The one downside of home ownership is once you own it, you’re stuck with it. We bought in the year before the recession hit and we actually lost over $100K of the house’s value for probably four years or so until it all recovered here. For that time period, no matter what, we knew we couldn’t sell it or move.
Buying a home is definitely nailing your feet in place. That said, it is the only way to get any real return on the money you pay every month to live inside a building. You’re either paying your own mortgage or you’re paying someone else’s (or they own the building now and you’re just handing them that cash to keep).
I’m just saying that I spent the better part of a decade unemployed, trying to get work in the field of my education and, I don’t know whether or not I’ll ever be able to do it again.
It was awful, depressing, and every day I had dozens of confirmations from prospective employers that I was of no value and my existence is wasteful. I don’t know if I’m psychologically able to handle that and have debt and lose my health insurance which pays for medication that helps me not kill myself.
Yeah. Houses will appreciate quicker than you can save.
Mortgages are crazy expensive. Next year they’ll be worse. Soon you’re paying less than renters.
The equity isn’t worth a damn, mind, because every other house is increasing as much as yours is. It’s paper money. But at least you’ve fixed the outgoings for a while.
You and I are a lot alike. I may not make a huge pile of cash… but I have set it up in every job I’ve had so that I get more out of the job than they are getting out of me. In terms of education and personal growth, not office supplies silly man.
Like you, if I played the game “better” I could be making tons more. But it would come at a very high personal cost in terms of stress and maintaining a different facade of employability and needing to get to the next level all the time. Sounds like too much extra work, to me.
No offense because I really don’t know your situation, though my ex-wife is in a similar one. The advice I gave her was “give up on that career and find another.” Hers was being a teacher but then she was in two car accidents and is no longer able to teach all day (and no one will hire her to do it).
I walked out of a doctoral program (I have an MA) after realizing that I’d never be able to get a job once I graduated with my PhD in my field. I then went back to engineering, which I’d been trying to leave.
My daughter is entering her second year of college right now. I have a few years of making sure her tuition and room and board get paid before I can consider myself free and clear of obligations. A steady paycheck is worth more than some possible “grass is greener” scenario (and I like my work just fine too).
You and I should talk. I was unemployed for over a year during the deepest part of the recession. But I had an epiphany that actually changed my life. I am not talking about Amway or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m just talking about a fundamental attitude shift that I hinted at in another post on this thread. I view jobs totally differently than I did before, and I’m at peace with the possibility that they may be temporary. You sound a mite stressed, and this mental shift might help you see your own self value at all times, even in the face of assholes telling you otherwise.
Yes, it is. I have pie-in-the-sky entrepreneurial dreams. Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge dreamer. But they get chased after the work is done and I make sure I maintain my regular job at all times. I have two teenagers, so that college tuition train you are riding and about to get ejected from is coming down the tracks at me next.
12 fucking times the average salary to buy the average house in London. Oh dear, no house for you. Ever. Even in shitholes like where I’m from it’s 7 times. If you aren’t already on the ladder and don’t have relatives you can inherit from you’re renting forever, with the associated increasing costs each year.
I’m with @LDoBe. While having a house is a nice idea if you’re already on the ladder and have a stable job, it’s not something I have in my long term plan at all. Maybe things will change and I will get into a better financial situation, but for the time being I’ll take advantage of the mobility that renting allows. I’m not against saving, but the amount I could save and the amount that would make a dent in a house are very different numbers. For a lot of people, I think this is the new reality rather than a financial decision.
Yup. At the current rate I’m making and the current house prices within a 10 mile radius, I’d have to get on some kind of 30 year mortgage, never lose my job ever, and also be happy living in the exact same spot for what seems like the rest of my life. That’s no bueno in my opinion. I want the option of getting the heck outta dodge if I get ants in my pants, and if I have a mortgage that’s not really an option.
This is only true if you want to live in a “big name” city. As recently as two years ago, for example, houses in Portland, OR were 1/3 of what they are in the Bay Area. (They’ve climbed more recently as people have moved there due to tech work + cheap housing.)
A friend of my doing her doctorate in Cleveland went in with some folks to buy a 100 year old craftsman house there (which they turned into a zendo and she has a room in) for something like $60K. There are large swaths of America, in cities even, where houses are less than $100K. They just aren’t San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, etc.
I have a friend who bought a house in a small town in Michegan for about that much. It’s actually really nice with a small amount of farmland and a barn big enough for 4-5 cattle. They have some animals and grow a lot of their own food, make their own alcohol and generally live a better life than anyone I know of (with the possible exception of @japhroaig). He works in IT and his wife is a teacher, so it’s true that it’s possible. On the other hand, another couple I know did that a couple of years before the main employer in the town shut down. He lost his job too, and it was very difficult to sell the house as a lot of others were also trying to sell theirs.
Stable jobs still exist and some people will be able to go it alone, but this is not the case for many. I work online, so I would be more mobile if my wife didn’t also have to work. My in-laws also live with us, and they have their own needs. Buying a house would mean that we were very sure that the situation wouldn’t change for the worse and that we wouldn’t have to move in the foreseeable future, in addition to having the money that we would need to save. My job requires me to compete with people who can charge much less, and even in Germany many employers want me to accept a little over minimum wage for a skilled position with experience that people still associate with a good income.
I think the real reason many people stay poor is that, as your quote suggests, they live in a fantasy world. They do not plan ahead; they just imagine. And this suits the political Right extremely well, because they largely control the sources of imaginative material.
Nothing I wrote criticises the OP–no idea why you would think otherwise.
I suggested three points for further discussion all three with the explicit aim to move the conversation away from individual vulnerability onto the underlying issue of a society that has accepted structural homelessness as the price you pay for who knows what? “the myth that if you are savvy enough, and plan ahead enough and are generally sensible you will be fine”–generously overlooking that other major ingredient called “luck”.
The luck to have good genes, a nurturing start in life and not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, 50% of bankruptcies in the US are do to ill health–and presumably there is a link between bankruptcies and homelessness and presumably even the most ardent capitalist will admit that illness is at least in part a question of luck.
Allow me to observe that this thread is dominated by the discussion of how to survive as individuals / as family units in a hostile world how to cheating fate.
The discussion of how else to address structural homelessness, i.e. structurally seems to be marginalised–and I kind of thought that was the really interesting question arising from the article. There are solutions such as the community land trust which a fellow commenter (whose comment I can’t find has linked to) http://cltnetwork.org.
There are other ways to organise society and my hope is that when we recognise that we are all vulnerable (and how vulnerable we really are) the discussion will shift in that direction–in talking about how we could organise society differently (e.g. by not criminalising homelessness), saving my nest eggs while people around me are going to the dogs is just not fun.
Very good point. Honestly somtimes, I’m reminded of my youth here. I used to hang out with two othe guys and we’d get “disruptive” feeding off each other’s energy. Sometimes I actually avoid responding to @shaddack and @slybevel because I know we’ll end up going off on a tangent.
Anyway, didn’t Salt Lake City do a free public housing project just handing unused properties to the homeless? IIRC it was a spectacular success, and I’m confused why other less socially conservative cities like Seattle and LA haven’t followed suit.
Yeah, some of us like to get in here and kick the sand around. What do grown-ups do again? Oh yeah, I remember now: be boring and bore everyone with their boring stories about boredom.
Regarding structural problems, one of the big tactical issues in becoming not homeless again (assuming a perfect, frictionless sphere that has become homeless) are three things: a mailing address and two utility bill stubs. Getting out of homelessness without those is monumentally harder. And a bank account, even at $0 is a huge help.
It makes me wonder if there was a way to short circuit those steps while still being ethical.
