281–290 of 350 posts
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Suppose your odds of landing in that exact scenerio are .001%. If you are unlucky, should we pay for you? What about your kids? It seems valuable to society to not have old, homeless people causing trouble. But that's just me.
That .001% is what charity is for. Personally, I think people should pay the price for their stupidity. Subsidizing stupidity never works out in the end.
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Because I keep seeing articles pop up over the last few years trying to convince me that suburbs are basically evil incarnate for some reason. It gets to the point where it feels like a political platform.
There's definitely a political platform here. Economic models claiming suburbs are beyond bankrupt and destined for failure. [1] Apparently my property taxes can't even cover the cost of pavement and water mains, and yet we just built a new school, and are in the process of planning a $20 million library. [1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
From the link: "If they operated on accrual accounting -- where you account for your long term liabilities -- instead of a cash basis -- where you don't -- they would have been bankrupt decades ago"
The PF analogy to what you're saying is "yeah I'm dipping into savings to make mortgage payments and need to replace my roof next year and repair a major crack in the foundation. But they let me open a credit card and get a loan for a car, so what's the problem?"
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It is honestly worth your while to pay off your mortgage as soon as humanly possible.
Not necessarily – interest rates are exceptionally low in places. My own mortgage is around the 1% mark – it's more efficient to invest the money that would otherwise be used to pay it off. (That's not to say that there are no other reasons to pay off the mortgage – owning a home outright is a great security to have.)
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>It's not just the salary. It's also the opportunities to do things as in for the SF Bay Area we can go to wine country one weekend, go snow boarding another, sail, surf, hike; there's a lot of stuff to do here. You can do all of those same things just living an hour east of SF.
True with those examples. I live 20 minutes out of Seattle. I have hundreds of restaurants, every movie in theaters, hundreds of dance clubs/bars/social clubs within a 20 minute drive. I can't get a well-paying job, or access to any of the above without being close to the city.
I liked the visualization and data, but I don't think it makes sense to compare home prices to wages w/o considering alternatives to home ownership. Home prices don't exit in a vacuum. That is, if a home is 10x the median salary, you can't really say "well, if I didn't buy a home I could work 10 years less." That's because the alternative to buying is renting, which is also expensive. So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k…
You can sublet and pay people in cash for a lot less than the official renting price. This is particularly true in places with high real estate prices like LA, NY, NJ and SF where there is rent control. Thus it incentivizes long-term tenants to sublet for a sub-market price. You can't really buy a house in such a fashion though.
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For the data, the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey provides affordability data for many countries and cities: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf The top 10 least affordable with respect to median price/income ratios: China Hong Kong 18.1 Australia Sydney, NSW, 12.2 Canada Vancouver, BC 11.8 N.Z. Auckland 10.0 U.S. San Jose, CA 9.6 Australia Melbourne, VIC 9.5 U.S. Honolulu, HI 9.4 U.S. Los Angel…
Wait... Bournemouth and Dorset!?!?
I liked the visualization and data, but I don't think it makes sense to compare home prices to wages w/o considering alternatives to home ownership. Home prices don't exit in a vacuum. That is, if a home is 10x the median salary, you can't really say "well, if I didn't buy a home I could work 10 years less." That's because the alternative to buying is renting, which is also expensive. So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k…
You also have to factor in the opportunity cost of what you could've done with that down payment (e.g. What would a $100k downpayment invested for 30 years in the stock market be worth vs how much is that worth in your home in 30 years?) The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make some of these decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
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Vs NYC there's also Tahoe, the ocean is surfable, there are beaches, it doesn't smell like trash everywhere, the climate is less extreme (less hot humid in the summer no snow), more access to fresh local produce more of the year, etc etc. It's not like rent in Manhattan is cheap, and you'd likely make less in NYC vs SF unless you work in finance.
I probably should have been more specific. People like NYC for different reasons, like the nightlife / club scene where the SF Bay Area doesn't compare at all. There's also culture that you wouldn't find outside NYC like the fashion industry and even art. That said NYC isn't for me either but it is for a lot of people, which is why people endure finance to stay there. Since we're on the subject, LA is another compara…
But lots of people are plenty happy in the "boonies". They just have different interests, like doing more outdoor-oriented activities like hunting, hiking, fishing, or building their own workshops from scratch. Or maybe they're more cerebral and like the peace and quiet so they can focus on writing.
It's worth pointing out that far more people live outside of San Fransisco and New York (sure, throw in LA and Chicago, too) than inside those metropolitan areas.
Each of those cities is unique in different things. So they are part of the fatter part of a long thin tail. But that's not the same as "everyone wants to live here!"
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That .001% is what charity is for. Personally, I think people should pay the price for their stupidity. Subsidizing stupidity never works out in the end.
Next time, please provide a source for your percentages.
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Not necessarily – interest rates are exceptionally low in places. My own mortgage is around the 1% mark – it's more efficient to invest the money that would otherwise be used to pay it off. (That's not to say that there are no other reasons to pay off the mortgage – owning a home outright is a great security to have.)
1% is incredibly low. Where do you live, when did you take out the loan, and what are the terms? According to this[1] chart, the lowest 30 year mortgage rate in the past 40 years was about 3.5%. I'm curious how you got a loan with such a low rate. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NUh