Big jumps are happening for home owners too in many areas, most recently due to insurance and tax increases. I know people who have seen both double. These costs are pricing many people out of their homes. Yes, rent goes up, but in a rental the costs are divided among the tenants over time. Also having grown up with landlord parents, sometimes the landlord has to eat the costs. At the end of the day they can only charge what local rental market supports.
I do get what you’re saying and I’m not anti-homeownership, but it’s not the silver bullet to build automatic wealth it once was.Its very case by case, zip code by zip code.
Yes because our entire economy is built upon mountains and mountains of debt. Most people will never “climb the ladder” high enough to eliminate their debt. Even those that go through bankruptcy within ten years are right back at it.
One issue is what now is a “necessity?” Sure home wifi and a smart phone won’t force you to starve but living without becomes very difficult. Student loans because a college degree is required for jobs in which there is absolutely no need to have a college degree.
Similar situation with a friend of mine in FLA. She bought a home about 20 years ago. Mortgage was sold a couple times and she was required to take on PMI insurance that almost busted her budget. She did a lot of remodeling and increased the homes value enough to eventually be able to drop the PMI. About that time homeowners insurance became an issue. She spent a fortune cutting large old oak trees to keep her insurance. Then they wanted a roof or else she would be dropped. She shopped for another policy and could not find anything else she could afford. We loaned her money toward reroofing.
She bought the house back then thinking she would be able to retire someday since her “rent” would not increase. Taxes and insurance have made that untrue.
Last week her parking costs at work doubled. She and her carpool partner are already walking a distance to save money. The remodeling on that house was mostly done with free labor using materials found on sale by stopping at Lowe’s and home Depot every day on the way home. It took months to get enough torn and discounted bags of concrete to make a new front sidewalk, for example.
Being frugal and working hard is not enough to keep up with increases. People are falling behind. Young people are becoming hopeless about the future and don’t want mortgages as a result.
This is the result of government mismanagement. Those at the top of the food chain benefited while those at the bottom suffer greatly. The government did not care that a whole new industry was being created, “The College Diploma Industry”.
More jobs being created for high paid educators, more college campuses and buildings needed. It was a great idea just like immigration that gives a stimulus to the economy. Except that the “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” doesn’t work.
We see kids that were duped going to college with the lure of making more money in the workforce. Except those promised jobs don’t exist. So they leave college with a diploma that has NO value whatsoever and now they are on the hook for tens of thousands in debt, they cannot get out of.
So it’s off to Taco Bell or somewhere that pays maybe another $1-2 more per hour. With inflation they don’t have the necessary means to afford a home, buy a new car or start a family. And that is the segment group that spurs durable goods and new homes that feed the home improvement sector.
So the government can’t complain when the most productive group can’t pay into their government funded ponzi schemes i.e. SS. Homes sales and everythin else heads downward. They can’t or shouldn’t complain because they created this mess.
Won’t argue your logic on anything except the part about high paid educators. Most colleges have replaced full professors with “adjuncts” who are the product of the PhD system. But instead of being on a career track in academia, they’re poorly paid contractors with no benefits and no job security. However, the number of college administrators and the amount they’re paid has increase substantially. Win/win for the bureaucracy!
Driving around on errands and the radio has a Credit Union commercial where they will re-finance your automobile loan so you can have some cash to spend. As you go deeper into debt.
Seriously, people are re-financing their car loans??
I think the college dupe has a lot to do with the idea that degrees you can obtain while being drunk, stoned, on the phone at a club, or in bed much of the time, will outcome a career that will let you pay back loans.
I have spent enough time in the past many years in regular dorm and cafeterias and those on an engineering campus to know there are differences in who is present and what their lifestyles are like.
It’s sad that some kids attend top tier schools on credit for careers that won’t even pay the loan costs. When I hear someone say they or their kids are attending “brand name” Uni for early childhood education, or social work, or gender studies, or English, my brain gets stuck on the ROI aspects and I am not sore how to respond, and default you how proud the parents must be and how great college life is etc, while my brain is pondering of you can pay rent and a student loan payment both while waitressing, bartending or working for the county health or school system.
Interestingly some of the young people are okay with it in that they don’t plan on owning a home or having families. A cute effiecency with high speed Internet, and decent coffee and eats nearby are enough. Many young folks despise the need for a car and the related expenses, and see the requirement of one for urban dwelling as a failure of our government and its city planners.
It’s just wrong to not tell people straight up what they will be paying in full. Is there something I’m not understanding? Maybe there is, I’m not great at understanding these things and how they work, but this just seems criminal.
I have thought for a while that the sort of person who will do well is separable from where they are educated.
A confounding factor in educational salary statistics for example is a person who drops out of high school because they are troubled versus choose not to. A person who could go to college and do well who chooses not to is the real question many are trying to answer, not whether high school dropouts contain a subset of losers.
