Some folks are able to buy a home but choose to rent because they can also afford a landlord that’ll actually do the job a landlord is hypothetically there to do and fix the place up if there’s an issue
It’s law in Canada too, but the Landlord Tenant board is so backed up with complaints that you’ll have to wait ages for a response to anything but emergencies
The u.s. mostly only uses civil enforcement. If your landlord isn't upholding their end of the contract then the contract is void and you can move somewhere else. There's rarely any mechanism to make them do anything.
In theory American renters are protected by the contract they sign with their landlord, with some basic protections guaranteed by law.
In practice,
landlords have essentially no competition, since they own many properties in an area, meaning that contract terms rarely differ in any way that matters;
landlords don’t compete meaningfully with home ownership (see OP);
alleging breach of contract requires an expensive court case against a landlord who has more money than you and can hire a better lawyer;
those basic legal protections are rarely enforced, and when they are it’s in civil court, not criminal court, meaning that they can be ordered to comply, but any penalty is financial (and only a pittance goes to the claimant), considered by many landlords to be the cost of doing business and an acceptable loss.
Yeah they’re all parasites unless I’m demanding they fix something then I need them and life sucks unless they do a bunch of work.
People love to trash landlords for not working 24/7 the same way they trash teachers for having summers off, but when it rains it pours for landlords and problems always come at the worst time.
There are good landlords and there are bad landlords. Just like tenants.
Even if a particular landlord is a decent person otherwise, landlording is wrong. It is the hoarding of essential resources to for the purposes of being released for profit. If landlording was restricted to renting vacation houses (in appropriate areas) or something it might be OK.
The advantages of a rental (not worrying directly about maintenance, just paying someone to take care of it) can be had with a property management company.
Being a nonprofit landlord is also ok, imo. If you’re just charging enough to pay the mortgage, taxes, insurance, upkeep, etc. then you’re using your equity or credit score to help another person have a place to live when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to qualify for a loan. If I’m ever in a position to be a landlord, I’ll probably do it that way; and by the time you pay the equivalent of the cost of the home in rent if you want to own the place, I’ll sign it over to you. Kind of a rent-to-own thing.
The difference here is teachers provide a valuable service, and landlords do not. I don’t care how good the good ones are, their entire job is “had enough money some years ago to buy a building, and now lives off other people’s income”.
In all my years renting from individuals to big property management companies, good and bad alike, never was it easy to get things fixed which is apparently the only advantage to renting. Days/weeks/months go by, all the while I’m dumping money into their pockets for the privilege.
At least when owning, the money I have to spend on my mortgage and repairs is going toward the value of my house, and not the ethereal void that is a landlord.
Why is it a bad idea? Because it’s basically subsidizing landlords. Instead of paying for public infrastructure you’d be helping out landlords to increase the rent, since you know, you have more “disposable” income
I own a home with a mortgage. I’d sell my house to an llc, and rent to myself. The. I’d be able to deduct the profit of the llc from the expenses (the mortgage and upkeep of the home), and then deduct the rent I’m effectively paying to myself from my income.
I mean I’d love for this to happen, but if every home in the country did this, no one would pay taxes, and communities would be underfunded. Goodbye water treatment, police, firemen, teachers. Probably not great for society as a whole.
Home owners get to write off interest, so us renters should get something.
The real bitch is that I could totally afford a mortgage. I’ve lived in the same place for 11 years without missing a payment on my rent, but because it’s rent it doesn’t count towards my credit score, so fuck me right?
Homeowners get to write off interest but rarely ever do. You need to exceed the standardized deduction in order for an itemized deduction to save you more money. So unless you are paying more than 20k/year in interest you are not writing anything off and are in the same boat as a non homeowner.
Lots of people exceed the standard deduction. It’s not just home interest that can be written off taxes, and the home interest plus other eligible expenses often exceeds it.
My side job has me working on contracts so I write off enough business expenses to exceed the standard deduction every year. Getting to write off a portion of my rent would be huge.
Actually I think they went and did the math and found that the average mortgage on a house is actually less expensive than rent nowadays. To the point where Banks turning people down because they can’t afford their rent is a complete non sequitur, they still do it, it just doesn’t make any sense that they do it. You know besides greed and keeping the peasants in their place
That’s how landlords operate. They don’t buy the properties cash. They get loans and have the renters pay the loans back for them, plus some more for profits. All they do is make housing more expensive.
