I would imagine most homeowners couldn’t afford a loan for their current house at its current value. I just ran a borrowing capacity calculator for a local large bank, and it’s well below what my house is worth.
I bought at 21 and had it paid off at 38. I earn triple what I did back then.
Well, people who own lots of shit had to be properly compensated for owning lots of shit, otherwise - or so we are told - “they wouldn’t invest”.
It’s funny how we’re told to “work hard” and there’s even lots of criticism of the “workshy poor” all the while the entire economic system has been changed to maximize the returns of rent-seeking (which is the single most parasitical economic activity there is) at the cost of the returns from working AND the purchasing power of said returns (because life essentials like housing are way much more expensive).
A rising tied raises all boats - Ronnie Regan (but if you don’t own a boat, you drown)
He meant to say “yachts” not “boats”.
Rising tide lifts all boats, so let’s lift the biggest boats. That’ll surely raise the tide.
The tide’s going out though, we’re on the verge of a recession.
People think I am full of it when I say that my household income (largish household with kids) is a quarter million a year and we are basically living like we are middle class. Money just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As a millennial, I never would have imagined working my way up to this point only to find I can’t even buy a house. Oh sure, I could make the bare minimum down payment and get stuck with a super high mortgage payment, but if I lose my job or become disabled or unable to work, we would have no way to pay for it.
Groceries, housing, and insurance costs have more than doubled for us since 2019.
$250,000 a year is middle class and has been for a long time - it’s about how much a doctor (who isn’t in a particularly high-paying specialty) makes. But DINKs with that household income could afford a million-dollar house.
By what definition of middle class are you considering $250,000 to be middle class? That’s greater than the 90th percentile income.
My personal definition of “upper class” excludes anyone who actually has to work. Wikipedia seems to agree, putting “CEOs and successful business owners” in the upper middle class. And the New York Times considers the 90th to 99th percentile of earners upper-middle-class.
I do see some places defining “upper class” as those earning at least twice the median household income (so about $150,000) but I don’t think that matches common usage. Is a software developer right out of college upper class? Or a nurse practitioner? I would say “clearly no, unless they happen to be from a very wealthy family”.
Yes, a software developer in the 90th percentile of household income, making a single income, is most assuredly “upper class”
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$250,000 a year is middle class and has been for a long time
like 5% of the population makes $250,000
Yes, and IMO less than 1% of the population is upper class.
Sounds like you live in HCOL area where $250K is pretty much middle class.
250k household is not middle class anywhere in the United States.
$250K is borderlining middle class in San Francisco and Seattle.
It most assuredly is not.
Median income there is $54k or less in both of those cities. 5x median income is not middle class.
I really don’t think that’s a good metric given that the average house cost in San Francisco is 1.12 million dollars. Someone making $250,000 a year isn’t affording that house any more than someone making $54,000. They’re both priced out. That’s the point everyone else is making. That and the new idea what anyone working for a living is not upper class.
People in upper class society worked even during the height of the Robber Barons, so I’m not sure why you’re pretending that’s new.
Have you just like, not read The Great Gatsby or something? Shit, wealthy landowners in colonial days worked - even those with slaves.
Your points need to be grounded in reality somewhere.
San Francisco specifically being expensive to buy a home in has no bearing on what “middle class” represents whatsoever.
The “tax the rich but oh wait not me” liberals and progressives are the absolute worst
The worst part isn’t a corner bedroom going up 5 times…
It’s even a shitty hole in the wall is 1500 now.
I couldn’t buy my own house today. I bought in 2010.
I bought in October 2020 and couldn’t afford it now. I bought with a 15-year mortgage, which I feel unbelievably fortunate to have been able to do. If I was to refinance to a 30-year loan, I’d be paying $500 per month more than I am now, and that’s not accounting for the 25% increase in house value. It’s insane.
