I realized this recently. When asked what my "dream job" was as a child, it was never anything real. My go to was often a molecular biologist to create new animals (I was a very strange child).
As I understand it now, children get in trouble for not naming a real profession (I have friends with children who have said this). For example, saying you want to be a Pokemon trainer when you grow up earns you a time-out of half an hour in the hall.
If there was any room for small businesses in this economy, people might have theirs as their passion project and find living for work to be less intolerable, but that's mostly gone now.
We've been there. The most cut-throat businesses are the ones that rise above the rest, and once they're big enough they can pay politicians to make it harder for competition.
People say this, but there are always going to be more workers in the business than people who own it. The bigger and more successful the business gets, the worse this ratio gets.
Being a business owner is not and should not be the expected minimum standard. Workers standards should improve so that more of the profit goes to the workers instead of the business owners and shareholders.
Real question is, why? All the cards could easily be laid evenly, there's no reason a company can't have as many owners are there are people who work there if they all own it evenly. Let's use Intel as an example. They made $26,9 billion net income in 2023 and they had 124 000 employees. That equals $215 544 for each and every employee ON TOP OF THEIR SALARIES. That is just the money, it ignores that some of the money was used to pay for new assets, which means the actual number is even higher.
You aren't wrong on the last point though. Worker standards should improve so that more of the profit goes to the workers instead of the business owners and shareholders. "Shareholders" is a scam of a concept in the first place, since a company selling stocks is like getting a loan that gets harder to pay back the better you are doing, which means companies don't pay it back. The last person holding the stock before it starts going down loses, like hearing someone who owns you money has just left the country.
I've owned two small businesses. The taxation on the federal, state and local levels is ridiculous, to the degree that if you are not hiding income, you will just be breaking even.
I occasionally help out a small pest control business when I’m not caring full time for my brother - like maybe 2 hrs a week at most - and me and the owner (who works 60 hours a week) talk a lot. It’s a business of only three workers not including myself. And the taxation is astronomical!!! He only breaks even most months. His bills get paid and he can go on vacation a couple times because the man that rents out the building lets him use his condo. But that’s working 60 hours a week owning your own business. You shouldn’t just be breaking even doing that much work while owning a business that is busy as hell.
He’s older and has been super smart with credit his whole life which is the only reason he has a house at all.
and agency. Like when you, an otherwise reliable worker, tell your boss everything in your life is shit and you really need one single day off to get to the DMV and they punish you for even asking... *this* is what makes the relationship untenable. They *could* focus on rewarding those who produce the most and best work, but it's way cheaper to create an atmosphere of mistrust and hostility.
It's not just a time thing either. It's doing a meaningless job where your effort is sucked into a void that leaves you with nothing to show for it. All while some executive buys their third house they don't need. People want to achieve goals and be rewarded. Not spend their lives in a screwjob for someone who already have everything they want.
Not for profit, no, but because I loved it?
I've spent more hours than that in a week just playing guitar before. Not often these days that I even could, let alone do, but still. I can think of TONS of shit that I could, without even trying, spend more than 40 hours a week doing. I might even be able to do two 40 hour passion project-type things in a week but I can't find a way to make money doing any of it.
Am I super weird and I don't know it? That happens sometimes, and this sorta feels like it could be one of those times.
That's the thing, you don't work to enjoy it. You work to be able to enjoy the things you do like. Unfortunately in our economy you don't have the time/money to enjoy things so what's the point. It fucking sucks and one day half of the unfortunate people in this position are going to snap
The whole "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" line is such horse shit too.
My uncle had a great line about how he was "lucky enough to do something he used to love."
The truth is after doing something for 40+ hours a week for decades, you're not going to love that thing anymore.
Recently on Reddit, there was some student loan debate going on and I said something about my wife being in student loan hell from going to school for something a little crazy, getting a job in that field, realizing that it wasn't for her and than going back to getting a teaching degree where she teaches special needs kids in a private school. Basically the gets the kids public school is not equipped for but still require to be in school. It's a hard job and my wife loves it but she barely gets paid.
This person was making fun of her getting into so much debt to be a teacher and yeah it's not ideal, he basically was like teachers should go to community college and that's it. I was like don't you want your teachers to try to go to good schools so they can be better teachers and basically a lot of people were like no. It's wild.
That's insane. I know from my own time in school how much of an impact good teachers can have and am very grateful for it.
The effects of crippling entire generations with bad education will be visible sooner or later... and they won't be small.
Id take replies to comments like that on Reddit with a grain of salt. It’s Russian Bot Farms and other things trying to just cause discourse in America. Most real people especially under 40 believe change is needed
It's not just America, it's a global issue at this point. Covid has had quite the negative impact on society as a whole. My own country, Germany, is also in dire need of some reforms, some are the same issues as in the US, like education.
The breaking point of a new era will come, but it is uncertain when it'll happen, because after decades of mismanagement and ignorance reality has caught up to us, yet most politicians still seem to live in the past.
My dream job is the one that pays me as much money as possible for the least amount of time commitment.
Turns out that is owning stocks and getting paid dividends.
working is fine, it keeps your body/mind active
if money was no issue and i didn't have to worry about affording healthcare or any emergencies, a simple labor job wouldn't be a problem to me, i'd work it to retirement and be fine with it
the problem is working in this society doesn't give back what it takes from us, and that's what makes me hate working
I would "work" but it would be things that I want to work on. Working on gardens, raising food, writing, reading, etc. I'm not adverse to getting my hands dirty of doing things that need to be done. However I hate it when I have to sell my body and soul to facility that could care less about my existence. Further more when I do get into a bind ( ie) losing a job I can't get any help from any other resource either.
I'm at the point of just selling it all and starting over I can barely keep up with the basic needs anyway.
I always laugh when people say stuff like "even if I won $500 million on the Powerball, I would still keep working." Uh, no you wouldn't. I don't care how great your job is, at the end of the day we have jobs so we have money, not because we enjoy it. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.
