anymore. Nobody starts in the mailroom and becomes a company president anymore. Nobody holds one job their whole lives anymore. Shit, that was already fading for my father, a Boomer. I'm not certain how many jobs he held, but it was at least six, and he has a chemical engineering degree. And speaking of Boomers, they're clinging to jobs they should have left to GenX by now, so GenX can move up and open up jobs for Millennials, but that hasn't happened. My neighbor across the street is 68 years old and still working. Why? Because his house isn't paid off yet and his youngest child (a Millennial) still lives in his basement. Statistically, he's not unusual.
Meanwhile houses have doubled and tripled in price, even in parts of the country that aren't hyper-inflated, and the hyper-inflated parts have risen by factors of five and eight and ten.. Car prices have doubled, both new and used.[1] Even food prices have risen dramatically since Boomers were young. All of that would be tolerable if wages had kept pace with inflation, but wages didn't keep pace with inflation even for those smug Boomers. Wage growth fell behind in the 1970s and never recovered, so even my father the Boomer never earned as much money as his own father, relative to his expenses.
Millennials would be fools to listen to economic advice from their parents and grandparents. The manufacturing economy that advice was relevant to doesn't exist anymore. The service economy that allegedly replaced it, didn't. I judge the health of the local economy by the number of Help Wanted signs (there aren't any) and by the number of hand-lettered signs offering lawn service (the number fluctuates, but hasn't dropped to zero in years). Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore. It's all white boys now. Millennials, in fact, desperately participating in the gig economy, because that's all there is, and there isn't nearly enough of it to go around.
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[1] Yes there are reasons why both real estate and car prices have gone up. The reasons are irrelevant when talking about purchasing power. Only the price matters.
Because we don't want a bunch of welfare EBT using niglets trashing the neighborhood, chimping out, and overall causing a gang infested ruckus in the suburbs. Poor? Go live out in a rural area. Don't go and live where you don't plan on behaving. We don't want to deal with that shit.
I guess I'm one of those normal millenials who literally just spent the week in Spain eating avocado, manchego and jamon toast. I had no problem with the 40k downpayment on my new house at the age of 27. I made $28k per year in 2008. I'm up to $40k now. The thing I didn't have was student loan debt or any medical problems. I feel very sorry for my friends with $40k in student loans. They won't be able to invest in a house until later. They never got the chance to invest in the stock market post 2008. They got ripped off.
How does "wanting something but not having the money for it" count as entitled whining?
If that's not the definition, then what is? What do you call it when kids want ice cream from the store, but parents won't buy it for them?
... unless you can make a couple of job transitions without moving. Otherwise, you might end up trapped in a buyers market with an illiquid asset. Since I didn't follow my hard-earned advice, I lost several 10's of thousands of $$ during these times.
Employment is rarely stable, even in past generations.
But you're making another mistake - without the government doing anything, most larger companies are paying the health care costs anyway. If you're trying to be competitive when hiring employees, the very first perk you're going to have to show is a medical plan. Without the plan the only employees you're going to get are those who couldn't get a job elsewhere.
I guess you're renting.
FHA loan will let you do a 3.5% down payment if you have decent credit. Still, 3.5% on a $300K house is over $10K. It will take a couple years of steady job and scrimping and saving, but it's a feasible goal for many people. Things get more complicated if you absolutely must have a house in an expensive location, getting mortgages for $700K+ homes with very little down is unlikely unless you have a huge income. (dual income would help, I guess find a spouse that makes as much or more than you)
I didn't really have any money saved up when I was in my 20's either, but I have a house now (in Silicon Valley). I got into a groove in my late-20's/early-30's and was able to keep credit cards under control, paid off the car and kept it for several years (no car payments), car insurance got a lot cheaper, job paid more with more experience under my belt, and lots of other factors contributed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have a one-year old daughter. Many times over the last year people have said to me "just wait till she starts driving". It's one of those habitual sayings that people pull out without thinking. The thing is, that is 15 years away. I will be really surprised if she ever learns to drive. Her generation simply isn't going to do that except maybe as some hobby. She'll be 12 in 2028 and may very well be "driving" herself to her own after school activities by then, but she'll never learn how to "drive" unless it is for sport or hobby.
If you're a millenial, retirement is at least 30-35 years away. We'll be so far into the age of automation by then that we will have had to deal with figuring out how people are going to live without jobs. I suspect, you'll have nothing to worry about if you in fact make it through the transition period. Making it through those 30-35 years alive is likely a better thing to focus on.
We thought the housing bubble was bad in 2008. Wait until another credit bubble and student loan bubble's burst. This is a country who used to typical rise into the 4 to 5% GDP who now on a good quarter averages 2%. This is not a great economy by any stretch and people even educated college grads are riddled with debt, make less than they had planned and don't have much in savings with many living with relatives. Not the success that will spur economic growth we need.
I have a few months of college left and rather than graduating with debt, I'll graduate with more money in the bank than when I started school. While in school, I bought a new house worth twice as much as the one I bought before I went to college.
