House expensive and job no pay enough.
People aren’t paid enough. The rich have too large a portion of the resources.
Eat the rich. Bury their collaborators.
The worst part is that I am getting paid a salary I could have only dreamed about years ago, and yet I still can’t afford anything with how drastically everything went up in price.
Wages in general have gone up a little bit, but it’s crazy to me that I’m earning more than 5x as much as I used to 15 years ago and feel like my buying power has not noticeably improved at all. I’m still stuck living in crappy apartments because that is all I can afford.
Exactly! My partner and I together make over $100,000 a year and finally we are just barely comfortable. All of our bills get paid and even though the budget is tight, we still have a little money and decent credit. I could put a $1,000 guitar on credit and pay that off no problem, but there’s no way we could get a house.
Maybe if our wages doubled then we could find something further out in the sticks. Hopefully by that time more companies allow full remote work because I already lose an hour or more a day traveling.
Companies demanding return to office is such a twist of the knife. It’s a pay cut, making someone spend an hour or two commuting without paying them for it. But the boss doesn’t care
Maintenance, gas, car insurance, more expensive food, tolls, parking, and time. It’s a massive paycut for many people when you really think about it.
Bury them where? I can’t afford a plot of land :(
Ocean it is
WE ARE ALL FUCKING POOR
oh we know why, it’s not a mystery to anyone who talks to the average american worker. we are criminally underpaid for our labor and it gets worse the younger the generation is. millennials are more poor than their parents’ generation, and gen z will likely end up poorer than millennials.
I know no one really asked this question.
- Average house price in Q1 2025 was $500,000.
- $100k down at 6.5% with great credit and monthly payments of $3180 for 30yrs.
How many people can say they will have a job that pays that well for 30 yrs?
$100k down
Fucking LMAO
“Yeah, before you buy, we want an amount of money you will never have at any one point in your entire life before we consider thinking about suggesting a mortgage to you”
Oh…you poor bastard. Now you can pay the PMI and your morrgage will be around $4400 a month. You can save up $15-20k and refi when rates go down.
Welcome to renting for ever.
when rates go down
My sweet summer child, how dense and naive you are.
Unless you live near a major city. Then you double the price of housing.
Probably the same reason megacorporatins are turning in record profit, year over year, and a very few people have increased their income by several billions of dollars, but that’s just a guess. 💁
Don’t forget about the corporations that are buying as many houses a quick as possible (faster than a person who will have a mortgage can) and at a higher price than what a person can/will pay becaue they are using them as investments.
Absolutely!
Article title writer pictured here
Homes are fucking expensive. I couldn’t afford to buy a house in most markets at current prices. I have no idea how people are able to buy homes today.
Even my neighbor down the street…1st home for him, wife, and 2 year old kid. He tried to sell because he didn’t understand how property taxes worked. The previous owner of 30 years payed 1.5K a year. He bought the home and was hit with a 15K tax bill. He couldn’t afford it and thought his bill would also be 1.5K. The closing agent and real estate agent didn’t explain anything to him. They were just happy to collect commission and fees on a very expensive house.
Ah, a Californian
This doesn’t make sense to me.
In my state the bank pays the property taxes. Its included in the monthly mortgage and goes into an escrow account for taxes.
I guess the rules vary by state.
Some places cap property tax increases per year, or even have a flat rate based on purchase price (or appraisal?) that never goes up… until you sell the house to someone new. Then the tax gets recalculated based on the current value of the house. So if the price of the house went up 10x in those 30 years, the tax is going to be 10x higher. It’s actually beneficial to the taxpayer IMO to have a consistent predictable tax that doesn’t go up over time if your neighborhood gets gentrified or whatever and home prices skyrocket.
That part makes more sense. In my state the tax on the house goes up. It’s not locked like that.
I feel like it’s an oversight to not calculate the new tax rate and include it as cost to the buyer.
The bank losses out on the loan if you foreclose on it. They make money on the interest not the sale.
The only one who makes out on a bad sale like that is the realtor.
Escrow isn’t a requirement. The only requirement is that you pay your taxes and insurance whether you have someone else doing it or do it yourself.
What varies from place to place is how property taxes are calculated. Many places “lock you in” to a rate when you buy and only reassess when the property changes hands. In my state, the rate just increases by 3% every year regardless of whether you sell or not so nobody is hit with a big surprise bill.
A 7% interest rate doesn’t help
I had two houses at that interest rate in the 2000’s. The wage to house price was still reasonable then. Made $40k, paid $88k for a 3/2 in middle class suburban Tampa. I’m making 30% more now but houses are 400% more.
Not on top of the wild overvaluation.
We bought in 2020 and have a 2.875% rate on our mortgage. We only put 10% down and had PMI but the broker was all, “you can refinance to get rid of that”.
I asked him when in the world we’d ever be able to refinance at or below that rate? He had nothing to say to that.
deleted by creator
You are incorrect.
As the house value increases with the market you can refinance to a new lender with greater equity eliminating the need for PMI.
While true, I would point out that the low mortgage rates that increased housing prices — low mortgage rates permit people to borrow more and tends to drive up prices — in the decade-and-a-half before 2022 was unusual for the US. Prior to about 2008, interest rates were at or higher than they are today.
Here’s a graph of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
Here’s the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. This measures same-home prices — that it, it attempts to factor out changes in types of home being built, so new homes being larger won’t drive it up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPISA
It’s not adjusted for inflation, though.
Here’s an inflation-adjusted graph:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/
Between about 2011 and 2022, the real price of a given house rose rapidly in a low mortgage rate environment. In 2022, mortgage rates returned to something that’s more historically-normal.
I expect that to sell a house in this environment, a homeowner will probably have to cut what they’re asking.
Now combine them both and do average monthly payment.
Even with higher prices, lower interest rates mean lower monthly costs
$$$$?!?
I fucking wonder. Maybe I can ask Grok.
Grok: “It’s the Joos. Heil Hitler!”
So, after last week, I guess that’s heil Grok?
…Grokler?
Mecha Grokler
I’d wager that Elno changes Grok’s name to something similar in the coming months.
A house is a huge liability. If i lose my job, what do i do about the debt? It’s the job market uncertainty that i fear more than the current pay levels, tbh.
House is an asset. Mortgage is a liability. Having one without the other is now a dream.
capitalism. there. article done.
Been unable to afford a house since I first tried avocado toast circa 2008
Because of the increasing gap between wages and property values?
and poor job prospects on many fields, as well.