I know the game is rigged but shit, and I thought people who couldn’t get the bank to understand that they can afford to pay $500 a month for a mortgage, but only if they can stop paying $3,000 a month for rent had it bad.
Someone told me recently that one should only spend max. 1/3 on housing. After showing them the price for housing and the average salary, they connected the dots. But they didn’t seem to realize the Elephant in the room. I wonder when society is ready for the elephant.
I personally like how it is from the boomer generation that the 1/3 rule comes from as well. Keep in mind that is 1/3 for ALL housing expenses (water, heat, electricity,insurance, etc.), The US median is $1085 a week. This means all in a median Joe/Joette should find a place for under $1500 ALL IN in order to meet this rule.
Always remember that paying rent is a never ending cost while pay mortgage is limited. If you rent, you rent when you are retired. If you can buy, you don’t pay for your house anymore when you are retired. In other words, not buying a house/Appartment means that you will have less money in your retirement… Up to 2/3 of your current salary.
I know you are joking, but there is actually a YouTube series that is intended for landlords that teaches them how to milk tenants.
One of their videos literally suggests asking for tips alongside the rent, and threatening to include gratuities in all future versions of the lease, which is downright illegal but it’s not like people who rent can afford lawyers
Some think “younger people” shun the responsibility property brings with it. And obviously that we spend our money on traveling, Netflix and expensive gadgets instead.
Obligatory douchebag wealthy boomer remark about “avocado toast” and the outrage over man buns. They’re out of touch and their perspective of having afforded a house means they cannot understand a world in which they ruined opportunity for future generations.
This, I actually went to a program called Step Up that tried to help people out of work find employment in town, the program did not last long and I stopped seeing adverts for it very shortly after I graduated the program.
As I thought they were going to set me up with resources, or maybe there were some businesses in the area that worked with the program and directly hired from them, but no, they were just a bunch of Boomers from the big cities offering their practical advice and where to get yokels like me back to work.
Basically none of their advice was practical, and they kept getting the phone numbers and URLs we were supposed to call or click on in order to go to the next class mixed up, causing me to miss a few. They actually threatened to kick me out of the program over it, until I pointed out with screen caps that they legitimately did give me wrong urls.
So what was the advice that their needlessly complicated program offered? Well they kept asking me to show up at random businesses and just ask to talk to people, and if I was unwilling to do that I could just make a bunch of cold calls. I told them that I was not comfortable doing that and if they had any other help they could give me I would take
Eventually they threatened to drop me if I wasn’t going to take their advice, so I made cold calls. To pretty much every business I was qualified to work for, because oh yeah degree inflation has been a thing since these people were in the marketplace.
And exactly what I thought was going to happen happened, a lot of really annoyed customers sales representatives told me to never call them again unless I was buying something or had a question about store operation.
These people still think it works like it does in black and white movies, were you just go into a local mechanic shop, talk about how you know what a wrench is, and shake hands with the guy who runs the place.
These people believe that it’s a wonderful life, a movie where a 20,000 a year dollar salary is more money than George Bailey can imagine, and a house worth $5,000 is just this amazingly extravagant property, is an accurate representation of the modern Marketplace.
Ever wonder why baby boomers are so stingy even when they’re rich, to the point where they’ll throw a fit upon being expected to pay average price for things? They don’t have much of a concept of change, to them spending a dollar on a candy bar is highway robbery.
They are so stuck in their ways that they are constantly baffled when a nickel can’t get them a Coke.
That analogy is really a big deal, and you would think the inflation that they lived through during the Carter and Reagan years would’ve made them as a whole, more sympathetic. We’re dealing with prohibitively expensive medical costs, and home ownership being a pipe dream, to where we try to explain to them that a $400k mortgage on a $70k wage/salary doesn’t equate to what they had available to them.
There are some who get it, but anecdotally they seem obscure and silent in comparison to those who pulled the “nOboDy wAnTS tO wOrK AnyMOre” card.
I really wish it could be highlighted how shitty people are treated when they’re trying to get employment. Between getting ghosted or some of the bullshit hiring managers have in their minds, I’m seeing that people who eventually do find a role are very well justified in just sticking to the job’s expectations, and “going above and beyond” is an uncommon practice.