You *can* go into a bunch of debt and get a useless degree in Gender Studies. A degree in snowflake studies at UCLA and then whining about it is an option.
Another option is a degree in an IT field from WGU, which costs $4,500 / year after the current $1,500 tax credit, and while you're in school you'll be getting certifications such as Cisco CCNA, which increases your salary while you're still in school.
Your parents and grandparents *also* had the option to do dumb shit. Most of them didn't.
The myth of a home being a quality investment is just that - a myth - and is finally starting to crumble completely and people are recognizing it for the fallacy that it is. Few people other than realtors will make money on the sales of homes again any time in the forseeable future; what then is the incentive to purchasing a home at all? Smart people are renting apartments in better designed buildings where they can get the amenities they want and need without being dragged down by pointless shit like lawn maintenance and mortgage insurance. They then can invest the money they save in retirement accounts or go on the vacations that their friends who are being dragged under by home ownership can only aspire to.
There's a reason why we are seeing nice apartment complexes being built in desirable school districts.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Or at least get a concrete definition, because it seems to just mean "those damn kids" at this point. The year range is extremely hazy, and ever expanding from what I've seen. Originally what I saw was people born from 1982-1995, 82 because that's the first year that would be the graduating class of 2000 and hence the name. However as of late I've seen it defined as broadly as 1980 up until now.
Ok well first off it seems rather silly to include almost a 40 year period as a "generation" since there would be many children literally in the same "generation" as their parents which makes no sense (a family generation is offspring). Makes the term pretty meaningless.
That aside if you are going to define it so broadly, then you can't make any generalizations about said group since they are very different people and faced very different problems. I'd be a "millennial" by that definition, but I'm 37. I've been working professionally for over 15 years, when I got in to the workforce, the big depression hadn't happened, when I went to university costs hadn't gone nuts, I've owned a home for a decade, etc.
So the experiences I've had have little in common with our students who are 18-22 and will be entering the workforce soon. They get called "millennials" too which would maybe be accurate for the tail end of the initial definition. What they are going to deal with going in to the workforce is very different then what I had to, and their school has been WAY more expensive because the state has been cutting tax money to public schools for over a decade.
So I think the media bitching about millennials needs to stop at the very least until they can work out a concrete definition of a "millennial". Stop acting like everyone under 40 is some kind of homogeneous group, it is absurd on the face of it.
SF is an edge case here. In most the U.S. the land is the inexpensive part. The raw materials for the house are far more expensive. In my area, a .25 acre lot sells for around 70k. Houses range from 300k-600k.
As a software engineer, I can almost guarantee that my quality of life is much higher here then it would be in SF, even though I could make almost twice as much in SF.
I have $80k liquid saved (still live at home) but because I live in Orange County, my choices are an overvalued condo, a house in Santa Ana or Long Beach (ehhh), or finding a place in Riverside (reasonable, nice homes, but very hot and a terrible commute).
Hoping there's another housing collapse relatively soon (even ~half as significant at the ~'08 one would be great for me), or I'll likely have to move.
You're probably taking out your smallest violin at the moment, but a ~600 sq ft condo w/ garage in a nice area (~$320k) or house w/ bars on the windows (Santa Ana/Long Beach) isnt my idea of a great trade for all the cash I've saved.
I agree. I don't ever plan to move unless something drastic changes. As I've seen my own net worth grow because I'm not house poor I truly feel bad for people who do end up with too much house.
Fuck, I'm stuck here in GenX and I still can't afford a fucking house.
Well, I can, I just don't feel like going back to the goddamned ramen and rice diet I had back in college. I guess I could buy a house to starve in.
You got it backwards, the cost of higher ed is high because student enrollment is up and the large quantity of federal higher ed loans. Think of it this way, if you ran a $1/slice pizza shop and all your customers started showing up holding $1 federal pizza vouchers, you'd conclude that you could raise the price to more than $1 and still get plenty of customers right? It works the same way with federal loans and college tuition.
Thank you : I mis-modded a post a while ago and didn't think of this way to erase it.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
bullshit, I am a millenial, and put down 37% on my house. Well, I'm a right-wing millenial, that's probably why.
Actually, assuming 45 years of work and buying a latte EVERY day, you'll have $98,617. And 50 cents. Happy retirement!
Our "leaders" will tell you that the economy is in good shape. And they can do that, because they changed yardsticks during the Reagan years. All the economic conditions that virtually created a middle class that could reasonably expect to do things like graduate from college debt free, or work in a trade that paid a living wage, buy a home, put kids through college, etc., no longer exist.
you will believe it, right up until you actually wake up.
and isn't a virtual home all they every wanted? They are working in virtual jobs, spend their time with virtual friends - so why bother with reality at all?
I'd like to see an article that highlights the percentage of millenials (specifically, for the sake of sanity, aged 18-34) who appear to believe that the term is reserved for berating people younger than them. From my own subjective observations, it seems that people in the 28-34 bracket have a much higher tendency to exempt themselves from it, while simultaneously applying it to people only slightly younger than them.