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I was just talking to my father last week about this exact thing. He built his house about 10 years ago and bought the land close to 30 years ago. He was a steel worker so not terrible pay but nothing amazing. That house today would be well over 1mil. No way he could have built it today. And we live pretty close to the middle of nowhere, Indiana. I pray I can buy my brother out one day, at this rate it’s the only chance I have of owning a nice house. Even with a STEM degree I’m looking at maybe 70k salary right now. Which I thought would be awesome when I started college but now that I graduated, I feel like anything under 6 figures will be hard to live a middle class life on. I guess I’m lucky I spent my 20s broke and homeless, I have learned to really stretch a dollar.
Yep, STEM degree: Mechanical engineering. It’s enough to sustain at this point but I’m not getting ahead at all. Feels like I’m slowly losing.
I bought in 2019, and am in the exact same situation. There’s no fucking way that my house has over doubled in value in 4 fucking years
The only reason I still live in Ohio. My salary is almost double the median income, and I’m still just barely staying out of the paycheck to paycheck life while paying my spouses way through school. I wouldn’t have been able to afford a house anywhere else with just my income and maintain what semblance of a life we do have.
The perks of living in the decaying rust belt I guess.
I just cut straight to the pie and set up camp in the wilderness. Pretty cheap, but the HOA are a pain.
My wife and I couldn’t afford to live in our own neighborhood if we were looking to buy now. We bought in 2019.
Same. Somehow my house has more than doubled in that time frame.
What community am i in?
Boston
I woke up this morning, and the sun was gone…
Turned on some music to start my day and dreamed of the house I’d never own…
Now post the tweet where she admits to living in subsidized housing while making $47/hr. This units were intended to get families off the street. She was stealing housing from the poor while someone in Seattle making $14/hr couldn’t qualify for a reduced-fare transit card. That’s right, she doesn’t like to talk about that.
Absolute hypocrite.
server
there was that post about parking meters being $27/hr so I thought this was computer servers speaking at first
lemmyshitpost
I’m going to be deadass with you brother. When I say it’s every single time, I mean it’s Every. Single. Time.
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Huh? Where in the world do you live?
Servers don’t make that much. These days restaurants are asking their customers to tip and pay the servers for the extra rent costs.
I imagine that they were using the tips and then averaging their total revenue per hour.
A 47 year old lawyer should be able to afford $3,600 a month without particular difficulty. I’m a software developer so I make less than most lawyers do, but I can pay about $3,400 a month for my one-bedroom in the center of a big city.
(I don’t rent. $3,400 is my mortgage plus my building fees and the building charges an additional fee to people who rent out their unit, so if I rented mine out for $3,600 then I would probably actually lose money every month. Paying my mortgage does mean that my net worth increases, but it doesn’t help me afford things now. Someone with their mortgage paid off would be in a better position to be a landlord, but they would still be getting less than 4% profit per year even if they have the perfect tenant who never costs them anything. Selling the apartment and putting the money in the stock market would be more profitable than renting it out for $3,600.)
Being a landlord might net you 4% but then you have to live with being a human parasite.
The average yearly return of the S&P 500 over the last 30 years is almost 10% a year, so if instead of investing in the stock market, you choose to be a landlord whose yearly profit is 4%, you’re a humanitarian donating 6% of the cost of your apartment to your tenant every year.
I’m exaggerating because the average rise in real estate values is 6% so such a landlord actually gets about the same return as he would get from the stock market, as long as he never has a bad tenant and doesn’t mind his money being locked up in real estate.
And maybe trying to wring as much money as possible from everyone is contributing to making our world unlivable (for us).
Well that was in the past, but over the last 2-3 years I have lost a few thousand $ in the value of my S&P 500 index fund investments. That money would have been better off in a plain old savings account or invested in real estate (but it wasn’t really enough to buy any real estate).
You must have bought at the worst possible time. But there’s risk associated with any investment - the neighborhood you buy in could go to hell, or if you rent out your property then you could get a tenant who trashes it and takes a year to evict. I think real estate does tend to be less risky than the stock market, but it has significantly worse returns too. (Plus, the stock market lets you diversify - if you only own one property and something happens to it, you have lost everything.)
With that said, you can invest in real estate even if you don’t have enough money to buy property yourself - you can buy shares in a real estate investment trust.