Ending hustle culture is one of the best things I’ve seen over the past year.
Honestly the only time I go above and beyond is when I have a few hours left on the clock, and I need to find something to do outside of sitting down.
Going above and beyond is something that only makes sense, if your boss is a sociopath and you really need a job, or you live in 1970 whatever and getting promoted up the corporate ladder is realistic.
At this point I barely even try to save up, because I know that the outcome is going to be the same either way. I will still be thousands away from ever realistically owning my own home. So what is even the point of trying to save beyond what I need for rent bills and a little bit for the occasional emergency? There isn’t, the only reason I stop buying junk food just because I couldn’t afford it anymore with inflation, and I stop by and games on Steam because I basically own every game on Steam. There is nothing for me to spend money on. I can’t make down payments on a house because the money I have to work with is nowhere near what they would even entertain as such a Down payment. If there are four digits in my bank account at the end of the month, I consider that a fucking miracle. And this is even after I stop spending because there’s nothing to spend on. I feel like the richest poor person in the goddamn world
This, you have to remember this is the same generation that thought we were being antisocial by staring at our phones all day. Ignoring the fact that we are actually talking to people all across the world while we do so, and that we were not in fact just staring blindly at a screen.
In my case I really am antisocial. I only ever message my family and the one guy I used to hang out with would phone me and talk for hours mostly by himself.
The obvious answer is that she’s wrong. By the numbers Millenialls born in 1990 have a slightly higher rate of home ownership (43%) than GenXs born in 1970 (41%). Most of GenZ simply isn’t old enough to purchase a home. If we define them as being born 1997 to 2012 then the very oldest of them are 27 with the youngest still being in Middle School! The vast majority of GenZ is somewhere in the middle around 18-24 years old. They either about to graduate High School or College but either way they’re not at home buying age yet.
A boomer I know blames young people being in house debt because “they all buy houses with quarts and granite counters, hardwood floors and heated tile floor bathrooms. They skip the starter homes and go right to the forever homes”.
He doesn’t consider the fact that no one is building starter homes anymore. Everything has heated tile floors, granite counters and hardwood floors because the contractors are demolishing all the older “starter” homes to build luxury houses and 55+ only condos to sell to boomers who throw all their money at it. There’s no profit in building starter homes anymore.
At least in our area, most of the starter homes were purchased and then completely redone internally to fancy up and then flipped. All of the homes went up about $100,000 at minimum because of people trying to profit off the housing market.
My first house, I bought in 2009 (so right during the crash). We offered full asking price, only to be told there was 3 higher cash offers, which I couldn’t compete with as a mortgage (FHA) offer. The seller made living in the house for 1 year a condition of sale, and all the higher offers disappeared. Guarantee those were just flippers looking to make a profit, rather than homebuyers.
Only problem, is that house flippers are also the only ones you can rehab old POS falling down shacks I to a saleable and occupiable house. So many houses near where I live have been rehabbed from a teardown into a usable house.
Maybe exempt if the purchase price was a certain amount below the average for the market.
Like if the price per sq. ft / acre of the house was 75% of market average when purchased it’s exempt, that way the houses that really need to be repaired and fixed with get the attention they need to keep them in the market.
Then people can’t just buy a house, slap a coat of paint on it and some new counters then sell for $100k over the purchased price 6 months later.
Ehhh, I disagree with this a bit. People are still putting LVP instead of hardwood in new builds, with granite instead of quartz countertops, and no fancy heated floors, and the cheapest carpet they can find at Home Depot. I feel like most new builds I see going up are more on the “starter home” side of things, but maybe it’s an area specific thing.
The real problem though, is even these cheaper options still end up being unaffordable.
Ha, jokes on them. I moved to the countryside, and purchased a former starter home.
The joke on me is that it was 3/4 of a million dollars. I would have not been able to buy it at all if I didn’t have the support of my SO, who works full time like me, and my brother AND his wife, who all had full time jobs at the time of purchase…
Six bedrooms, two bathrooms, nearly 2800 sq ft. At least 15 minutes from anywhere, and at least 30 minutes from mid sized cities, and an hour and a half from the nearest major metro area. It’s quiet here… Like, weirdly quiet.