Based on what I’ve seen in computer programming with these snake oil salesman selling six figure salaries after a 12 week bootcamp, the people who make it would have made it without the bootcamp and those who wouldn’t have made it, don’t get over a hump because they attended one.
That describes Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s, “The Dumbing Down Of America”. Kids today have been steered toward instant gratification or as some like to call it, “the microwave society”.
When I went to school back in the 70’s in NYC, many of the High Schools were also Trade Schools. You learned a trade for free: carpenter, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, TV and Radio repair, wood working, even becoming an architect was taught for free.
The education system has turned that into pay to learn. I graduated in 1976 and was offered a fully paid engineering scholarship to Bell and Howell in Queens NY.
My father worked in such a highschool vo-tech for 20 years. Things changed dramatically about midway through his time there. Mostly the changes were centered around how the powers that be viewed trade and skills as compared to college.
The problem is we graduate kids who think they can do calculus at a college level be apse they were given a C in an AP calculus class and yet they cannot give change for a 20 without a calculator.
These same kids, who have so little financial literacy, are encourage by parents and guidance counselors at school to sign on the dotted line for loans. They are told to just go have the best 4 years of their life and it will all work out later if they finish their degrees.
My daughters partner got to the summer before senior year, fortunately with little debt due to scholarships and a 4.+ average in his political science degree and started thinking about jobs. He was a bit angry and depressed to find basically a hopeless situation unless he finished at least a masters.
We encouraged him that finishing the degree would open doors even if outside his major. He did end up getting a job in IT for the county and does hardware and tech support for the various county departments. He is in charge of tech needed to record and stream the commissioners meetings and other such things. He has good benefits and is gaining nationally recognized certifications relative to IT that will be good resume builders at the counties cost. They are both paying attention to those meetings and the issues. I would not be surprised if he runs for a seat soon.
I feel blessed seeing and experiencing a different America. It was an America that put you in a position and set you on a path to succeed. Everyone of our High School teachers who taught a trade, had a side business in that respective field.
That did two things, added their on the job experience in what they taught and secondly it taught us students not to rely on the government system but instead to start and build our own business.
My TV Repair teacher in my senior year knew I came from a single family home and was on welfare. He used to pound it in my head as well as others when he would say to me: “don’t be a parasite to society”. He would brag about paying cash for his 1974 Chrysler Newport because he had a successful TV Repair business when not teaching class.
My father had had a 20 year career in the Navy before teaching his subject. He went to college and interned in his own classroom / shop facility because the school system had hired him without his degree being complete based on experience. His first summers as a teacher he worked for the school board writing his own curriculum and textbooks while also finishing his bachelor’s degree at the university.
He kept in touch with the better employers in the area to kept tabs on what they needed out of his graduates and tweaked things as needed. Computer Numerical Control was coming on the scene during those years.
I met a machinist at HBG a couple years back who worked on 5 axis CNC machines. So that is cool.
TV repair, that has changed a lot. I once owned a tube tester( radio shack retail counter top model) not that I am old enough to remember tubes or anything.
I wanted to share a story from a few weeks ago. RE social decay in the NY metro area. You guys know how I love to tell stories.
We were driving from Long Island to New Jersey and stopped at our usual rest stop in NJ, not far from the GW bridge, a small but popular center where there is a convenience store (Wawa), 2 fast food places and an office building.
It was a Friday night. To my stunned surprise (I have never seen anything like this before in my life and I ain’t no spring chick and I been around), the entire parking lot was packed with young people hanging out. It was surreal, like something out of a movie. They weren’t there for any reason but to hang out in a parking lot.
They were from every race, teenage through 30 I would say. Lots of intimidating bikers racing around the lot, speeding in from the highway. An intense stench of the absolute worst weed I have ever smelled. Slutty girls and cool dudes. Cars driving all around along with the bikes, it was all you could do to get from your car to the store, without dying. I did not feel safe.
As I left the store, I heard a pop behind me and I jumped. The guy was very polite and said “sorry Miss, I just popped my soda.” I realized these weren’t bad people. As I took in the energy, I sensed there was no danger, just a bunch of kids who want to socialize and have nowhere else to go. At least they’re not on their screens. At least they’re developing relationships. At least they’re not watching pornography. They just want to hang out. No racism here, everyone getting along just fine, very mixed.
But why here? I guess it’s just the thing to do these days. Maybe it’s a new trend. This was the hot spot in town on Friday night, and I got the feeling there was gonna be some hooking up. The Wawa parking lot off the highway. They were creating a dangerous situation because there were too many things driving around and way too many people. It felt oppressive. I wondered where the cops were. Everything was peaceful but we all know that can turn in a moment. And I was hoping no one would be driving high. But just walking through that place would get you high.
Make of this what you will, I just wanted to share it. Has anyone else noticed this as a trend?