I honestly don’t even know why this upsets me so much. I am 50 and all set. I don’t have children and barely any debt. I never considered myself particularly patriotic but somehow this whole thing gets under my skin. I guess it sours my achievements and fruits of decades of struggle (it took three generations of planning and hustle to get us out of poverty). It’s like being a kid having a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese by yourself while all your friends are locked outside and you can see them through the glass windows.
We live in the most effectively propagandized society ever created. It hasn’t been until more recently that it’s started to slip. A lot of folks still believe in the old lies and believe that everything would work if we just got rid of the immigrants, Jews, and corrupt politicians. Still I think more people are waking up to the reality that this system is broken not the people in it.
And that’s because they are stupid. They are not educated becasause the education they received was garbage. All by design from your “trickle down” bringing republikkkans. Working as planned.
My parents are in their 80’s and working for DoorDash. They are lucky they at least paid off their home, because they didn’t save enough and this country is sucking every penny it can get from them.
I bought a condo that I love, have almost all my debt paid off, and am saving for what I hope will be an early retirement. It breaks my heart to see people struggling everywhere, and if I had Elon Musk money, I wouldn’t be blowing it on a vanity space program.
I’m so glad my Dad, also in his 80s, programs COBOL. My parents have owned their home since 86, but I’m sure that without the random COBOL job they’d have to do door dash or something as well.
It gets under my skin because the west was on the right trajectory; improving wealth equality, quality of life, work life balance, etc — Then Capitalists killed all those gains using Conservatism, Neoliberalism, and a bastardised version of Libertarianism — just to enrich a tiny percentage the human population and return the rest of humanity to feudalism.
Why should they own all the gains from humanities collective efforts, when all of us have a rightful claim to a share of those gains?
Yup, we could be creating an amazing life for more people - and damaging the environment less while we are at it; but instead "we" keep doubling down in the other direction
A lot of the west is still on the right trajectory. It’s the US that is not.
There are a lot of developed countries, especially in Europe, where the “American Dream” is much easier to attain than in America. But, more often than not, they don’t even want that dream. For good reason.
In the early 1900s we had huge fights for labor. Strikes yes, but also some literal armed fights.
We won a lot. They conceded a lot.
But they’ve eroded those wins, little by little, for a century or so.
This is what will ALWAYS happen when you live in a system explicitly designed to extract profit from workers and reward greed. It cannot be reformed. It cannot be controlled. It will always slide backwards into this. We need a different system altogether.
While there are a lot of factors, you really cannot understate the size of the homes being built in the US. We are building homes nearly 3x the size (despite cost per square foot only going up slightly), and pretending it has no effect on housing costs. It’s actually pretty insane.
Both apartments and houses have their merit, both can exist as a viable shelter that fulfills people’s needs. We don’t need to argue over which things corporations and greed took from us is better.
TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
Maybe in the middle of nowhere America. Meanwhile my wife and I make well above that in Los Angeles and we can’t afford the monthly on a two bedroom house in a sketchy neighborhood.
I’m sorry, you think people that can’t afford a basic living situation in California are able to up and move their entire lives that easily? Do you have any idea how much that costs?
If you already live in a place that is difficult for you to afford, how are you supposed to be able to afford moving to a different state? You’re having trouble paying rent/mortgage, but you’re still able to save a few grand to move your whole life across state lines? What about changes in your income due to the change of state?
There are so many more factors than “you make x, this place costs y, so move dipshit.”
Yeah, I get it…I know it doesn’t come through a simple text question, but I wasn’t born yesterday 😉
I wasn’t really asking from the standpoint of every single person’s circumstances from the well off to the impoverished. It was more of what would you do if there was choice.
I know people who were behind on rent, scraped enough gas money to just drive ina direction and found themselves somewhere they could make under the table money to get started in another place.
That’s a hard and scary thing to do. If you have a family, almost impossible unless you’re on the edge.
Being born there, living your entire life there, your whole family and all your friends are there, you went to high school and college there so it’s easier to transfer to a CSU for grad school, and cheaper because you won’t have to pay non-resident fees, etc etc. The same reason people don’t move from other places. Besides, it takes a lot of savings to move, especially out of state, especially when you have to keep going back and forth to look at places. There’s also just not wanting to move. I am really not ok with being forced out of my home and away from my family because of bullshit like this.
And yes the weather really is that good - in Southern California.
The US government would rather disabled people just not exist. From their perspective, nobody on disability creates shareholder value, therefore you are subhuman. And non-disabled humans to them are cattle.
i dont mean to pry, but i have been trying to work out how i can do this for myself so id be interested how you were able to do it.
im not asking for your life story, and obviously share what youre comfortable with online, but some helpful info would be your salary range, location and cost of home, and down payment (even as just a percentage of the total home cost).
other useful contextual information would be how long it took you to save up for the down payment, whether you did so while paying rent, if you had any other assitance with the down payment (personal loan, gift from family, borrowed against your 401k, etc), state of the home (move-in ready/fixer upper/built yourself), whether you used the loan to acquire furniture, etc.
sorry if thats asking too much but id like to use you as a data point, even if just for myself, and i do need a bit of data to do that.