Around me all the 55+ condos are dirt cheap and price controlled, while the regular condos and sfh are 2-3x price. So, when the boomers want to downsize they can just sell their that the vigorously fought to keep zoned without density to a millennial for a huge profit and then buy a cheap condo (conveniently dense and conveniently 55+) and live off the rest of the proceeds. It’s as if the boomers get to use their kids future earnings as a piggy bank for their retirement. It’s the same story with offloading the climate change impacts of their gluttonous lifestyle to their kids as well. They really did pull up the ladder.
I was fortunate enough to buy a house this year and the options seemed to be:
Under $250K: needs $100k of work
$250k to $350k: houses with less sq ft than my apartment that are >80 yrs old
$350k to $400k: okay house/location, probably with one glaring issue. If you’re lucky you’ll find one of those ‘starter homes’ will be here
over $400k: acceptable
over $500k: built within the last 15 years
The new starter homes seem to be townhomes, me and my wife considered buying one instead and the market for them was blistering as they were all that most people could afford that aren’t shacks/fixer-uppers… and people buying those will usually have to pay steep HOA fees on top of the increased interest rates, which is less going into their equity.
No one is building starter homes and with investing being so more accessible, you might as well do that while living in a nice apartment and wait to buy a nicer house.
Actually this does make sense, because remember reading articles about how Millennials and gen Z we’re not buying groceries or eating out, which led to some article writers wondering if younger Generations even ate food.
The boomers are believing their own PR department about how lazy we are, they think that if we just walking to an office somewhere, shake the manager’s hand, and just cut back on whatever it is that brings us joy, that this surplus of cash will just come flowing in and we can buy a house.
Like they really don’t get it, I remember watching an old video where they were interviewing Generation X and Baby Boomers about why they thought Millennials were broke all the time, and the answers were just ridiculous. One guy who I just could not get out of my head, gave the answer that we were all lazy and trying too hard to get noticed on YouTube because being a pretend celebrity mattered to us more.
Even though at the time becoming a YouTuber was one of the fastest growing and well-paying careers. Like it never occurred to him that maybe YouTube actually was a job for some people. And it was around that time that Youtube Partnerships were a thing so yeah…
Yeah millennials got over a decade of news headlines like “Millennials are killing X! Millennials dont like Y! MILLENNIALS MAKING FINANCIALLY POOR DECISIONS BY BUYING EXPENSIVE LATE’S AND AVOCADO TOAST!” . I think some of it is pandering “kids these days” clickbait but a lot of it is also disconnect from how things have changed as well as people not understanding how to read data.
The funny thing is the articles didnt stop they just realized that elder millennials are in their 40s and shifted to gen z.
A weird trend I noticed that targets us now is gen Z making fun of millennials. That makes sense they changed what IT is and millennials are no longer with it and some elder millennials may even be their parents. So like yeah young people making fun of the on the way out trends and fashion is par for the course and they arent part of the same generation block so they can just target millennials all at once now. The thing that gets me is Im noticing gen X-ers coming in to join the shitting on millennials and thats just uncool.
And Starbucks. Remember had we invested in Starbucks instead of buying it, we’d be bagillionaires like heroes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who totally got rich the same way.
Yeah, just do the math! $5.00 cup of coffee every day for a year is a whopping $1,825! That’s like 2 weeks rent in LA! After 10 years you could buy a used Ford Fiesta :O
That last article comes sooo close to figuring it out.
Finally, renting allows millennials to live in more desirable or “happening” parts of cities that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for home ownership.
That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying we can’t afford to buy houses.
Sadly, Millennials aren’t handy. Baby boomers are famous for the idea of being able to fix it themselves. If the dishwasher broke, they fixed it. If the carpet needed cleaning, they cleaned it. They enjoyed doing these tasks on their weekend. That is not the case with Millennials. They don’t care to understand how to fix something.
These are the same people that can’t use an iPad unsupervised without somehow getting tricked into sending $2k worth of bitcoin and their SSN to a scammer.
Yeah, the shit they fixed was generally just a motor and some bearings, maybe with some simple electrical switches. Everything was simple and made as durable as possible because that used to be a selling point.
