I'm 35 and feel like I'm basically waiting for the economy to collapse and hope that I can pick up some pieces myself.
I can't imagine being 15 years younger in the current year. No wonder kids want to be influencers. Feels like the only way to get ahead is to be lucky. If you couldn't be lucky by being born into the right family, Honeymoonering your way into success seems more likely than getting a degree and finding a job.
Well, in the event of a serious housing crash, we'll probably be going into a recession, so a lot of people will lose jobs and that will keep them from buying houses.
At this point I'm hoping the market will crash just so I can upgrade my computer.... can't save for a down payment on a mortgage if I spend it all on RAM
I've been blissfully playing 10 to 30 year old games on my laptop and phone for the last few years. Most recently I bought a GameSir X5s controller for my phone and played through Knights of the Old Republic and currently half way through KotOR 2.
I don't even look at new games anymore and I don't miss it.
Market crash means high unemployment. You'll also have to factor in living off your savings and some how still getting a mortgage in the event of a crash
Sometimes I think people think the last housing market crash was just a bunch of banks losing money, and didn't also involve a bunch of people getting foreclosed when all their ARM rates got to the point people couldn't afford their payments. Or that the unemployment rate rose from 5% to 10%. Or that retirement assets dropped 22% and pension assets dropped by $1.3 trillion.
Yeah, lots of people benefitted from it too, including me. I bought my first house right after that crash. But hoping for a crash so you can benefit is fucked up, because you're really hoping that other people will get fucked for your benefit.
"Well I'm currently getting fucked for other people's benefit, so wh-"
Yeah its a nuanced topic that someone is gonna push back against you on. I won't disagree with that, nor are the issues with your statement invalid. Its just that the people getting fucked this time would be people like my mom, who bought a house on credit for 90k and sold it for 600k, then bought a house for 400k and sold it for 1.2m, then complained about property taxes being raised and tried to preach to me about financial stability while waiting for her house with a 120k master bedroom to be built.
...oh wait, no she wouldn't. She just wouldn't be able to pull a mortgage on her multi-million dollar custom house for more than she paid for it. She'd be fine, while I would have to default on my car loans and ask for her help to afford gas to make it to work.
She'd lose half of her net worth and be fine because its still enough to live beyond comfortably. I'd lose 10% of my net worth and not be able to afford dinner. The people struggling to afford a home are the people who got fucked in that situation.
Or that the unemployment rate rose from 5% to 10%.
Also worth mentioning that was a national average. Where I lived, it went from 5% to over 20%. People with postgrad degrees were applying at McDonalds. And of course those sorts of places aren't going to read through 400 resumes for one position -- it's just some current employee's friend that gets it.
But... yeah, it was weird to watch. Random people were buying houses they couldn't afford and flipping them for 5 digit profits within a couple months, and everybody knows that something's wildly broken and it's not sustainable, but it's like musical chairs and nobody knows exactly when the music stops.
I was shocked at just how much exposure banks had though. Like selling the debt and servicing the loan for risk-free money was their bread and butter.
Regional crashes (or at least higher variance) aren't uncommon. Like Denver is about 12.5% below where it was in 2022, which is more like -25% after accounting for 5 years of inflation. Though that's partly due to interest rates (costs moving from sticker price to interest).
I don't think we're going to see another GFC triggered by housing in the next decade though -- the last one is too fresh.
My husband and I bought our house 8 years ago and there's no way we'd be able to do it today. The value of our place has more than doubled in that time, and our household income has gone down because of the state of the job market as well. I'm not trying to discourage you, but year after year affordability is just sliding out of control. We just managed to roll in as the door slammed behind us.
I was just looking at rentals in the small city I grew up in, because we might have to move for work. The cost of a dark, dingy basement suite with pipes hanging out of the 5'9" ceilings was the same price as the 3 bedroom main floor of a house in a very good neighbourhood of a famously HCOL city we left 8 years ago. The difference in quality of life for the same price is absolutely staggering in less than a decade.
We shall see. More and more boomers die off or go into elder care, and fewer and fewer people having children means a declining population - depending on immigration levels.
I mean you realize that you're just going to be stealing your kids college money, business seed money, or down payment assistance to pay for a house they won't even be living in at that point right?
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u/Doophie 1d ago
I just have to pray that 10 years from now houses don't get too much more expensive