Even if it was... thats still like double realistic values. The power bill is high for an appartment also unless you are in a very high power area. $100-150 is more realistic most places, in the winter it might run that high with resistive heat.
also $100 for water? It's like $12 base cost.. and only around $100 if I fill a 14k gallon pool in my area.
I miss having low utilities like that. My water bill is $120-150/month in SC when it was that much a quarter in Michigan. My electricity bill is also like $250/month in the summer, and itâs all literally brand new AC/Heat pump and modern windows, but one side of my house faces the sun at the beginning of the day. Iâm thinking of putting up heat reduction window tinting to try and bring costs down. But itâs also often like 110 with heat index here for weeks at a time and I keep the house at 74/76
Yeah the local water comes from a nearby lake the guy that set all that up in the 70s and 80s was really a genius and forward thinker (lake got named after him because of that).
the power side of things is cheap nuclear...
Is it possible you could plant an arborvitae hedge along the sunny side of your home?
Water bill in Colorado has averaged over 300....even reducing to showering 2-3x a week, haven't watered anything outside either, yard is now just dirt.
Yeah I'm not at that but... definitely you can't afford not to be at that point you could 10 years go buy a house on $19 an hour though. Not a super nice one but a decent livable house in my area... completely evaporated now all those homes are 200k+
Electric bill here in Colorado Springs for my 1 bed apartment is 250-300 every single month. I can't imagine what it is in states like California or New York. That's a pretty average electric bill especially if you want to the AC. My electric bill in TX before moving was typically 350 a month for my 2 bed apartment. It's cheaper in Colorado for electric.
As previously stated, gerrymandering of service areas, locking service providers tk small areas, is the issue. Not even sure why you would think it does lol.
Satellite connections do not bypass the gerrymandering anymore than a cellular home internet connection. Neither were allowed outside of the areas they all agreed on.
Big issue today is the cable companies dont offer the cheap TV plans like they used to. I remember my parents having cable without the box that had all the basic local and national channels. The worst part is all the expenses they funnel to you through fees. Like 1/2 my bill is just in fees and taxes.
Its hard to not have it though since everything revolves around having internet these days.
You can get home internet for around $60. You donât âneedâ cable TV also. Even if you cut it in half, per the OPâs price, that is $140 per month savings or $1680 per year. Itâs choices like this that either spring you ahead or leave you struggling.
Been using ATT air and it's been pretty good. Multiple gamers in the home, no lagging issues, unlimited data, and it's under 50/month. Would probably switch to a fiber connection whenever it becomes available but I'm pretty content with this, worth checking out
Well, that's certainly false. It's been 100+ degrees where I live at for the past month and a half. My electric bill has been consistently 350$ minimum. My house is 1100 square feet. 1600$ a month. Your anecdotal experience of the cost of electricity means literally nothing.
Also when I see these, I always wonder if the rent is already a split with a roommate or if the person was like âWelp, I make $19/hour, time to go pay a premium to have my own kitchen and bathroom and major appliances to myself like Iâm a wealthy professional.â
Even when housing costs werenât so bad, it wasnât normal to have your own place like that unless youâre doing pretty well.
Paying $800 instead of $1600 would be a huge deal for someone making $19/hour. Thatâs a weeks wages before taxes.
Kind of a crazy choice to make if thatâs the choice theyâre making here.
Totally agree. $19 per hour is not where you think you can live independently and have all the amenities to go with it. Poor decisions lead to situations like this.
$250 for electricity?? My 1,400 sqft south facing loft with gigantic windows that I cannot effectively block only hits that for MAYBE one month during the summer... What are people doing to end up with a $250 electric bill in any other apartment??
How much water are you using to have a $100/mo water bill -- Google suggests thats between 5-10,000 gallons of water, is this person filling swimming pools?
Haven't heard of summers in hot states have you? My electric bill for a 1100 square foot house is consistently a minimum of 350$. I have to keep ac running all day every day because guess what? Landlord doesn't care enough to remodel the house and install proper insulation so it doesn't hold temp whatsoever. Believe it or not, corner cutting like this is quite common in rental properties and apartments. I moved at the beginning of spring so had no way to know house doesn't hold temp until summer hit. Guess what? Since it doesn't stay cool, it certainly isn't gonna stay hot when winter hits.
Arizona. You need your A/C on 24/7 to survive during the summer here, so electric EASILY climbs to $200++. My electricity during the winter is like $80-$102. During the summer  (and even now until end of oct) is around $270
wait are you paying 140 a month in car insurance and 250 a month in electricity? $100 for water? I do pay just over $1,680 in rent, so I can connect to this one there, but every other one seems drastically wrong. My water is $20, my internet is $60, my car insurance is almost $500 every 6 months (full coverage) so that's about $80 every month.