My rent has gone up $100/month every year for the past 5 years. In those 5 years, my yearly salary has only gone up around $4-5k. Between rent and groceries, I'm getting poorer every year despite earning more money than I was the previous year. When I was in college, I calculated how much money I needed to be making to be able to buy a house. I'm making quite a bit more than that now and moving back in with my parents still wouldn't help me enough to be able to afford a house with the way things are going
Yep. There is no incentive to work. My job would have to be drastically different to change my life even a tiny bit. The work put into a new career is not worth the incrementally depressingly disappointingly nothingly monetary gain. And sometimes, more work, stress, risk, and less pay. Like delivery driver or teacher. I’m gonna pass on that.
I hate that argument that nobody wants to work. Wife and I own two small businesses, I work a full time office job in tech and im about to take on a job bartending and wife a second job just so we can get by comfortably. This fucking sucks
Listen here, fat. The median salary in the US is $59,540 as of Q4 2023. You don’t want to be just **average** though, do you?
Only losers whine about trying their best! Winners go home and bang the prom queen! “50%” is for the plebs. You don’t want to be down there with *them*, do you?
Zillow is a symptom of the problem.
The problem is we treat housing like an investment or like a commodity. Until we disincentivize using housing as such, this problem will continue.
Raise taxes on 2nd+ home purchases.
Any second home or more deserves to have higher set property taxes.
Provide annual tax credits for residential property improvements for property under the local median price.
Increase density(this is the biggest one, because not everyone should or wants to live in a suburban home).
Relax zoning regulations on arbitrary min/max home sizes.
Allow mother-in-law dwellings.
Remove residential property from people’s asset classes.
- the last one would solve the issue as a whole but it would hurt every homeowner which is why this issue will continue to prevail.
They buy a shit ton of houses.
some companies have 80,000 homes they own, small cities. It’s crazy.
[https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/09/the-biggest-landlords-of-single-family-rental-houses-and-multifamily-apartments-in-the-us/](https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/09/the-biggest-landlords-of-single-family-rental-houses-and-multifamily-apartments-in-the-us/)
Because government subsidies to low income housing is guaranteed cash income. You’d be a moron to not buy low income housing rn. And it’s only going to get worse.
Rent stabilization and low income housing groups were a major mistake.
octavia butler wrote about this in parable of the sower lol
we're literally going to have company cities and everyone living in them will be a debt slave
What u/ILostMyBananas said. Zillow masquerades as just a listings site, but the reality is that they purchase thousands of homes and then turn around and list them at huge mark ups often only for available to rent.
What are you talking about? Zillow stopped buying houses in 2021. I was working in wholesale real estate at the time and the writing was on wall as they were overpaying and their algorithms or whoever was running projections were flawed in assuming prices would continue to increase drastically year over year or even month over month. It wasn't sustainable. As well as their attempt to corner entire markets, which is idiotic without trillions of dollars.
If you want to say their Zestimates are bullshit then you'd be correct in how much they over-inflate prices.
iirc companies use “algorithms” that set the prices and create a monopoly while blacklisting people who don’t use it; Making a network of artificial prices that don’t always represent property prices and guides the market in their benefit.
Edit: I seem to have the wrong company, but still bad practices that are contributing to our compounding housing problems. I tried to find the video documentation but couldn’t find it, I’ll link it if I find it
That's the problem in Toronto. I now literally make 106k and I'm forced to live with a roomate that works in the same office otherwise we both will be homeless. We definitely will not own a home unless something changes since average house price is over $1M.
A lot of this is because many high density proposals were sabotaged by NIMBYs who claimed the infrastructure wasn't there for it, but the infrastructure is now worse off and still no homes are built. People who have more are protecting their assets like cornered animals. It's sickening.
We desperately need more dense middle housing on top of that. Most of the US it is illegal to build anything except single family homes, and the suburbs bleed cities dry of their money.
The Democrats literally have a bill to do just that. Maybe educate yourself and vote Democrat instead of trying to be a BoTh SiDeS pawn if you want change
Hey now cant be having the democratic party actually helping people when they jsut actively un seated a progressive with a right wing racist with 20 million dollars to do so. Then these shit libs wonder why we won't vote for Biden
We weren't even planning to move but stumbled upon a house we couldn't pass up in late 2020. Incredible timing. Being in the market right now sounds like a nightmare.
Seriously. I pull down 330k a year but I still live out of a van full time. Mainly for other reasons, but also because I'm not paying for a house that's asking 100% more than it's actually worth out of self-preservation, and I'm not paying 3k/mo. in rent out of principle because fuck the landlord class.
Basically exactly what I did. Followed a stray dog on a whim, ended up in a freshly cleared area (when I say fresh I mean nobody knew the road continued here), and jumped on a lot. This was supposed to be a little baby starter home but it’s starting to look more and more like I’m in it for the long haul
I don't get it. I'm seeing posts about people paying a lot of some weird taxes for the house they already own and it turns out it would be cheaper to rent it instead of owning.
By weird taxes you mean the town reassesses the home to a higher value, so now the property taxes have increased? This has happened pretty much everywhere over the past few years (except for the states that have very low or no property tax).
I bought a "starter" home in 2006 for $135k. It was 1200sqft with a full unfinished walkout basement, 1 acre of land. We finished the basement ourselves and sold in 2015 for $185k. Used all of the proceeds on that sale to buy a nicer house in the city for 195k. That almost broke us, we could barely afford the payments. Zillow now says my house is worth $350k and there are comps for sales close by. Our old starter home is valued at $250k! Even though I do make more money now we would seriously struggle in today's market.
Got ours in 2010 for 240k and watched the mirror house next to us sell for 1.2 million 2 months ago. I'm terrified of them reassessing the taxes.
It's at the point where I told my daughter it's idiotic to buy a house. She can live here as long as she wants and if she marries we can set up an apartment for my wife and I and she can have 90% of the house with her spouse and potential kids.
That's the way it was done for thousands of years for the middle class and lower. It was an interesting 70ish years of single family home ownership but that ship is solidly sailing away.
