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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.'
I'm sure this is completely unrelated to the previous article about our booming gig economy
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
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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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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
My parents helped me with my first down payment. I will be helping my kids.
This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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"?
Same. This also (partially) explains why many black populations in the US are so screwed over today. They weren't able to get mortgages in the 50s and 60s, so they never were able to start accruing wealth to pass onto the next generation.
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.
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.
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.
It's arguable that immigration always leads to wage depression because it increases supply.
The H1B program should be reserved for the cream of the crop; for jobs where not only is there little supply of workers immediately available but where there are very poor prospects of training enough people to do the job.
We have plenty of shortages in the medical field, and it takes a lot of skill and effort to become a doctor. It does not take as much skill or effort to become an IT services worker, even one specialized in certain specific fields. I've seen eighteen year olds recruited fresh out of highschool pick it up and I've seen older workers that transfered within the non-IT-focused company to the IT department manage to do it. We don't need to import workers for IT, and I expect a lot of CIS and CSE jobs likewise could be done with existing population.
Save the H1B for the specialists where we really do need their help.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Never mind all the Asian boat people from the 70's who came with only rags. I knew one who beat his kids for anything grade less than an A. Both kids are now successful engineers.
Don't they just need to wait for their parents to die?
The Baby Boomer parents are too busy spending their inheritance. All that they're going to get is a bill from Uncle Sam to pay for Social Security/Medicare and everything else.
I mean, they were raised with everyone getting a trophy just for showing up...maybe they thought mommy and daddy (or the mommy state) would give them a house too...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer?
I think you've missed the fact that Generation-X is stereotypically cynical, and the poster was just expressing that cynicism. He doesn't want Millennials to suffer. Instead, he's complaining that nobody cared when Generation-X had the same problem.
The two generations have different ways of complaining. Millennials complain by with very public (and often emotional) outbursts. Generation-X complains by making wry, cynical statements. The difference probably has it origins in their relationships with their parents. The Millennials have a lot of support from their parents and other adults in the community. So, they can expect that the adults will correct a problem if they are made aware of it. In contrast, Generation-X had very little support from their parents and other adults. In fact, Gen-Xers usually felt that the adults were idiots. (For example, the character of Marty McFly in Back To The Future was a typical Generation-X teenager.) A Generation-X teenager couldn't complain publicly without be scolded by the adults. So, the whole generation resorted to cynicism as a way of expressing their complaints to each other, while avoiding the wrath of the adults.
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.
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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