Modern appliances are specialized computers with moving parts that are designed with cheap, flimsy pieces that are only meant to last until their warrenty period runs out. One minute after that and its all “replacement parts? You mean call our service dept or buy a new one, right?”
Lots of boomers fixing modern machines out there? Somehow I bet they are still talking about that one time in 1983 when they changed out the belt in a dryer that had 6 parts total and had been working for 23 years. Yeah, congrats. You did a simple thing to a simple machine.
Being the guy who owns a truck (work truck, I’d love an electric work van or teleporter since we’re now in fantasy land lmao) I went with my parents to pick up a new washer and dryer for their house.
While wandering around one of those “we fixed this broken used stuff, and are now selling it to you at 70% original price” , the old guy behind the counter kept talking mad shit about how people my age don’t know how to just fix something, and the whole time I’m looking around at verious appliances, I notice something pretty obvious.
All this shit is old, extremely simple, or the only issue was clearly cosmetic and was likely purchased as part of a defect lot. No smart devices, no sensors, not even microwaves. Just things exactly like you described, a belt had broken, or some very simple swappable part needed swapped.
I asked him when the last time he fixed a computer was, or the last time he worked on a car from after 2010. Because I do those all the time, and never see people his age working on their own stuff, they always come to people my age. So maybe let’s just get along with our business and try to show off on our personal times, huh?
He thought that was hilarious, and I wasn’t intending for it to be rude so I just chuckled with him and went about loading everything up.
Honestly I love working on older things, and I like working on my truck because of how simple it is. My truck is from the 90s, and while it’s about half the size of modern trucks, I’ve always wanted a smaller one like an old Ford ranger or even some of the smaller pickups from the 60s/70s. If I could do an electric swap within my budget limitations on one of those, I’d be soooooo thrilled. Modern EVs are too complicated for me now. I can do electronics work, but damn.
Boomers created the current system where you can’t “just fix” your dishwasher. The old dish washer at my parents can be fixed with a screw driver and a ¢25 washer from home depot. The newer ones are all glue, one way plastic clips, and stickers that say it can only be repaired by a certified repair shop. I get kinda what they are saying but the change didn’t happen in a vacuum. I used to repaired computers for a living and I noticed year after year computers became more difficult to repair. For most laptops you can’t just open them up and swap out bad parts. It’s all glued together and has micro components that need to be resoldered to the motherboard. Great for size but impossible to repair outside of the manufacturer. I mean for fuck sakes their are billion dollar military equipment that can’t be serviced without the manufacturers help. It’s all a scam to keep us dependent on corporations.
The pixel watch is so bad that if you crack the screen, Google tells you to throw it away and buy a new one. Apparently even Google themselves can’t repair that.
That’s the logic behind every one of those decisions that made things harder to repair. The only fix really is government intervention, because capitalist logic by itself dictates that this is how you make more profit.
I can’t remember who made it, but some years ago before the big smartwatch boom, someone put out a watch that had a standard mechanism, but also a tiny one-line screen that would show information like texts to you. That seemed like a good middle ground. But I don’t see a lot of watches that fit that middle ground anymore.
And they’re awesome. Battery lasts weeks on a single charge, works like a watch should, tracks all sorts of things and gives you silent notifications like a smart wearable should.
Sometimes you have to kobayashi maru things in life.
Part of being a conscious consumer is having the willpower to forgo convience for something bigger.
Unfortunately, we are in hyper simulated/consumerist society, so I really only see this trend getting exacerbated until some global calamity happening.
Boomer culture is highly problematic, but remember not all boomers are this way and even many of those that are were taught to be this way, that’s what culture is. Boomers were raised in an extremely toxic, capitalist, exploitative world and mostly only saw the good side of it.
If you were raised the same way, with the same info available, the same things taught to you, you might behave similarly.
The problem is not boomers or any other generation. The problem is the tiny psychopathic hoarder class and their hired goons and they want you to blame other generations, other races, other countries, anything but them.
My parents’ washing machine broke when I was probably like 8 or 9. I helped my dad fix it over a weekend; it cost like $20 and took us a few hours over the course of Friday and Saturday, not counting a couple of trips to the hardware store. We didn’t need much in the way of tools other than a Philips screwdriver and a socket set. That washer is still working today, 30 years later.