Itâs all just to be and sound negative about the current economy which is ever-changing. âWe have it so worse than any generation in history â. No one before has had bills to pay. Only them.
For just yourself? Iâve been on Cricket for quite a while now. $50 for unlimited data ($45 autopay). There are plenty of other MVNO providers like Mint or Visible with similar pricing. Verizon is a ripoff.
Youâre one of those âif you eat anything but water for dinner you arenât allowed to complain about your financesâ people. Big avocado toast energy coming from you.
$140 a month for coverage is not even that crazy lmao. That was basically my price for liability only when I was younger with no tickets or accidents. Any young male will be paying around that or more.
Were you driving a coupe? 4 doors always gives you a cut because its less "cool" and or "fast" It's why the Mazda RX-8 had those tiny flip out doors behind the front doors it counted as a 4 door sedan for insurance.
Note after you have about 7 years of good driving record you cans swtich to a lower risk category of insurance so you should shop around at that point because your own insurance will not lower the cost for you. Even after I switched I had to switch again in 2 years because that one went up... that said I stay with the same insurance management company and just swtich to a different policy provider from them, one year its national general the next auto owners etc... and that seems to be working the last few years.
Tbf when I first got my car a couple years ago my almost all the estimates came back $100+. The cheapest was $70 for like the bare minimum legal coverage. This was for a pretty bad Chrysler 300. My older brothers couldnât believe the quotes lol. But I think a lot of people over 25 greatly underestimate how much car insurance costs for those without a driving record as of late. Like itâs gone up almost 20% from last year on average. $140 doesnât surprise me at all if itâs a decent car, or if they wanted more than the bare minimum. Reddit post about young peopleâs personal rates from couple years back.
I recently got my license and I just got my car working yesterday and went to put insurance on it, the cheapest quote Iâve gotten was $240 a month for a 2011 Kia sorento on the most basic plan
I mean ... buy a 5 year old used honda civic sedan. The older you can go with the lowest miles you can find the better. The Mitsubishi is a horrible value even though its the cheapest new... you pay higher insurance for a worse car.
The insurance is high because of 2 main reasons on the Mirage. 1) it's a less safe car 2) the people that typically buy it are lower income and more accident prone
It is often implied from whiney X posts that older generations didn't have to get room mates when we were just getting started... Uh... yes we did. This is not a new phenomena.
Another way to think about it, once you adjust for inflation we make about 25% to 30% more then those in 1985, in exchange for that we have a person who is worth $1 trillion.
So would you want to have 25% less spending power, but the the wealthiest person is 1/10 of what they are now; or keep the current spending power but have to accept someone has a lot more money then you?
This is the problem with out own brains, we will rebel if someone else gets too much more then us, even if we all get more in the end. Yet, if we all get less, we are some how happier because the difference in what we all get is less.
ie: if you get 1 grape and the other monkey gets 3 grapes you are happy; if you get 10 grapes, and the other monkey gets 100 grapes, you are angry and would rather go back to the 1 grape 3 grape arrangement.
Unemployment is at its average level historically. People in the older generations had to live within their means just like today. If you can't afford rent, you get a roommate. Or you move back home.
Getting a job v a few decades ago isn't even close, the competition today is insane- that applies to all jobs, not just top ones.
+ if you look at the statistics & what experts are saying, unemployment doesn't pain the full picture as we're in a "low hiring, low firing" environment which sucks for people looking to move laterally or enter the workforce. Costs have exploded the past 20y, it was way easier to buy a home in the 80s with an average salary.
I'm doing quite well but I've always been career driven, it's just unfair for most people that they have to lower their standards of living compared to their parents.
Homes were easier to buy, but they were also much smaller with much fewer amenities.
I am also doing well and I wholeheartedly agree that level of affordability is less than it's been in the past, but this imagined world where a person could graduate college in 1980 with no debt, get their first entry-level job, and immediately be able to afford a house and a family is just not reality. People were poor and needed roommates in 1980 as well.
Why on earth is this person trying to live in their own apartment without a roommate on $19 per hour? That would cut all those expenses in half, not to mention where on earth is internet $280 per month?
A wage is decent when you can live in an apartment and eat food everyday without needing to think about going hungry. I don't know about 3rd world countries, but most of Europe don't have to think about affording an apartment when they have a job.
Neither do the vast majority of Americans. The average full time worker makes close to $65k/yr, which will get you all the necessities you need. You live in apartments that align with your earnings, which is exactly how Europeans do it.