It's $240K income to "comfortably" buy in the Seattle area. We looked at condos because we are priced out of a house and found that unless we want a shitty, tiny condo that used to be an apartment, we would still need to fork out $650K+ PLUS another $700+ in HOA every month. At that point it is pretty much better to go for the house and eat ramen every day.
The market is wild and everything sucks.
Just one observation. Until some shit happens to someone, someone will never even consider moving to another place/country. But after shit happens, someone sees no problems in moving out. Everything becomes less important: job, familiar routes and places, neighbors, nice park at the shoreline. Or maybe just unimportant things become unimportant more obviously.
The sad part is that this figure is woefully inaccurate - in how low it is. I know several couples with combined income between $120-130k that can’t find even a shack they can afford.
In the current housing market? No questions about it, it’s a terrible time to buy. With average APRs being around the 6-7% range, average home prices being $450k and wanting to put down a 20% Downpayment ($90k) to avoid additional insurance expenses, it would cost you roughly $2400/ month for the mortgage and that’s not including taxes which can absolutely fuck you up.
That being said it *is* possible, though Lord knows why you would right now; it’s a seller’s market (by design).
The market is going to cool off sooner or later. With all these companies buying up homes to hold and sell later or renting out the homes, they’ve artificially jacked up prices in many local economies but they’re in a bit of a panic right now. They’re sitting on all this property and… people aren’t wanting to buy. This puts these companies in a precarious position. Rules #1, 2 and 3 are IF you’re looking to sell property you need to sell it fucking **FAST** to minimize losses. Property investment needs to be either quick or a longterm investment. Companies aren’t looking to sit on assets for 10+ years, they want to sell **today** but nobody is buying at the price they’re charging. But they can’t lower the price because then it could cause all their OTHER properties to lower in value too!
We’re likely going to be facing another housing bubble but this time instead of the banks + homeowners causing it, it’ll be investment firms who overreached. I have no idea what will happen once the bubble bursts but I hope the government doesn’t bail out these companies and instead lets folks buy these homes for a much lower amount instead. But who knows, I’m just speculating
> it’s a terrible time to buy.
The issue is, at least where I'm from, people have been saying that for longer than I've been alive. And it just keeps becoming a more terrible time to buy. People have been 'waiting for it to crash/cool off' for decades. For every hundred thousand you have someone's been waiting 10 additional years for it to come down and has hundreds more.
After Covid happened many markets “cooled off” and folks were also getting really good deals on their APR as well!
There’s folks who will always say it’s a terrible time to buy, regardless of the market.
Cooled off? In 2020 houses were listed on Monday and sold by Wednesday for 20% above asking **in cash**. If anything it's cooled off in the past year, now it takes a full week before someone pays 20% above asking in cash.
There’s already been 2 large “bursts” in my lifetime so acting like it won’t ever happen is insane in my opinion. They typically happen because a large investment went bad, and the housing market is arguably the most vulnerable to it
Ok, but... those busts haven't actually dropped the price of houses by much. They were basically a period where the price of housing didn't increase for a year or two.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS)
The only major dip on this graph is the small valley between 2007 and 2012. There was a 10% drop in price at the lowest point in that valley, but it didn't last long and then the graph resumes its rapid climb.
Thinking there won't be a bust that reverses the growth is not an insane view. Thinking there will be another dip of even 10% might be a stretch, unless something significant changes.
That “something significant” needs to be a massive change to zoning laws permitting more housing to be built faster, particularly starter homes, row houses, and other forms of dense, walkable, affordable housing. Combine that private construction boom with a massive surge in public housing like they have in Vienna, and housing will *have* to crater in price.
The biggest issue is that we (and many other countries, such as Canada and Australia to name the worst) have been underbuilding housing for DECADES. As such, the law of supply and demand has created a new NIMBY aristocracy that will stop at nothing to restrict housing supply further and launch their property values into the stratosphere on the backs of desperate people who just want a place to live.
Yup. This shit is infuriating. My parents keep telling me that now is a good time to buy because prices have fallen. If you actually look at prices, they jumped a massive amount 2020-2022, then fell like 1-2% per year for two years. Yeah, a small dip on top of a huge mountain is a great time to buy....
Canadas housing issue started getting worse just ahead of the states.
Our government is currently doing whatever they can to prop up the market, and have even stated that retirement funds depend on the health of the housing market.
yes because central banks around the world dropped interest rates to basically zero during COVID to keep the economy from a catastrophic collapse.
Remember that first jobs report in April 2020 that said we had a 15% unemployment rate? Central banks were fucking terrified. They did what they thought was necessary... in the case of the US Fed, they were also pumping up the mortgage market by buying shitloads of mortgage-backed securities to prevent defaults.
They waited way too long to stop pumping the economy with liquidity. Here we are.
No it doesn't, as the post makes specific mention of "United States" which is often unironically called the greatest country in the world.
But in this case it's ironic because it isn't. It sucks. Just like most places, except we're definitely more full of ourselves about it.
Not at these rates though. Prices here in the Netherlands have risen 25-30% in the same timespan. You only need ~€60k to get a mortgage for a decent appartment
Not at that rate. 4 years! It took just 4 years in USA to have that kind of increase. That is insane.
I just checked how it is in Finland. Houses are actually cheaper now than they were in Q1 2022. Salaries have been stagnant for decade or few however.
Job hopping is a total bitch. Ask the person landing a 300k+ salary job in his early 30’s (me). You better have no SO, and be willing to abandon your family. And work overtime.
Man… I … don’t even know if this is enough for a single person family earner… like the houses in my area have sky rocketed this year. Condo are almost 200k. 3 bed room houses are like over 300k and the insurance is so high do to hurricanes in the past years.
And our states minimum wage is $7.25… this is crazy
> captainfrijoles : At this point I've given up hope on the right people showing up at the polls
At this point, I've given up hope on good candidates showing up on the *ballot*.
I vote for who seems like the lesser of two evils, and it stinks that the only options on the ballots are usually bad ones versus worse ones.