Full disclosure, I'm 30-ish, and don't find the label bothersome.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
People want a promotion, were made redundant, people move to be beside parents, want to get out of sinking neighborhoods, want a bigger home, want a bigger garden, got fed up of commuting, want to be close to a train station, want to get away from being close to a freeway, want to downsize, want to move to better schools, want somewhere quiet, any other number of reasons.
When housing supply is tight, buyers are forced to buy whatever they can first, then start looking around for somewhere better. But it's just not possible to get exactly where you want. I've tried running simulations where I pretended to want to buy a home in a particular street (say somewhere detached with a driveway/garage and bay windows and a garden or sundeck at the back). Those homes were there, but they were never on the market. There were actually large rectangular blanks on the housing maps where there were absolutely no homes for sale in those areas. Somewhere like London has housing chains where the set of buyers and sellers actually form a closed loop, leading to a financial deadlock state requiring bridging loans to cover the time between a purchase and sale.
It took me three months to find my apartment. I wanted a simple one bedroom, but all the market had on offer were three bedrooms next to freeways and main roads.
There are lots of banks that release these studies in an effort to drum up support for (now useless) "Savings Accounts".
Interest rates have fallen so far that nearly nobody is interested in Savings Accounts anymore.
Of course, a headline that reads 80% of Americans have less than $1000 in a Savings Account, it's not nearly as dire.
I have around $300 sitting idly in a savings account. But it's not like that's a measure of my worth.
Millennials are just younger workers (not the youngest) in an economy that doesn't really need workers. Gen X had similar (not identical) experiences, and many are only just now buying first homes and settling into semi-stable careers. The expectation that you'd be independent and financially secure from your early 20's was set during the 50's for the Boomers and Silent Generation, when the world was rebuilding from WWII and the U.S. had the only industrial economy that hadn't been bombed. That was an aberration, and we're back to normal now. Normal sucks.
The Millennial hate is mostly aimed at lucky tech workers who earn 6 figures straight out of paid-by-parents college, out earning everyone (including older generations) while still living at home and spouting baseless opinions, wasting money on garbage, and complaining. There aren't all that many of them (except in Silicon Valley), but they really rile the blood, like the especially fortunate '46 and '47 boomer scions of the current political "leadership." Most Millennials are like most Gen X who are like most Gen Jones. Other than Boomers, it's not really fair to tar entire generations yet.
Man, you snowflakes get upset by other people complaining. You need to find a safe space.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If these millennial stuck to the gender they got when born, and didn't spend all their money getting sex change operations, then they could afford to live in their own houses.
On the other hand, people regularly bought houses for $25,000 in 1970. Today such a house should cost no more than 150,000. For such a house you need to scrounge up $10,000 and maybe $700 a month. But how many houses are on the market for that price? The median home price is more like $200,000.
US houses built today are 62% larger than those built in 1970. https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/pdf/squarefeet.pdf
Adds a bit to the cost.
I want affordable housing for everyone, but I don't want the value of my house to go down.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What do you mean by "Stable"?
The Lehman Brothers bank was more than 160 years old when it suddenly collapsed, due to some trading bets that I'll bet myself weren't exactly shared with the techies.
Bear Stearns was founded in 1923, and survived the Depression.
General Motors needed a giant bailout or would go bust (according to its executives, anyhow, who weren't working in IT).
And went bust itself earlier in 2009.
United Airlines went bankrupt in 2002.
Chrysler, PG&E, Texaco... What do you mean by 'Stable'?
Woolworth's department store. K-Mart. Best Buy. Blockbuster Video. Radio Shack.
You name it, how do you KNOW it's "Stable"?
AC
...I'm pretty sure that there are many Slashdotters with crappy parents and they intend to be crappy to their kids too.
Really, what kind of asshole parent doesn't want their children to succeed and won't give them a leg up on that?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
thanks to our medical system their parents are going to be broke leaving nothing but medical debt and a "reverse" mortgage that means even their house gets claimed by debtors when they die.
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is if they whine loud and long enough, someone will just give in and give them one.
Legislation was recently introduced to allow Bankruptcy to wipe student loan debt. To hell with all those who worked their ass off to pay their loans off the right way apparently.
Never in our history have we had such an entitlement generation who wants everything just handed to them.
Fuck these people.
What you saying sounds nice but it's just not true in practice. We had strong family unites for thousands of years and abject poverty for all but a few kings.
Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s. They slow down, make more mistakes and generally just aren't as productive. By then they're spending what little energy they have keeping themselves alive, not paying their kids mortgages. Yes, there are exceptions. You and your family are probably one of them. But they're exceptions. By the time I'm 50 I'm going to be basically worthless to my kid like my Dad and mom were to me and their dad and mom where to them.
No, it's not family that fought a successful battle against poverty. It's a) war reducing unnecessary population b) technology (especially food growing) allowing us to feed more people and c) government taking an active and positive role in the economy to prevent things like the dust bowls of the 30s. Family doesn't hurt, but don't say it'll stop or even slow poverty. You've got 5 thousand years of recorded history proving you wrong.