Sorry, I’m not talking about this any more. Lemmy is too fucking toxic to anyone who goes against the hive mind. My comment was made in an effort to bring hope to people who read this, that there ways to make it work. But I’m done with this community honestly
i replied to your comment because it did give me a bit of hope that it was probable for someone without a six figure salary. i was just looking for some context to see what kind of sacrifices to my lifestyle and living situation i might have to make to achieve that. if it came off as passive or judgmental i am sorry. that was not my intention. i am glad you tried to give others hope that it can be done, but without a clear path to a goal, however conditional, it doesnt end up helping very much.
the problem is that anything I say will be downvoted to oblivion because it disagrees with the Lemmy hivemind. So why should I contribute to an echo chamber? I do want to give hope though.
I work in IT and don’t make that much money. I saved up for 10 years, enough to have $10k for a house down payment, found a house for $250k and my mortgage is about $1400 a month. I don’t know what a superfund site is and I don’t have anything special otherwise. Just work hard,budget, and save up. It’s doable with less thna $50k a year if you can find the right place
i do understand your perspective. i have avoided social media for the last 15 years, and had only interacted on reddit very rarely before moving to lemmy, so it may be that i am less disillusioned, but it seems to me that the better the information, the less negative discourse seems to surround it. the article in the post will definitely incite a lot of negative feelings here, since it seems to confirm a lot of the beliefs of those who feel disenfranchised by the state of the world. so yea, the deck seems pretty well stacked against hope, at least on this thread.
anyway, i appreciate you getting back to me. its nice to hear some solid figures, and that does definitely give me some hope. $10k is achievable, and a 4% down payment is probably the most reassuring figure here, as a lot of the advice i hear is closer to 8-10% which make it just that much further out of reach as id have to save up twice as much or purchase a home worth half as much which is impossible in my current market.
if you could indulge me just a bit further, how far away from a metropolitan area are you? my wife has always grown up in cities and while she does like to visit more rural areas she isnt too keen on relying entirely on a car to get around, or having to own two cars to get by, but like i said before, im curious about any sacrifices wed have to make for that sort of lifestyle so, you know, if thats how it has to be then thats how it has to be.
Congrats. Do you live in Central Florida (Orlando area)? How much student loan debt do you carry? The article was fairly specific about that $125k. I’m pretty sure you can buy a home and live well within your means with much less if you lived in Gray, Louisiana.
One thing that the author is not taking into consideration is the post-pandemic ability to “work from home”. Gray, Louisiana is 45 minutes away from New Orleans and five minutes away from Houma. You can buy a 4Bd/3Ba 2100sqft brick house there for $165k. Crimenis relatively low and there is a university close by. You get the full suburban treatment for cheap…but you have to have a skill set that allows for remote work.
This happened because people were lulled into voting for the very people who gave their fair share of corporate profits to the rich. Looking at you, Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan.
the federal government will loan you the money for the house at below market rates, and if their rate is still too expensive, they can give you a deferment.
Lots of sellers will prefer cash or regular loans so your application is very likely to be last in line. Plus the applications are much, much more complicated and mortgage applications are already a bitch. But then it’s usually a once in a lifetime experience and may be the only option for a lot of people do this is more of a heads up than an attempt to discourage anyone from applying.
This. The inspection and repair criteria are higher than for private lending. We sold our house to someone using this program and had to fix stuff that we didn’t need fixed when we bought the house. It wasn’t a huge deal but it did add a week to the process to get it fixed and reinspected.
Yeah, sellers (flippers really) are asking 70-80k over the value of the house, and they want no-inspection, as is, and you need to bring cash to the closing to cover appraisal gap, which is usually in the 60-100k range.
We need to start taxing unoccupied single-family home at their list price. There is no incentive to sell at a reasonable price.
Yeah, sellers (flippers really) are asking 70-80k over the value of the house, and they want no-inspection, as is, and you need to bring cash to the closing to cover appraisal gap, which is usually in the 60-100k range.
I haven’t been in the market for nearly a decade. This seems pants-on-head crazy to me.
All I can hope for is that when the market inevitably collapses again (let’s face it, this is not sustainable) all these assholes hit rock bottom and the government FINES them instead of bailing them out.
Isn’t what’s been happening that corporations buy them for cash they have on hand and now they’re all rentals? It’d have to crash pretty hard to push those guys out I think. [pure speculation by me]
i live in a hot market. i got one. it was a slog, but it happened.
edit: we were approved in november. we put in multiple offers and had to periodically get re-approved by the usda, but we had an offer accepted mid march and closed in april.
for a brief period, we kept the “apartment in the city” for a month and moved one sub-compact car worth of belongings across town every night. not really relevant, but i’m going to remember fondly the brief time that we kept an apartment in the city, because that shit is never gonna happen again for poor schlubs like us.
“applicants must be without decent, safe, and sanitary housing” is that a hard stop or is there some flexibility on that condition? im not trying to pry into your previous situation, but that makes it sound a bit more dire than the average renter.
i had a lease on an apartment when the process started.
edit: honestly if the requirement were that you were homeless or next to it,i don’t think anyone would ever apply for this program. the first application is daunting, and then there is the matter of actually shopping for a house.
I can technically afford my house and acre on my wife and mys income
Doesn’t mean I’m not currently planning and setting up my network of legit customers of shitake and no other mushrooms to help make sure I can survive, no sir
transportation costs, suppliers, loss prevention is not 100%, insurances, food, lower customer base due to inflation/ cheaper lower quality alternatives (goes hand in hand), office supplies/ services, etcetera
inflation has hit everyone even in the shady areas
No, it really was true for a long time (as long as you weren’t a minority). Wealth disparity has skyrocketed in the last few decades. It’s why boomers can’t grasp that people just can’t afford to live–in their day, anyone who couldn’t afford to live was just plain lazy*.
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