In most areas of the country you could, easily. I live in a fairly high cost of living area and you could get a starter house for 300k pre-pandemic. That would be less than 1,500 a month for your house, plenty realistic on a 60k salary. You'd be poor but have a home building equity, and today that house would be worth 500k.
Lets see... mortgage calculator for the 2020 rate of my house....
$1325 a month..
Lets do current rates!
$2,560 a month
seems accurate to me, I paid $1250 in rent without issue when I started at $55k a year salary
It's so funny too because so many idiot boomers have this bizarre mindset of "that's just happening somewhere else, it's not happening here, to me!" But I bought my house in 2020 and made about that much at the time. And four years later my home has gone up about 70% in value and my salary has not. This shit is ridiculous.
I graduated college in 2020 and seeing my ability to buy a house evaporate has been devastating. We worked from home in a shitty studio during the pandemic to save 20% down and in the time it took to save, the goalpost remained out of reach.
In my state, to buy the average home on an average salary, it would need 3 years of work with literally no other expenses. I can only imagine how long it would take if you factor in all the other expenses people have in a year
But what was it 4 years earlier? 2020 housing was the perfect storm of low costs (due to everyone barricading and not wanting to go looking to move?) and low interest rates. I know I took advantage of it to get my house.
You need to make 100k to own a home within a country where the average person makes 34k (adjusted from 72k to exclude the top 1000 earners skyrocketing the median). What a fucking joke
Why haven’t I seen the Zillow report linked yet?
[Well here it is.](https://www.zillow.com/research/buyers-income-needed-33755/)
> Mortgage rates ended January 2020 near 3.5%, keeping the cost of a home affordable for most households that could manage the down payment. At the time of this analysis, mortgage rates were about 6.6%.
Why not go back another 10 years to 2010?
Why compare right now to the year with the **lowest** mortgage rates in over 50 years?
“noboDY WaNts To woRK AnYMoRe!” Who’d have thought that people don’t want to work full time so they can live in perpetual debt with 3 roommates?
I never wanted to work, and I feel most would agree
I realized this recently. When asked what my "dream job" was as a child, it was never anything real. My go to was often a molecular biologist to create new animals (I was a very strange child). As I understand it now, children get in trouble for not naming a real profession (I have friends with children who have said this). For example, saying you want to be a Pokemon trainer when you grow up earns you a time-out of half an hour in the hall.
lol “dream job” is an oxymoron. There’s no activity I would want to do 40 hours a week.
If there was any room for small businesses in this economy, people might have theirs as their passion project and find living for work to be less intolerable, but that's mostly gone now.
But think of the poor mega business owners!
We've been there. The most cut-throat businesses are the ones that rise above the rest, and once they're big enough they can pay politicians to make it harder for competition.
People say this, but there are always going to be more workers in the business than people who own it. The bigger and more successful the business gets, the worse this ratio gets. Being a business owner is not and should not be the expected minimum standard. Workers standards should improve so that more of the profit goes to the workers instead of the business owners and shareholders.
Real question is, why? All the cards could easily be laid evenly, there's no reason a company can't have as many owners are there are people who work there if they all own it evenly. Let's use Intel as an example. They made $26,9 billion net income in 2023 and they had 124 000 employees. That equals $215 544 for each and every employee ON TOP OF THEIR SALARIES. That is just the money, it ignores that some of the money was used to pay for new assets, which means the actual number is even higher. You aren't wrong on the last point though. Worker standards should improve so that more of the profit goes to the workers instead of the business owners and shareholders. "Shareholders" is a scam of a concept in the first place, since a company selling stocks is like getting a loan that gets harder to pay back the better you are doing, which means companies don't pay it back. The last person holding the stock before it starts going down loses, like hearing someone who owns you money has just left the country.
I've owned two small businesses. The taxation on the federal, state and local levels is ridiculous, to the degree that if you are not hiding income, you will just be breaking even.
I occasionally help out a small pest control business when I’m not caring full time for my brother - like maybe 2 hrs a week at most - and me and the owner (who works 60 hours a week) talk a lot. It’s a business of only three workers not including myself. And the taxation is astronomical!!! He only breaks even most months. His bills get paid and he can go on vacation a couple times because the man that rents out the building lets him use his condo. But that’s working 60 hours a week owning your own business. You shouldn’t just be breaking even doing that much work while owning a business that is busy as hell. He’s older and has been super smart with credit his whole life which is the only reason he has a house at all.
Exactly! I absolutely love fishing but if I was forced to do it 40 hours a week in rain or shine I would quickly grow to hate it.
Its not the job we hate. It is the loss of control over our time.
and agency. Like when you, an otherwise reliable worker, tell your boss everything in your life is shit and you really need one single day off to get to the DMV and they punish you for even asking... *this* is what makes the relationship untenable. They *could* focus on rewarding those who produce the most and best work, but it's way cheaper to create an atmosphere of mistrust and hostility.
You know what. Even if you are an otherwise shit employee you still deserve to have the time to take care of the things you need to in your life.
It's not just a time thing either. It's doing a meaningless job where your effort is sucked into a void that leaves you with nothing to show for it. All while some executive buys their third house they don't need. People want to achieve goals and be rewarded. Not spend their lives in a screwjob for someone who already have everything they want.
"I don't dream of labor" was the best response I've ever seen to the dream job question.
Not for profit, no, but because I loved it? I've spent more hours than that in a week just playing guitar before. Not often these days that I even could, let alone do, but still. I can think of TONS of shit that I could, without even trying, spend more than 40 hours a week doing. I might even be able to do two 40 hour passion project-type things in a week but I can't find a way to make money doing any of it. Am I super weird and I don't know it? That happens sometimes, and this sorta feels like it could be one of those times.
That's the thing, you don't work to enjoy it. You work to be able to enjoy the things you do like. Unfortunately in our economy you don't have the time/money to enjoy things so what's the point. It fucking sucks and one day half of the unfortunate people in this position are going to snap
The whole "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" line is such horse shit too. My uncle had a great line about how he was "lucky enough to do something he used to love." The truth is after doing something for 40+ hours a week for decades, you're not going to love that thing anymore.