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the cost hasn't gone up. We pulled federal funding during the Clinton era. I was in college then and the college newspapers were all talking about it. Bush continued to pull funding and Obama did (or could do) nothing to restore it. College has always been expensive as fuck. We used to hide that by taxing the rich to pay for the working class' education. In the 90s and 2000s we stopped doing that.
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Unless you're independently wealthy you went to a public school on public roads grades K-12. If you're in your 40s you went to a University that was heavily subsidized by tax payers to hide the true cost of your education (unless you're rich or one of those rare geniuses who gets a full ride to a private U like Harvard, in which case what the hell are you doing wasting your time on /.?).
You road the benefits bandwagon with the rest of us. It was just cleverly disguised as a car you paid for so you wouldn't get all uppity about accepting the help you need. We do the same thing with social security. Remember Ayn Rand? She lived out her old age on it.
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i bet they can get a really good cardboard box for a 1000 dollars
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore.
That is another factor that people don't like to admit. Millenials have to compete on a much more fair playing field (at least within their cohort). In the 70s, many women and racial minorities were disqualified from large swaths of the labor force for bogus reasons, which lowered the bar for "success" among those who were not discriminated against.
If you trade your old phone in you get a new one every year for $500. I'm not going to talk about the service fees because, like cars, we've made cell phones a necessity. If you don't have one you're marked as weird and will have doors closed to you.
Now, $500/yr sounds like a lot if you can't do math. Lets say our Hypothetical Millennial buys a $100 phone and replaces it every 2 years ( I own cheap phones, they start getting crashy and failing in about 2 years). They're saving $450/year now. They need $40k for a down payment on a 'starter' home in a city with a job market (it's not good living in a place where I can buy a house for $40k if I can't get a job to pay for it). 40,000/$450 = 88 years.
Nows the part where you point out their coffee is $5 bucks a day or about $1800/yr. With our savings from our cell phone that's just 17 years to get our starter home. Of course, there's this little thing called inflation and this other little thing called Wage Stagnation. So in 17 years our plucky Millennial's savings are worth about 3/4 what they were (I'm being _very_ charitable here with my math).
The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money. Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys. Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...
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a small group of billionaires owns just about everything. Prices didn't fall after 2008. Also, we're not building. The government usually puts money into infrastructure so that builders can do the cheap work of throwing up a frame and some spackle and make tons of money. After 30 years of tax cuts the government isn't doing that anymore.
We're heading for dystopia. It's not going to just correct itself. Take action now.
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That's food, shelter, healthcare, education, transportation. Wages are going up around 2%. Youngungs can't stay around because they're constantly on the move for more money to stay ahead of inflation. Most fail, some succeed. We celebrate the ones that succeed and ignore the ones that fail...
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+5 isn't enough. The problem with the world is that it takes both hard work _and_ luck to succeed. The people who do almost immediately forget that.
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I find these oversimplistic generalizations that do not take changes in politics, culture, cost of health and education, among several other factors just to bunch in an entirely diverse category of the population in a homogeneous mass extremely troubling and extremely disingenuous.
It's just food for trolls of the "everything was good back when everything was worse" kind. I'm not a "millennial" myself, but analysis like these reeks of prejudice. More problematic is that it ends up masking real problems for the sake of scapegoating. It only helps spread the holier than thou attitude some people already mount on.
Back when I was your age I had 5 jobs, lived on a grass and water diet and the occasional rat I killed, skinned and cooked myself, and I still saved enough to buy my mansion in the suburbs... omg, who the fuck cares.
A white person mowing? That pretty much doesn't happen here (Houston), except for the occasional homeowner mowing their own lawn. Kids mowing? I haven't seen that for at least a decade.
We hire a team of 2-3 Hispanic men for the same price I charged as a kid 35 years ago. Of course, they have better equipment and do it much faster than I could.
People who think the word "snowflake" means something bad are stupid. Literal idiots who just repeat weak trash talk like they came up with it. Vicarious charlatans they are.
First - Cost of education.. every kid who sought to get an education is digging out from under mountains of debt. Second - Savings are not important when you are fascinated (and expect to be part of ) a post apocalyptic dystopia. Hollywood has been putting out movies that make the future predictably awful. How about we make saving and planning and being prepared both possible and desirable?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
68% have less than a thousand bucks saved. But according to the article most of them are good savers. They just save for short term things, instead of long term. Yet 80% say they want to buy a house.
Who the heck edits these dumb articles?
Oops.. This keyboard has a sticky period key.....
Most politicians say they want affordable housing, but when we started to get it during the so-called "crisis" of 2008, all everybody did was bitch.
It politicians really wanted affordable housing they'd get rid of the mortgage interest tax break. That would bring housing prices more in line with what the market could actually bare.
Universities were able to extract more money from students because of loans, and used that money to hire more administrators who did not help improve student performance in any way. That's why cost has gone up - because they had more money to throw around, they hired more paper pushers who don't actually help with anything. Not the other way around as you seem to think. If that one link isn't enough to convince you, take your pick.
