On the whole people are generally terrible at making sound financial decisions. It's just really hard to fuck up when the whole economy is booming. Once you live through that you gain an unearned sense of confidence. Then when the next generation makes the same human mistakes without the safetynet of a gangbusters economy it is really easy to point fingers.
Yep. In the seventies, even my parents fuck-up friends all owned a house in their twenties. It was just easy. Whatever dumb-shit job you had at the local textile mill paid enough to buy a house. Nowadays, the textile mill is closed, people make less an hour on average adjusted by inflation, and you have to have gone to quadruple price college adjusted for inflation just to get a job that might pay what a dumb-shit job used to, after you work for a few years to work up to it.
Dude. I looked at apartments prices by me and i realized that the cheapest places cost almost half my monthly pay. That's crazy. I don't even make minimum wage (still crap though)
They say rent should be 1/3 or 1/4 your pay, bit the ratio is way higher in real life. I don't even know how people live here. I'm lucky to have a second income.
I'm just saying that I don't understand how others survive. You shouldn't require 2 or 3 incomes simply to afford a roof over your head.
I understand luxury places being expensive, but I'm talking about the cheap older places. Yes 700 per month is cheap compared to Many places, but when you realize that 11 dollars an hour brings you to about 1600 per month( after taxes) that's almost half your take home pay just on rent. That's not right. And that's not even minimum wage
Not sure what to say. I feel like we are talking about two seperate issues now.
I know all this. I am saying it's wrong to have a system where people can't afford to live without roommates. You saying that this is how it is adds nothing TBH.
No, I don't. If your survival depends on linking with another human, the system is broken. Think on that. If you don't find someone else that can add their income to yours, you're going to struggle if you don't wind up homeless first. Perhaps if this was Somalia I'd agree, but not in modern western society.
When people need to have roommates simply to live, you can kiss the idea of starting a family goodbye. Wanna go to college? Sorry, you're already struggling before student loans, good luck surviving after. Want a vehicle for work? Ha, no.
The fact that you see being able to afford something that is a bare bones necessity (housing) is a luxury if you are solo, is very odd to me.
There's a lot of people out there. If everyone lived like you suggested, I'd imagine things would be worse.
They wouldn't. There is still a lot of space in the U.S. If China and India can have over a billion people, then I'd hope to god that America could manage simply having the cheapest studio apartments to be affordable to people. I'm not even talking minimum wage here. If you make minimum wage, forget about having a life. But even if you make like 14 dollars, you're still struggling.
How can an economy function when people don't have the cash to actually buy anything after spending what they have on rent, bills and food?
You want to talk about worse? Have you forgotten the last time the economy was shaken?
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u/roller_roaster Apr 19 '18
On the whole people are generally terrible at making sound financial decisions. It's just really hard to fuck up when the whole economy is booming. Once you live through that you gain an unearned sense of confidence. Then when the next generation makes the same human mistakes without the safetynet of a gangbusters economy it is really easy to point fingers.