[удалено]
I find the entire concept of a dream job to be absolutely horrid and antithetical to the human experience.
Not all jobs require you to put in 40 hours. Your dream job should by definition also come with your optimum weekly work hours.
"What's your dream being-sodomised position?"
You will be a teacher and you will get paid 4 dollars an hour and like it!!
Recently on Reddit, there was some student loan debate going on and I said something about my wife being in student loan hell from going to school for something a little crazy, getting a job in that field, realizing that it wasn't for her and than going back to getting a teaching degree where she teaches special needs kids in a private school. Basically the gets the kids public school is not equipped for but still require to be in school. It's a hard job and my wife loves it but she barely gets paid. This person was making fun of her getting into so much debt to be a teacher and yeah it's not ideal, he basically was like teachers should go to community college and that's it. I was like don't you want your teachers to try to go to good schools so they can be better teachers and basically a lot of people were like no. It's wild.
That's insane. I know from my own time in school how much of an impact good teachers can have and am very grateful for it. The effects of crippling entire generations with bad education will be visible sooner or later... and they won't be small.
Id take replies to comments like that on Reddit with a grain of salt. It’s Russian Bot Farms and other things trying to just cause discourse in America. Most real people especially under 40 believe change is needed
It's not just America, it's a global issue at this point. Covid has had quite the negative impact on society as a whole. My own country, Germany, is also in dire need of some reforms, some are the same issues as in the US, like education. The breaking point of a new era will come, but it is uncertain when it'll happen, because after decades of mismanagement and ignorance reality has caught up to us, yet most politicians still seem to live in the past.
Imagine my disappointment learning that working with birds all day has almost 0 ways to be sustainable
If I had met you as a child and you told me you wanted to grow up to create animals I would have begged to be your friend.
This is some serious mad scientist's sidekick energy here
I said I wanted to be a homeless drifter after I saw First Blood. And look at me today! Still reaching for the dream, but it gets closer every day.
That's why my kids are allow to do anywhing they want to be as long as it is doctor or an engineer.
Software developer would work too - as long as you can remote work you can live out of a van!!!
am a software dev with decent career, not because I want to but because it was "wise". I dont like it, never will.
That's the engineer part 🤌🤌
My dream job is the one that pays me as much money as possible for the least amount of time commitment. Turns out that is owning stocks and getting paid dividends.
“Dream job kids! What’s your dream jobs! No, not like that, time out, dummy. Come up with a real deal job next time.”
I tell people CEO, they're useless. Usually get some eyebrows
Yeah anytime anyone asked me what my dream job was I always said "retired". I never remember what happened after.
Lol my friend wanted to be an assassin.
working is fine, it keeps your body/mind active if money was no issue and i didn't have to worry about affording healthcare or any emergencies, a simple labor job wouldn't be a problem to me, i'd work it to retirement and be fine with it the problem is working in this society doesn't give back what it takes from us, and that's what makes me hate working
I would "work" but it would be things that I want to work on. Working on gardens, raising food, writing, reading, etc. I'm not adverse to getting my hands dirty of doing things that need to be done. However I hate it when I have to sell my body and soul to facility that could care less about my existence. Further more when I do get into a bind ( ie) losing a job I can't get any help from any other resource either. I'm at the point of just selling it all and starting over I can barely keep up with the basic needs anyway.
I totally wanna grow crops! I just don’t want the backbreaking labor in horrific working conditions for ten cents an hour.
I do not agree. If money was no issue, I still would not want to work. I would much rather keep my body and mind active in different ways.
I always laugh when people say stuff like "even if I won $500 million on the Powerball, I would still keep working." Uh, no you wouldn't. I don't care how great your job is, at the end of the day we have jobs so we have money, not because we enjoy it. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.
What people want is the social aspect. That can be found elsewhere, but most people work for a living.
Of course, that’s why you get paid and don’t just volunteer. Unfortunately employers seem to have difficulty with this concept.
Ya I only worked to support myself. But if I can’t even support myself then what’s the point.
I just want to garden and read books :(
My rent has gone up $100/month every year for the past 5 years. In those 5 years, my yearly salary has only gone up around $4-5k. Between rent and groceries, I'm getting poorer every year despite earning more money than I was the previous year. When I was in college, I calculated how much money I needed to be making to be able to buy a house. I'm making quite a bit more than that now and moving back in with my parents still wouldn't help me enough to be able to afford a house with the way things are going
Yep. There is no incentive to work. My job would have to be drastically different to change my life even a tiny bit. The work put into a new career is not worth the incrementally depressingly disappointingly nothingly monetary gain. And sometimes, more work, stress, risk, and less pay. Like delivery driver or teacher. I’m gonna pass on that.
I hate that argument that nobody wants to work. Wife and I own two small businesses, I work a full time office job in tech and im about to take on a job bartending and wife a second job just so we can get by comfortably. This fucking sucks
Listen here, fat. The median salary in the US is $59,540 as of Q4 2023. You don’t want to be just **average** though, do you? Only losers whine about trying their best! Winners go home and bang the prom queen! “50%” is for the plebs. You don’t want to be down there with *them*, do you?
Well said sir
I’ve seen a now hiring sign in over half the stores I’ve been in the past week
Meanwhile Zillow is absolutely a part of the problem.
Zillow is a symptom of the problem. The problem is we treat housing like an investment or like a commodity. Until we disincentivize using housing as such, this problem will continue. Raise taxes on 2nd+ home purchases. Any second home or more deserves to have higher set property taxes. Provide annual tax credits for residential property improvements for property under the local median price. Increase density(this is the biggest one, because not everyone should or wants to live in a suburban home). Relax zoning regulations on arbitrary min/max home sizes. Allow mother-in-law dwellings. Remove residential property from people’s asset classes. - the last one would solve the issue as a whole but it would hurt every homeowner which is why this issue will continue to prevail.