I live in downtown SF too and prices are crazy, but it's also because it's really expensive to build here. It can take years to get developments approved because of onerous planning regulations and the ability for anyone to object to any aspect at any time. I read last year that for a new apartment, over $200,000 of the price goes straight to the city in taxes, fees, etc.
Actually if you put $6 in your piggy bank every day for a year, and at the end of each year put the resulting ~$2,200 in to an investment that returned 5% annually, and you continued to do that for a working life of 45 years, you'd have approx. $350K
> Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore. It's all white boys now. Millennials, in fact, desperately participating in the gig economy, because that's all there is, and there isn't nearly enough of it to go around.
I know this varies from placed to place, but in the mid-90s near New York City, lawn care was done by people who spoke English (Americans). Within a few years they all got replaced by illegals.
Now, these were crews working for a company (a lot of rentals and people working in Manhattan). The owners deliberately hire illegals for low pay. I've heard stories of it happening in other parts of the county and other types of jobs.
My solution is simple: arrest the owners of these businesses. When the jobs dry up, illegal immigrants will leave.
If you're a millenial, retirement is at least 30-35 years away
Shit, I'm mid-point Gen X and I'm still 30 years away from retirement.
Pensions aren't worth what they used to be and the state isn't handing them out any more.
Actually, assuming 45 years of work and buying a latte EVERY day, you'll have $98,617. And 50 cents. Happy retirement!
If your investment has a return of nothing, you are doing it wrong.
Shit, you really don't know how to get a return on your investment.
Even at just 3% compound you'd have $211k. The FTSE100 index alone has averaged substantially better than that in the past 45 years.
I assume you have a job. This is how I did it: no $5 coffees or brunches or random workplace social functions. Go out once or twice a week in the evening. Cook a lot for your friends rather than seeing them down the pub. Live in a small flat. Drive a nasty car. I did that for 6 years and had enough money saved to buy my first house for cash. It was functional, but not attractive, in a suburb with a less than snobby reputation (not the worst part of town but downmarket). When I moved in I carried on living in more or less the same fashion, maintained the house myself but did not improve it. Ten years later I had saved/invested enough to have it knocked down, and a new one built in its placed. Meanwhile the suburb had gone up in reputation and so I had not over capitalised..
I would agree that the savings you can make from a frugal lifestyle are smaller in the USA as you don't suffer from stupid Australian prices Just in case I sound like it was a prison sentence my personal extravagance is travel, I always went overseas every couple of years. I also worked on a racing team (unpaid) which has a way of absorbing any amount of free time. Even now i have a spreadsheet of income and expenses, and if I can't pay cash for something then I don't buy it. My one exception to that is a margin loan for my shares which I now occasionally use as a short term buffer, but that nearly cost me all my savings,twice, so I'm glad I wasn't using it early on.
If you haven't got a job yes you are fucked.Incidentally I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or paid for stuff.
That's a pretty impressive savings rate. A bit of history. A friend of mine lived in rented accommodation, all his working life. His theory was that his savings were going up faster than house prices were going up. He was right, sort of, and they were able to retire five years sooner than me. (he's a lot better at investing and was paid far more than me). But they still have the hassle of landlords, and anything they do in the garden is short term.
On the other hand I bought a house early on and now have another as a weekender. I think overall he's better off financially and has more free time, I spend my spare time thinking about gutters and solar panels and vegetable patches.
I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or bought me stuff. They did bring me up to be self reliant and independent. So why don't you try that?
"Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s" I'm 56, recovering from cancer, working three days a week, I'm paid a lot in a safety critical job and I do well from my investments. Absent the worst case scenario I'm good for another 5 years of productive life. Yes, I'd love to be thirty again. Yes I'd love to have only one medical issue at a time. But... them's the breaks.I'm certainly not basically useless.
FAIL
My first house was frankly a bit nasty. The children seem to think their first house should be like the one I live in now, in a nice part of town. They drive shiny cars. I drove a Toyota Corona for 12 years. In fact the /unemployed/ daughter in law seems to think their first house should be BETTER than the one her parents live in.
Fuck i'm going to laugh when I die and she discovers she's getting $10000 and a big fuck off from me.She's expecting a house.
The other one's OK, even with a newborn baby she does part time work. Her bf built a house that is bright and shiny and not well made in a new suburb, which is probably a good long term plan..They do have $5 coffees and $20 brunces and shiny cars, so I don't exactly think they are on struggle street, despite the whingeing.
"A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is _artificially_ limited."
There, fixed that for you. :)
There is as much physical land available to build in SF as there is in the Phoenix Metro area (the tribal lands surrounding PHX constrain building in a similar way as the water does around SF), but in PHX if you want to build something higher density, or on existing land, you can, but in SF you legally can't without getting all the neighbors (who already own their property and thus don't want to see property prices go down, ever) to agree.
As a result, one has super-high housing costs and the other one doesn't. The system is literally designed that way.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The price of the median home has increased, even adjusted for inflation. That's true. What you're missing is why that's true. Because people have been able to buy them and wanted them, houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.
