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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
"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.
Don't they just need to wait for their parents to die?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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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You don't spend much time on Twitter, do you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I got to where I was at without riding the benefits bandwagon, even though I certainly qualified for it. The need for government handouts is an illusion, and the student loan debt is so high BECAUSE those programs exist to ensure it. The last sentence is right, you just want the problem to be worse so it can be fixed....
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and then move upstairs?
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..."
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"?
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.
Most state universities used to be funded by public dollars, so tuition costs remained low. The subsidies dried up and were replaced with private loans. A lot of those loans didn't pan out. Banks started reducing the number of student loans they were offering and increased the eligibility requirements due to the high risk. When banks reduced their loan offerings for public schools, government stepped in to back them. Don't get me wrong, I agree that guaranteed loans drove the cost of tuition sky high, but that is a symptom, not a cause.
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.
The CCC and WPA were pretty nice programs imho.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
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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