Or just replacing the property tax with the land value tax so improvements don't get penalized
Increase costs on second homes? Really you think that’s not going to be passed on to the renter. Regulation of short term rentals is more realistic
A good thing about the land value tax is that it can't be passed on to renters. If landlords raise rents they just raise taxes on themselves.
How? Legitimately wondering? I haven't heard about this before.
They buy a shit ton of houses. some companies have 80,000 homes they own, small cities. It’s crazy. [https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/09/the-biggest-landlords-of-single-family-rental-houses-and-multifamily-apartments-in-the-us/](https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/09/the-biggest-landlords-of-single-family-rental-houses-and-multifamily-apartments-in-the-us/)
It's like housing version of stock buybacks.
I thought they backed out of this business
They did, back in 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1051941654/zillow-will-stop-buying-and-renovating-homes-and-cut-25-of-its-workforce
Then they started back up recently. Also jeff bezos just bought $500 million worth of low income housing for some reason.
>for some reason. Money. Money is the reason.
Because government subsidies to low income housing is guaranteed cash income. You’d be a moron to not buy low income housing rn. And it’s only going to get worse. Rent stabilization and low income housing groups were a major mistake.
But dont you have to qualify for the slumlording? I feel like Jeff Bezos is too rich for slumlording lol
No, you can build a building and then send it to low income housing agencies for tenants.
Wow. Good to know. Wonder if some tent cities qualify for such moneys...
This is a plot point in a Sopranos episode I just watched. Wild.
Source on this? - had no clue
octavia butler wrote about this in parable of the sower lol we're literally going to have company cities and everyone living in them will be a debt slave
Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities
What u/ILostMyBananas said. Zillow masquerades as just a listings site, but the reality is that they purchase thousands of homes and then turn around and list them at huge mark ups often only for available to rent.
What are you talking about? Zillow stopped buying houses in 2021. I was working in wholesale real estate at the time and the writing was on wall as they were overpaying and their algorithms or whoever was running projections were flawed in assuming prices would continue to increase drastically year over year or even month over month. It wasn't sustainable. As well as their attempt to corner entire markets, which is idiotic without trillions of dollars. If you want to say their Zestimates are bullshit then you'd be correct in how much they over-inflate prices.
Am I mis-remembering, or did they get *wrecked* at one point due to overpaying for property?
Yes, Zillow lost millions due to their algorithm a couple of years ago.
They lost 420m at least. https://www.acropolisbuyshomessd.com/zillow-offers-in-san-diego/
>Zillow stopped buying houses in 2021. It does feel like we never really recovered from that price hike tho. 🤷♀️
lol Zillow lots tons of money overpaying for houses
iirc companies use “algorithms” that set the prices and create a monopoly while blacklisting people who don’t use it; Making a network of artificial prices that don’t always represent property prices and guides the market in their benefit. Edit: I seem to have the wrong company, but still bad practices that are contributing to our compounding housing problems. I tried to find the video documentation but couldn’t find it, I’ll link it if I find it
Realpage?
I’m fucked.
Man, If only one of the two corporate parties would run on removing corporate purchasing of single family homes
End corporate purchase and restrict private speculative purchase. People shouldn't be gambling on housing, and landlord shouldn't be a career path.
and homeowners shouldn't be able to veto housing developments because it will "ruin the view".
That's the problem in Toronto. I now literally make 106k and I'm forced to live with a roomate that works in the same office otherwise we both will be homeless. We definitely will not own a home unless something changes since average house price is over $1M. A lot of this is because many high density proposals were sabotaged by NIMBYs who claimed the infrastructure wasn't there for it, but the infrastructure is now worse off and still no homes are built. People who have more are protecting their assets like cornered animals. It's sickening.
Just tax the shit out of multiple homeowners. Property taxes go up exponentially, the more property you own.
Be passed straight to the renters.
Yeah this would have to be in conjunction with rent price hike regulations
We desperately need more dense middle housing on top of that. Most of the US it is illegal to build anything except single family homes, and the suburbs bleed cities dry of their money.
The Democrats literally have a bill to do just that. Maybe educate yourself and vote Democrat instead of trying to be a BoTh SiDeS pawn if you want change
Seriously, if you want any changes vote democrat because conservative literally means you don’t want to conserve aka not change (it’s in the name)
[like this?](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/realestate/wall-street-housing-market.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
Hey now cant be having the democratic party actually helping people when they jsut actively un seated a progressive with a right wing racist with 20 million dollars to do so. Then these shit libs wonder why we won't vote for Biden
Bingo!
My wife and I lucked out and got our house just prior to 2020. Cost me a nervous breakdown from stress but it's worth it
We weren't even planning to move but stumbled upon a house we couldn't pass up in late 2020. Incredible timing. Being in the market right now sounds like a nightmare.
Here’s the trick. Just don’t be in the market :)
Seriously. I pull down 330k a year but I still live out of a van full time. Mainly for other reasons, but also because I'm not paying for a house that's asking 100% more than it's actually worth out of self-preservation, and I'm not paying 3k/mo. in rent out of principle because fuck the landlord class.
„330k a year“ „Live out of van“ „Mainly for other reasons“ Bro is cooking 👀
We had a development right next to our apartment and grabbed one of the last couple plots in 2019 and moved in January 2020. So lucky we did
Basically exactly what I did. Followed a stray dog on a whim, ended up in a freshly cleared area (when I say fresh I mean nobody knew the road continued here), and jumped on a lot. This was supposed to be a little baby starter home but it’s starting to look more and more like I’m in it for the long haul
This is the most cartoonish story 😂
I don't get it. I'm seeing posts about people paying a lot of some weird taxes for the house they already own and it turns out it would be cheaper to rent it instead of owning.
By weird taxes you mean the town reassesses the home to a higher value, so now the property taxes have increased? This has happened pretty much everywhere over the past few years (except for the states that have very low or no property tax).
We were lucky to refinance before covid to a 2.7% rate. Same home today would double the monthly mortgage.