So yeah, if you want to buy the "same" house as they bought in 1970, you'll pay way less now adjusted for inflation than they did at that point in time, but nobody wants that size/cheap of house anymore because they've been able to afford nicer ones. Even if you just want the same size house, but with all the new amenities, it's still less expensive per sq. ft. now, $109 vs. $118 in 1970, inflation adjusted.
This complaint is like saying food costs for Billionaires are much higher than those for welfare recipients. It doesn't take into account what's actually being purchased.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
...houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.
Whilst I can find articles to see where you got this idea from, this doesn't quite pass the smell test. This is true only for new homes (i.e. the well off to construct new dwellings) and if you include established homes and the number of children per adult this picture changes.
Here is a page showing the trend of less people per household in the US over time. It may seem like there has been an improvement in living space per person (again check for all residences and not new ones in your stats), but to me it just means that adults are sharing space in the cities that don't really want to and can't bring up kids like they could in the past for financial reasons.
Soon we'll all be destitute and precariously housed. Cool, right? Now if only we could turn it up a little a more and get some mass starvation. The "free" market demands it!
95% of Millennials want a flying pony, but unfortunately flying ponies don't exist.
Furthermore, the inputs to the cost of a house that will automatically increase as the area of the house increases only make up about 40% of the total costs. So a third increase will at the most increase the costs by 15%.
Much of that cost, arguably, should be offset by efficiency in home building. For example, although building times vary widely from year to year, for the past 40 years it has taken 6 months to complete a single family home. The average 500 square foot increase in size has not significantly increased the time to build the house. In addition, lot costs are 20% of the total costs of the house. In my area, 100 years ago even a modest house sat on 4,000 square feet of land. In the 1950's, that was down to 3,000 square feet. Most houses I have seen built lately sit on less than 2,000 square feet. No one wants big yard, just big enough not build their 4,000 square foot three story townhouse. That, in itself, probably cuts the cost down at least 5% of the 15% increase due to the bigger house.
Then there is the 'nicer part' For the outside of the house, those costs are about 10% of the house. As we said, the outside tends to be smaller, so it can be much nicer at the same costs. The inside of the house is about 20% of the costs. Again, efficiency gains should be able to make the inside much nicer without significantly increasing the costs.
As far as your billionaire food bill comment, I will simply say this. When I was kid, though i had some money, I could hardly afford a bag of chips pr fast food. Now, anyone but the poorest kid has a dollar for a bag of chips of $3 for a happy meal. To put in other terms, my current TV has 4 times the area of the TV we had when I was a kid, and it is color as well, yet it costs less.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ha. Don't worry about millennials. They will inherit their down payments from their baby boomer parents. Give me a break!
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw three white boys come in to a taco shop and pick up UberEATS orders. They are working for Mexicans now. Haahahhahaha.
If you look at the amortization schedule for a typical 30 year fixed rate mortgage, you get the biggest bang for your buck as far as the IRS goes in the first 5-10 years of the mortgage. After that, since you're paying more principal and also due to inflation, that deduction is far less effective for you. The end result is that, at least for first time buyers, you get the most deduction when you need it the most: when you're more likely to be less financially stable due to having just parted with a nest egg to buy property.
The problem is the rate of change. If house prices drop significantly, then you have people with negative equity and so they can't easily relocate for a job, can't remortgage (so may be stuck with very bad terms on a variable rate mortgage), and so on. If property prices go up too much, then the income needed to save for a deposit goes up a lot as well. Ideally, house price inflation, retail price index inflation, and wage inflation would all be the same. Unfortunately, each one of these is smaller than the previous one currently and that leaves you with a situation where owning property is more lucrative than working.
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This is a serious question. As somebody who lives in Germany where everything that can be regulated is regulated - and I mean *everything* - building my own home is a massive hassle and something of a burocratic endeavour on top of the work needed to do the actual building. We have rules for the angle of roofs - they aren't allowed to diverge off certain angles as not to disturb the overall appearance of settlements (no joke!).
But my understanding of the US is that you can go out into the countryside, buy a few acres of land for what basically amounts to a handful of bucks, get one or two shipping containters, plant them in the middle of said property and call it a home and then slowly start building away, cutting away windows, laying floors growing your garden and no "Bauamt" (Building Authority) will come bugging you with regulations about fire-safety, wether the fire-extinguisher is hanging at the correct position or sanitary conditions are up to modern regulations or if the containers fit the general regulated aestetics of the area.
AFAICT from across the pond building your own microhome in the US amounts to simply getting off your lazy ass, start doing it and having some patience as you wittle away and a chain of projects to build it. This is next to impossible in Germany, if you don't want to enter a legal gray area with some risks attached - which some people do.