Contrast that with the washer I bought when we moved into our home five years ago. It broke a month ago, and I didn’t even have the tools required to open it. The defect was with the motherboard, the tech discovered; and it would cost $550 to get a replacement made since the part was discontinued three years ago. That replacement would be ready in a month. Or I could spend $600 to buy a new machine.
Not to mention… you can’t fix modern appliances. They’re built to be replaced.
PLUS if you’re working multiple gigs to make ends meet over 40 hours a week, the last thing you want to do on your free hours off is try to take apart your dishwasher
As a GenX this narrative that Millenialls aren’t buying homes is weird.
Of the people born in 1970 about 41% of them owned a home by the time they were 30. Of the people born in 1990 some 43% of them owned a home by the time they were 30. Millenialls are actually slightly ahead of where GenX was at the same age!
GenZ shouldn’t really be a discussion as most of them simply haven’t reached “home buying” age yet.
It’s a distribution thing. In rural and lower populated areas, hone ownership by younger persons is probably higher than 1989 (i remember when, in my home area, a house could be had for ten grand but that was a unimaginable amount of money then and there, more there being the issue than then I guess), but also that large groups of young people concentrated in cities can’t afford anything.
This is one of my favorite genres of journalism. See also: why is everyone so mad about the economy? Meanwhile, the economy: 3 chicken wings, a carrot, and a 1/2 lb of lentils is $37.
Seems the ultra rich are doing quit well in this economy by sticking it to the not-so-rich. It’s not the economy, it’s the money & power that controls the price of everything, including wages, but go ahead and vote for the billionaire guy who says he alone can fix things while planing to rule you with an iron fist. If systemic change is what you want start by running folks at the ground level elections - it takes about ten years to really change things…
Unfortunately, we are being ruled by people who insist on getting blood from a stone, and if the stone won’t bleed obviously is the stone that is being too lazy to rapidly evolve having veins or any organic components at all
Seriously, we are also seeing record high inflation, used to 20 bucks could get me a bunch of drinks, a few microwavable meals to take to work, and some butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn.
Now it might cover the butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn and maybe one thing of drinks if it’s on special offer. And that wasn’t me comparing growing up to now, that’s me comparing two years ago to now
What I really don’t understand is all the people who in the next post tomorrow will mock China’s oversupply of homes. “Haha, stupid dictators who oversupplied the market. Their investors are all screwed because the homes didn’t go up in value.”
A ponzi scheme is where you collect investments and pay out the first investors high interest with the early money collected to make it appear you are legitimate and thereby trick more into giving you money.
Buying real estate which goes down in value because the government makes more homes isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s no different than losing money investing in wheat futures by betting against the US subsidizing farmers. (which creates a surplus.)
Yes it is a Ponzi scheme. People are putting money into something they aren’t getting. So the answer is no, you haven’t heard of Evergrande. If you think Evergrande is simply an “overbuild” situation then it’s clear you don’t know shit.
Dude that has nothing to do with liking or not liking China, nothing even to do with whether you think an over- vs. under-supply of housing is a better outcome. You just don’t understand what a Ponzi scheme is.
So you agree that it has nothing to do the subsidiaries on building/buying housing nor realizing Profit but everything with a market that overbuilt housing to the point where there were way too many homes than people looking for a home.
You could subside the first house. You could make no Profit and finish the building projects. You just can’t build way too many housing and expect the market to not collapse.
Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.
They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master’s Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we’d end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.
The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can’t pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don’t have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.
Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the “young people” in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy’s money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.
The target audience for ALL these articles is “daddy”, the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.
If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the “millennials” have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that’s why they can’t stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.
And that’s the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.
The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.
So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they’re “the help”, but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.
Nope. You’re “the help”. You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It’s a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.
So that’s why the articles are so “clueless”. The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.
They know why you’re poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That’s not news. They know why you can’t buy a house because they made sure you wouldn’t have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you’re fucked, because they’re fucking you.
But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they’re liable to read news articles about it. They don’t think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You’re the help.
Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, “knowledge worker” head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.
I love Mr. Robot. Reminds me a little about it. Not a cup of tea for everyone, but there was a lot to love about that show, from acting, dear gods the editing and some of the shots are just amazing, to being able to resonate with each and every character in one way or another.