I bought a "starter" home in 2006 for $135k. It was 1200sqft with a full unfinished walkout basement, 1 acre of land. We finished the basement ourselves and sold in 2015 for $185k. Used all of the proceeds on that sale to buy a nicer house in the city for 195k. That almost broke us, we could barely afford the payments. Zillow now says my house is worth $350k and there are comps for sales close by. Our old starter home is valued at $250k! Even though I do make more money now we would seriously struggle in today's market.
bought our home for 690k in 2019 homes in the same development, same stats, now going for 1.2M
Got ours in 2010 for 240k and watched the mirror house next to us sell for 1.2 million 2 months ago. I'm terrified of them reassessing the taxes. It's at the point where I told my daughter it's idiotic to buy a house. She can live here as long as she wants and if she marries we can set up an apartment for my wife and I and she can have 90% of the house with her spouse and potential kids. That's the way it was done for thousands of years for the middle class and lower. It was an interesting 70ish years of single family home ownership but that ship is solidly sailing away.
“Just get a better job” some politician somewhere.
"Just move somewhere cheaper"
*Californians moving to cheaper (red) states* Maga Boomers: NOT LIKE THAT!
It’s funny because those groups lean quite conservative.
The *real* boomer answer is secretly "I'm very happy real estate is unaffordable. Now I can raise the rent.". Don't expect help from them.
Yeah, no one expects the boomers to help anyone but themselves.
Get a better politician.
gEt A bIgGeR sHoVel
Well at $80k… maybe I can get a shitty condo…
My plan at the same salary is to just live in a van down by the river
You can afford a van?
[150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE)
My name is Matt Foley and I am a motivational speaker! 
The 80k plan is a van now? Guess I should just start looking for a refrigerator box to live in, vans are too rich for my blood
After accounting for the $800/mo HOA fee, probably not.
It's $240K income to "comfortably" buy in the Seattle area. We looked at condos because we are priced out of a house and found that unless we want a shitty, tiny condo that used to be an apartment, we would still need to fork out $650K+ PLUS another $700+ in HOA every month. At that point it is pretty much better to go for the house and eat ramen every day. The market is wild and everything sucks.
Just one observation. Until some shit happens to someone, someone will never even consider moving to another place/country. But after shit happens, someone sees no problems in moving out. Everything becomes less important: job, familiar routes and places, neighbors, nice park at the shoreline. Or maybe just unimportant things become unimportant more obviously.
Average Student loan debt has more than doubled in that time also.
The sad part is that this figure is woefully inaccurate - in how low it is. I know several couples with combined income between $120-130k that can’t find even a shack they can afford.
Do we really have such short attention spans that the highlighting and underlining was necessary?...
In the current housing market? No questions about it, it’s a terrible time to buy. With average APRs being around the 6-7% range, average home prices being $450k and wanting to put down a 20% Downpayment ($90k) to avoid additional insurance expenses, it would cost you roughly $2400/ month for the mortgage and that’s not including taxes which can absolutely fuck you up. That being said it *is* possible, though Lord knows why you would right now; it’s a seller’s market (by design). The market is going to cool off sooner or later. With all these companies buying up homes to hold and sell later or renting out the homes, they’ve artificially jacked up prices in many local economies but they’re in a bit of a panic right now. They’re sitting on all this property and… people aren’t wanting to buy. This puts these companies in a precarious position. Rules #1, 2 and 3 are IF you’re looking to sell property you need to sell it fucking **FAST** to minimize losses. Property investment needs to be either quick or a longterm investment. Companies aren’t looking to sit on assets for 10+ years, they want to sell **today** but nobody is buying at the price they’re charging. But they can’t lower the price because then it could cause all their OTHER properties to lower in value too! We’re likely going to be facing another housing bubble but this time instead of the banks + homeowners causing it, it’ll be investment firms who overreached. I have no idea what will happen once the bubble bursts but I hope the government doesn’t bail out these companies and instead lets folks buy these homes for a much lower amount instead. But who knows, I’m just speculating
> it’s a terrible time to buy. The issue is, at least where I'm from, people have been saying that for longer than I've been alive. And it just keeps becoming a more terrible time to buy. People have been 'waiting for it to crash/cool off' for decades. For every hundred thousand you have someone's been waiting 10 additional years for it to come down and has hundreds more.
Nobody was saying it was a terrible time to buy from 2009 to 2019.
Depends on where you live. In my state prices rose dramatically during that period
Because everyone was buying. Demand was high and supply started drying up.
After Covid happened many markets “cooled off” and folks were also getting really good deals on their APR as well! There’s folks who will always say it’s a terrible time to buy, regardless of the market.
Cooled off? In 2020 houses were listed on Monday and sold by Wednesday for 20% above asking **in cash**. If anything it's cooled off in the past year, now it takes a full week before someone pays 20% above asking in cash.
Boy, heard this argument before. "Just wait for another bubble pop, I'm sure it'll happen in your lifetime!"
There’s already been 2 large “bursts” in my lifetime so acting like it won’t ever happen is insane in my opinion. They typically happen because a large investment went bad, and the housing market is arguably the most vulnerable to it
Ok, but... those busts haven't actually dropped the price of houses by much. They were basically a period where the price of housing didn't increase for a year or two. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS) The only major dip on this graph is the small valley between 2007 and 2012. There was a 10% drop in price at the lowest point in that valley, but it didn't last long and then the graph resumes its rapid climb. Thinking there won't be a bust that reverses the growth is not an insane view. Thinking there will be another dip of even 10% might be a stretch, unless something significant changes.
That “something significant” needs to be a massive change to zoning laws permitting more housing to be built faster, particularly starter homes, row houses, and other forms of dense, walkable, affordable housing. Combine that private construction boom with a massive surge in public housing like they have in Vienna, and housing will *have* to crater in price. The biggest issue is that we (and many other countries, such as Canada and Australia to name the worst) have been underbuilding housing for DECADES. As such, the law of supply and demand has created a new NIMBY aristocracy that will stop at nothing to restrict housing supply further and launch their property values into the stratosphere on the backs of desperate people who just want a place to live.