Am I getting something wrong here? Please enlighten. How easy is it to build your own home in the US, just the way you like it with no authorities coming to bug you with details on how you are alowed to do it?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Its the same story here, except we also have tax incentives that allow people to make deductions against their income if they buy more than one house. The result: loads of baby boomers owning multiple properties and avoiding tax. Also they get a Capital Gains Tax discount of 50% when they sell. Australia basically steals from its youth and gives to the old. No one wants to do anything about it because no one wants house prices to drop. Baby boomers have most of the vote, less retirement savings (they didn't have to make mandatory retirement contributions for most of their working life) and they rely on the equity in their property portfolios to sustain them in their retirement. Millennials future is basically paying more tax to pay for the boomers retirement. When they sell their homes to retire...their kids wont get them, they sell to the Chinese who can easily outbid locals.
You can blame the banks, and they bear some of the blame but not all of it.
Right, you can also blame the politicians who bailed them out in exchange for nothing. But mostly you should blame the banks. They wrote a bunch of mortgages they knew would fail so that they could foreclose on a bunch of properties and then sit on them. The banks are refusing to sell the property for what the market will bear because if they do that, they have to admit that home values are much much lower than they claim, and then their valuations (which are based in large part upon that ill-gotten property) will plummet. In addition, the banks get a piece of almost every new home built in the form of financing, both during construction and then again when it is purchased. Keeping an unnaturally high rate of turnover in the housing market is profitable for the banks. And since We The People paid for those houses they refuse to sell for market value, they're not losing any money by holding them vacant until people trash them and steal all the metals and fixtures.
There is, IMHO, no *technical* barrier to supplying a house for less than $100k almost everywhere in the USA.
No, the barriers are all legal and/or political. It costs literally more in permit costs and mandatory connection fees to build a single bedroom home in Lake County, CA than it does to buy the materials, so basically the only thing that you can reasonably build any more is a housing development or similar (like a time share complex.) The problem there is that every one of those which has been built in the last decade has been a scam based on selling shit shacks to the stupid. For example, inadequate site survey. One home in a local development got literally ripped in half by the land settling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you just cant plop a box down and start living in it, we have pretty strict building codes
and that land that cost a few bucks is typically hundreds of miles away from anything, meaning water, power, sewer etc ... you can do it but it doesn't appeal to many people
Excellent point, except that median home price is higher than your stated number.
Go live in a cardboard box, millennial. Set fire to your shit to keep you warm. Eat from the trashbin!
Good thing millennials are known for eschewing unnecessary expenses to scrimp and save. I'm sure they didn't blow the money on ironic t-shirts or coachella tickets, certainly.
How much did you say smart phones cost in the US? Let me see, US median house sales price as of April 30 2017 = $244,800. Therefore ($244,800 - $10,000 down payment) / 20 phones = $11,740 per phone. Holy shit that's expensive.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
I've heard ideas like this a lot recently, but it's bullshit. I could never afford the same actual house that my parents owned 30 years ago, despite the fact that the structure is now 30 years older than when I lived there. .25 acre lot. Such luxury is well beyond what I, someone who barely makes six figures, could possibly afford. Instead i limp along, struggling to afford a 1000 square foot townhouse with no land in a much less desirable neighborhood than where that house we had when I was a teenager is.
According to Zillow, that home has 1500 square feet, and it's located on a
We live in a society where status and instant gratification are paramount. I'm not just picking on Millenials here - because I see this kind of behavior from all age groups. In the old days, people would save up for things. If you saw someone driving a Mercedes that was a real achievement. Today, any schmuck willing for fork over $400-500 a month can drive one.
For many people it's more important to LOOK rich than to BE rich. Looking rich is easy. You just go out and lease cars you can't really afford and put everything else on revolving credit. Instant status. Here's the problem: all your money is tied up in rapidly depreciating "assets" (and I use that term very loosely). Building wealth requires discipline and sacrifice. Unless you inherit money or win the lottery there is no shortcut. If you want to own a home then you have to sacrifice in the short term in order to save enough money for the down payment. That's the hard part. Once you get enough for the down payment, paying the mortgage is just like cutting a rent check except that you're paying yourself instead of the landlord.
But it's really hard to do since there are so many traps set up that suck wealth away from you without you realizing it. Leasing cars is one of them. If you have a business and can write off the cost of the lease then leasing a new car makes financial sense. Otherwise, get a 3 year old car for about half the price and buy it don't rent, I mean lease, it. And hang on to it for at least 5 years. That alone will probably put about $15,000 dollars in your pocket at the end of the 5 years.
The other thing is take a close look at how you spend your money on non-essential items. Do you really need 300 channels and 1 Gigabit internet service? Is it absolutely necessary to have the newest iPhone every 2 years? Is it practical to spend $300 on a pair of sneakers? Expensive vacations every year? Eating out a restaurants 3-4 times a week?
Now I'm not suggesting that we should live like hermits and drive rusty, broken down, unsafe vehicles. All I'm suggesting is a little restraint. Drive a Ford instead of a Mercedes. Eat out once or twice a week instead of every night. Pass on the Air Jordans. Those kinds of small sacrifices will enable you to save your money and buy a home. Don't think rich. Be rich.