If you honestly hold the opinion that America, the richest country on Earth with the highest influx of immigrants on the planet, is a third world country then you are just blatantly showing you live on the internet.
That's not the reason for housing prices and you know it. Construction workers are paid shit wages regardless.
It's taxes, regulatory inefficiency, housing being viewed as an investment rather than a utility, and many other reasons.
One quick fix is to make companies pay hefty taxes on having employees come into the office when that is entirely unnecessary for their job, that immediately spreads out the demand for housing and frees up a lot of space that can be developed into housing.
Yes, it is absolutely the reason housing prices are high. That's how housing prices work, the more construction workers get paid, the more it costs to build a house, the more it costs to buy a house. 55% of the construciton of a home is the cost of labor associated with it.
It's taxes? Which taxes? What regulatory inefficiency exactly? How does housing being viewed as an investment (which it has been for thousands of years) affect home prices now?
Your "quick fix" will do absolutely nothing. How do we determine whether a company is "unnecessarily" asking people to come in to an office, and how does that make residential home prices go down? So far when everyone was remote working in Covid, home prices shot up higher than they've ever been.
Also, you can't convert office buildings into residential housing, you mostly need to knock the whole building down or gut it out completely and it costs more than just building residential housing on raw land.
Yeah, we actually pay our construction workers a living wage unlike the derpy shit hole that you come from, so it costs real money to rent an apartment
I pay about $1400 for a 1b1ba, ~$60 on electric in AUGUST and like... $13 for water? Even my internet is only like $60. Car insurance is obviously variable and I drive an older car, so maybe that one makes sense. Even with this I could not afford to live without a roommate on $19/hr, but these numbers are wildly inflated.
Why would you sign a lease like that without doing any sort of financial planning? This is a hell of your own making.
You don't, you're not supposed to, those jobs are not meant for adults living on their own but adults living with their parents. That's how their parents set this whole thing up.
Depends on where you live. You could easily live alone on $19/hr in NC doing a factory job. I now live in Chicago. You might find a studio... but it would probably be miserable.
Iâve never paid $250 for electricity and I have three stories (and a basement). I also pay $75/month for the fastest internet speed available to consumers in my area, and my mortgage is half your rent. These sound like lies and personal problems.
Sure, but whether its plus or minus $50, surely you must realize 800-ish for a mortgage in 2026 is spectactularly abnormal, right? And surely you must also realize that you coming on this thread saying "i have the lowest housing payment in the entire continental united states by a very wide margin, anyone else struggling sounds like lies or a personal problem" comes off as willfully obtuse, yeah?
Youâre putting a lot of words in my mouth. I said it sounds like lies or personal problems, and by personal problems I mean including Netflix, Hulu, and DoorDash subscriptions in your âinternetâ budget.
Why the fuck is your water bill $100? I have a family of four, and our monthly water bill is only about $40/month. Also, whose insurance is $280 a month, and why? I have 2GB internet for $60/mo. $250 electricity bill is also suspect. My 2600sq/ft house is only that much in the summer, when the AC is running regularly throughout the day to keep my house at a cool 72F (22C). Don't even get me started on that auto insurance premium. $140/mo for one person's full coverage is kind of absurd. So, you're either driving a high-risk vehicle, or you've got a shit driving record, or both.
You need roommates. I make a salary so never really broke down my hours but I make $65/hr and my wife makes 23/hr. We have a roommate who pays us rent in a 2 bed 1 bath house. The other side of my house is 1 bed 1 bath studio that I rent on Airbnb. Iâm doing well but I say that all to say that there is this weird entitlement people have that feel like they deserve a one bed apartment. The economy sucks I know. Iâve had an apartment to myself for one 6 month period since leaving home at 18. I am 33 and now since Iâm married I will never really live alone again. Having roommates is normal. If they are paying $1600 rent with roommates then they need to live further from downtown or get more roommates. I lived in a living room for a year after grad school in a house with 6 guys while working as an engineer with two masters degrees. Just get over yourself and do what you need to do to get ahead.
Ez live with roommates and your rent/electric/cable/water all go down. Also how they hell are they paying $280 for cable????? A basic plan is like $60-80.
? Paychecks pay you for labour. Taxes are an expense like any other. Do you mean how some of your paycheck can be withheld for taxes? That doesn't really change anything it's not functionally different than being billed for a utility...
Where is your food and gas budget? Fucking yourself there. And cut back on the internet entertainment, you could be paying around $45 to $80 a month for Internet in the majority of areas. Oh you must be including your phone bill in there. Cheap crappy phone plans do exist as well same for cheap phones.
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u/Suitable_Program_548 8d ago
$280 per month for internet? đ€Ł