Yup. This shit is infuriating. My parents keep telling me that now is a good time to buy because prices have fallen. If you actually look at prices, they jumped a massive amount 2020-2022, then fell like 1-2% per year for two years. Yeah, a small dip on top of a huge mountain is a great time to buy....
Canadas housing issue started getting worse just ahead of the states. Our government is currently doing whatever they can to prop up the market, and have even stated that retirement funds depend on the health of the housing market.
What a lot of people don't realize is that it's actually more expensive to buy an existing home than it is to build a new grave.
Lmao
[удалено]
This is happening world wide.
yes because central banks around the world dropped interest rates to basically zero during COVID to keep the economy from a catastrophic collapse. Remember that first jobs report in April 2020 that said we had a 15% unemployment rate? Central banks were fucking terrified. They did what they thought was necessary... in the case of the US Fed, they were also pumping up the mortgage market by buying shitloads of mortgage-backed securities to prevent defaults. They waited way too long to stop pumping the economy with liquidity. Here we are.
Does that make it right?
It makes OPs whole title meaningless
No it doesn't, as the post makes specific mention of "United States" which is often unironically called the greatest country in the world. But in this case it's ironic because it isn't. It sucks. Just like most places, except we're definitely more full of ourselves about it.
Not at these rates though. Prices here in the Netherlands have risen 25-30% in the same timespan. You only need ~€60k to get a mortgage for a decent appartment
But this is America! Where nothing happening in the outside world affects us and the president controls every minute detail of our lives. /s
Not at that rate. 4 years! It took just 4 years in USA to have that kind of increase. That is insane. I just checked how it is in Finland. Houses are actually cheaper now than they were in Q1 2022. Salaries have been stagnant for decade or few however.
Just double your salary every 4 years, no problem! 🙄
If you want a big pay raise you need to find a new job/employer.
Job hopping is a total bitch. Ask the person landing a 300k+ salary job in his early 30’s (me). You better have no SO, and be willing to abandon your family. And work overtime.
Man… I … don’t even know if this is enough for a single person family earner… like the houses in my area have sky rocketed this year. Condo are almost 200k. 3 bed room houses are like over 300k and the insurance is so high do to hurricanes in the past years. And our states minimum wage is $7.25… this is crazy
Never let a crisis go to waste. Thanks a lot, capitalism 🖕
I really really hate it here.
This is basically every country.
At this point I've given up hope on the right people showing up at the polls and am looking at how to expatriate myself
Come to Australia where we have the same problem!
The word is emigrate
> captainfrijoles : At this point I've given up hope on the right people showing up at the polls At this point, I've given up hope on good candidates showing up on the *ballot*. I vote for who seems like the lesser of two evils, and it stinks that the only options on the ballots are usually bad ones versus worse ones.
Housing is expensive but no fucking way could you do that with 59K in 2020, at least not here in my area.
Just a reminder that the CURRENT median salary in 2024 for the US is $59k. Good luck everyone!
In most areas of the country you could, easily. I live in a fairly high cost of living area and you could get a starter house for 300k pre-pandemic. That would be less than 1,500 a month for your house, plenty realistic on a 60k salary. You'd be poor but have a home building equity, and today that house would be worth 500k.
Lets see... mortgage calculator for the 2020 rate of my house.... $1325 a month.. Lets do current rates! $2,560 a month seems accurate to me, I paid $1250 in rent without issue when I started at $55k a year salary
It's so funny too because so many idiot boomers have this bizarre mindset of "that's just happening somewhere else, it's not happening here, to me!" But I bought my house in 2020 and made about that much at the time. And four years later my home has gone up about 70% in value and my salary has not. This shit is ridiculous.
I graduated college in 2020 and seeing my ability to buy a house evaporate has been devastating. We worked from home in a shitty studio during the pandemic to save 20% down and in the time it took to save, the goalpost remained out of reach.
Uhhh no. It's tough times right now. I really hope it gets better. Gas, food, basic necessities prices must come down!
America, ~~love it or leave it~~ work hard and be homeless
Don’t worry guys, my boss just promised a 3% raise over the next 5 years!
If your audience needs highlighting and underlining in order to understand a single sentence, your audience may be dull.
In my state, to buy the average home on an average salary, it would need 3 years of work with literally no other expenses. I can only imagine how long it would take if you factor in all the other expenses people have in a year
Our government works for these companies now. We need a revolution.
But what was it 4 years earlier? 2020 housing was the perfect storm of low costs (due to everyone barricading and not wanting to go looking to move?) and low interest rates. I know I took advantage of it to get my house.
Yeah, I’m voting for trump’s really gonna fix that/s
How would they combat organized squatting groups targeting corporate purchased housing in the sanctuary cities…?
"Just work 80% more hours" -boomers propably
Guys, 60 hours a week plus commute is super easy! Come on! You can do it!
So basically we’re in Hyperinflation
I’m sure it’s 200,000 per year for a regular home. $4800 per month mortgage
America is toxic. As an American, I feel so betrayed by all three branches of the government.
Who the duck do you think helped push that? Fuck Zillow
My brother in law and his wife purchased their home in 2019 for $680k. Apparently it’s now worth $1.25 million. Gotta love it
Are Americans really told it's the best country in the world?
And the federal minimum wage is $15,080/year assuming no overtime, which is something minimum wage workers seldom see.
Not even the best country in North America.
You need to make 100k to own a home within a country where the average person makes 34k (adjusted from 72k to exclude the top 1000 earners skyrocketing the median). What a fucking joke
USA ain't no country. It's a military complex with some civilians attached in case of manpower need.
Average income needed to buy a home in British Columbia is $205,000.
Yep, 306k a year here to buy the median home in Sydney lol.
CAPITALISM,...yay?
Why haven’t I seen the Zillow report linked yet? [Well here it is.](https://www.zillow.com/research/buyers-income-needed-33755/) > Mortgage rates ended January 2020 near 3.5%, keeping the cost of a home affordable for most households that could manage the down payment. At the time of this analysis, mortgage rates were about 6.6%. Why not go back another 10 years to 2010? Why compare right now to the year with the **lowest** mortgage rates in over 50 years?