Housing is so expensive because the developers & builders make more money wasting resources by building huge, energy wasting "palaces" that only the rich or obsessively over-leveraged can afford. HOAs exacerbate the problem with wasteful regulations for the sake of boosting property values. The average person, especially millennials, have nothing to buy if they could, because the so-called marketplace does not serve them. The marketplace only serves the wealthy and those concerned with amassing wealth. It does not solve society's problems.
PlaynBass
every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances. It also indoctrinates kids into what can only be called the Cult of Capitalism. Seriously, when I was in school we were taught Capitalism & the Free Market like it as a religion. No competing theories, not even a discussion of how our government intervenes to keep the whole thing from shitting the bed every 10 years.
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Just a guess, but you must live in the Bay Area or NY or someplace people have elected folks to prevent growth.
Try looking at the rest of the country.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
adjusted for inflation. Assuming you're younger than 50 that is.
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You're in Lake County? Small world. You must be referring to that development over by the hospital in Lakeport. And yeah, Lake County needs housing to replace what was lost by the fires; but not that kind of housing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why? Wouldn't things be better if you helped kill and eat the fuckers who are taking more than one chair? Bourgeoisie tastes like veal I bet, but with more prozac and Viagra in the marbling.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Nope, Southern California here. Plenty of building and development going on all the time. Still can't afford the house I lived in as a teenager (which was also in Southern California).
Check out "mutual self-help housing" housing programs.
Check with your county (or multi-county) office to find out details (ask whoever administers the HEAT program).
We built our custom house, along with 5 other families. It took several months, but our home is beautiful. We are self-employed, lower income, and no bank would talk to us.
With these govt programs, no money is needed for down payments or anything. There are rural (USDA) and urban (HRD) versions. Since the fed. govt. is our bank, our interest rate is stunningly low, and there are programs to lower payments if our income goes down, etc.
Seriously, after renting for way too much from crazy landlords for way too long, it's the best thing we ever did.
Some specifics: We paid no money down. We got a 3,500 square foot home (including basement and garage) on a quarter-acre lot, with a beautiful view, in our lovely rural area. (Phone company offers gigabit Internet here, so all good.) The house cost $166,000 USD total, 30-year mortgage. We had no credit rating, so we supplied three bills we'd paid on time (Netflix, Water, I forget what else). Based on those, and the fact we'd been paying rent for years far in excess of our house payment, we were approved. Our payments were around a thousand a month, but we lost our business' main client a few months ago, so our payments were then reduced to $669/month. Those payments include property taxes and homeowners' insurance. We'll need to pay back the amount deferred, minus expenses spent on home upgrades in the meantime. The house is beautiful, open floor plan, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, and we got to choose from 7-or-so floor plans, which we could then adjust within our total budget. For instance, we chose extra large windows so there is lots of light, and it's a bit on the Modern side of a Contemporary style. Again, beautiful. Plus, we have a full basement we're beginning to finish up now. The work depends on your ability so, like, some people mostly cleaned up the site and passed tools to their spouse up on a ladder or whatever.
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I'm a self-taught programmer, or at least working towards being one. I think that it's probably descriptive if I say that I need to reread GoF, and I need to make a serious attempt on Knuth at some point. To my mind, programming education is insane. If you want to be a good programmer, you have to make that an explicit goal, and probably prioritize that above getting real work done unless you're very lucky. Most people seem to enjoy making things other than programming their hobby, and perhaps even most programmers. It's not necessarily everyone's idea of a fun Sunday to teach oneself about trie structures or binary searches, and it's easy to not use those things in one's day-to-day coding. Conversely, most employers are unwilling or uninterested in teaching people new programming skills, and while universities tend to provide a decent set of fundamentals with which to build a knowledge of programming, having plunked one's buns in a seat for four years says nothing about one's ability to learn programming independently.
Generally, I tend to take the long view, that if it takes 10,000 hours of actively trying to be better at something and a good helping of native talent to get there, then probably most people are never going to do so, and it's best to learn to live with that. However, to the degree to which there is an issue with programmers not knowing their trade, I think I would have to put the first blame for that on the industry rather than the individual.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Debtors? LOL.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You forgot a big one. Real Estate agents, who in many places have a monopoly or at very least a large advantage over the entire housing market, both yours and they other guys, are both highly incentivised to make housing as expensive as possible, and to keep people buying and selling as much as possible because they each make about 3% off whatever that value is during that transaction...
On a house that say costs 100,000 that is only about 3k, however on a house that is 800,000 that is 24,000$ for that one transaction (x2 for both agents!), so there are a lot of real estate folks getting rich right now...
how many boomers, or as I call them, old people will castigate us for what they perceive to be our wanton spending habits when the reality is that the only reason my husband and I could afford a home was because we graduated without student debt (him, scholarship, me, rich parents who paid 100% of my tuition). Of our friends and acquaintances in our peer group +/-5 our age, exactly 5 own homes, the rest just get by renting. Instead of blaming us because we like coffee and avocado toast, maybe step back and realize that the entire system has been stacked against us by your generation. If I didn't have loved ones who are boomers or older, I'd say I can't wait for you all to die so my generation will finally prosper.