Anyway, I send you virtual hugs because we are all fucked and sometimes we just need a damn hug in-between the horror show we dance to. And if you don’t want to be touched, then that is ok too.
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Children of the wealthy don’t need to “get smarter” to “make it”. Also, pretty sure they can afford homes. I really don’t think this article is about them.
I’m a millennial and own a home and can fix things. I do get experts in sometimes when I am less familiar with the job. What I found was that the previous boomer owner did a lot of things wrong. I can find the code violations, but may need an expert to come up with better solutions. I shadowed my electrician and don’t need him anymore. Still have my plumber in a bit for now.
The previous owner of my place “fixed” the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.
In my house (just bought it, renovating) the light switches by the front door seemed kind of loose behind the cover plate. Finally got around to looking at it and found that the switches and their plate are attached to the wall only with caulk; the metal box they’re supposed to be screwed to was somehow pushed a few inches into the wall. For bonus points, one of these switches produces a few seconds of loud humming when flipped followed by the main circuit breaker tripping.
Their is a fault in the circuit. What is the switch supposed to control? Had the same thing with the circuit for the lamppost. The wire for it wasn’t buried deep enough by the previous owner and became compromised over time. For the plates, they make longer screws and also spacers for times when the box is seated too recessed. If you don’t have those on-hand, you can remove the box and seat a new one properly, but that can be a lot of trouble depending upon the circumstances.
Acetone removes glue typically. Sometimes, when you think something is glued in hard, there is an extra screw that you missed.
My garbage disposal just broke. Turns out that the previous owner rigged the dishwasher drain in-line after the disposal, so that there is a chance that disposal water can kick-back into the clean dishes. Fixing that currently.
The kitchen hood vents into the attic, so have to fix that. The owner created a nest of electrical wires in the attic as well, so ended up creating a channel for them and organizing them so they are fastened nicely to the joists.
They created an unstable loft in the garage, so had to demo it since it was ugly as well. The list goes on and on.
I bought a house because I hate being beholden to unreliable landlords. Shoddy maintenance, selling the place, neverending rent going up every year. Been there, done that.
Dude…you think your landlord is loosing money? You’re subsidizing all his expenses with the house and paying a nice extra on top of that. That’s what rent is!
You people are incredibly butthurt. I am pretty sure I deleted all my comments because you capitalists were annoying so why/how are you still writing me?
It’s been a decade since I paid off my mortgage. So I’ve kept track of my expenses (tax, two plumber visits, two HVAC visits, air filter replacement, etc. Those expenses have averaged out to me paying only $250 a month on average for the last ten years (no mortgage payment anymore). To be fair, I did spend a lot I’m not counting on solar panels, because a landlord would never have bothered (tenant pays the electric bill, so no incentive to help the tenant reduce that). Even when I had a mortgage, the figure was like 1500 a month.
Meanwhile, a couple of identical houses in this neighborhood are listed on Zillow for rent for $3000 a month. When I bought I’m sure rent would have been 1.5k a month, but the rent goes up over time and a decent mortgage will not.
I never understood this “never ending expenses” stuff. Over the last 25 years, between renting and owning I can recall only a handful of expenses, and half of them were elective that a landlord would either not let me do or at least made me pay for it.
I think it’s the arrogance of thinking that your experience is the norm. A great deal of people who rent have shitty landlords who will only do the very bare minimum of maintenance and only begrudgingly at that. And most people who have a house with a mortgage have much lower expense than those who rent. Mostly due to the fact that mortgages stay the same over the time you are paying them and then they go away once you’ve paid them off and (unless you are lucky enough to be rent controlled) rent usually continually goes up yearly or bi-yearly.
Expenses to maintain a house should not be so overwhelming that renting is more cost effective. If that were the case how would a landlord make any profit?
It’s more likely that you were just particularly bad at homeownership. That’s on you, not owning a home in itself.
I never said I would be saving money by renting. I think I figured it out. You people are so weirdly defensive because you have to justify to yourself being in debt for 3 decades.
swear as a culture we’re not just headed toward being only renters, but we’re being primed for the cultural dialogue around home ownership to be about what a pain in the ass it is and how renting is just so much better. This weird, Deleuzeian dystopia where the thought of owning land is just completely foreign to most people.
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