duh
Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
201–210 of 359 posts
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s 2+ hours per day of your life that you’re never getting back. You can always make more money, but time lost is gone forever. How much is 2x5x52 = 520 hours worth to you? If you’re selling your time for even just $100/hour that’s $52,000/year right there. With a 300k salary your hour is worth way more than $100. For your family, it’s priceless.
300k a year post tax, 50 weeks a year, 50 hours a week, that's $120 an hour. If it takes an extra hour a day and $500 a month that's $3000 to save a month in housing costs
Don’t forget to take transportation cost out of your $3000 per month.
I live across the street from the office and yes the rent is stupid, but my commute is a 5 minute walk.
And rent is still stupid in a 30min radius (for a total of 1h/day). You really have to go 1h+ radius to make a significant dent in rent around here (SF).
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were smarter you'd have commuted in from the suburbs and banked the money for retirement.
That’s 2+ hours per day of your life that you’re never getting back. You can always make more money, but time lost is gone forever. How much is 2x5x52 = 520 hours worth to you? If you’re selling your time for even just $100/hour that’s $52,000/year right there. With a 300k salary your hour is worth way more than $100. For your family, it’s priceless.
If you commute by train it’s not all necessarily wasted time. You can read, play games, listen to podcasts, etc.
I always read many more books when I commuted than when I didn’t commute. I find myself making new year’s resolutions to read more. But it was easy when I had the commute as a forcing function. (Not having internet on the subway probably helped...)
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, if your goals and chosen locale are not identical to your parents, you can sell their house for cash and use the cash to buy a house in your chosen locale. In practice, a large percentage of the population are getting screwed because a.) their parents lost their home in the foreclosure crisis, the bank repossessed it, and it got sold to a private investor b.) their parents had inadequate savings and needed…
I think it is even simpler than that. According to wiki, life expectancy in USA is roughly 80 years. If the children are had at roughly 25-30 years, by the time property is inherited, children are 50-55 - age when they are expected to have grown their own children, not the best age to start a family. Under the same assumptions, grandchildren are 20-30, therefore at a good age to inherit the property. Yet, if we facto…
Your fertility rate math is off - it might be 3.25 grandchildren/grandparent, but each grandchild has 4 grandparents (barring edge-cases like incest or remarriage). If you account for property typically being owned by couples, it's only 2 grandcouples, but this is offset by your spouse having 2 grandcouples as well. As long as fertility rate Your comment about timing is right-on though: most couples are expected to have the house & kid before the grandparents die.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sane zoning laws would be much easier and do a lot more to ease the burden on people (I currently live in an “OMG no high rises! Won’t someone think of the neighborhood character!?” city and the rent is ridiculous). We just have to have the political will to change them, which unfortunately means angering very powerful monied interests, including Betty and Edgar who really love their now-valued-at-$500,000 house next…
This is bang on. Looking at the graph look where Harris County (Houston) and Dallas are. If the graphs were plotted with increase in population against the change in fertility then those places would be outliers. Texas zoning and tax on houses work. The funny thing about housing prices is that a state in the US has handled house prices so well with an economy that is doing well but Texas is often ignored in these dis…
Thousands of acres with mcmansions in gated HOAs and no walkability sounds terrible.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's saying that as absolute incomes get higher, commuting cost as a percentage of income drops, because commuting cost is largely fixed regardless of income. And so it makes more sense to live in a low-COL region and commute to a high-COL region. For the average person, flying to work every day is unrealistic. If you are making $1M/year, it suddenly becomes very realistic. Same day roundtrips between SFO and…
Why would you commute for 6 hours for $200 when you could stay in a hotel during the week? What's the point in going "home" to sleep?
The thought-experiment that started this thread assumes that rent in SF would reach $750K/year if salaries were $1M/year. Hotel rates are unlikely to stay at $200/night if rent is $750K/year. If they rise proportionally, expect hotel rates of ~$4000/night at that price level.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's saying that as absolute incomes get higher, commuting cost as a percentage of income drops, because commuting cost is largely fixed regardless of income. And so it makes more sense to live in a low-COL region and commute to a high-COL region. For the average person, flying to work every day is unrealistic. If you are making $1M/year, it suddenly becomes very realistic. Same day roundtrips between SFO and…
Why would you commute for 6 hours for $200 when you could stay in a hotel during the week? What's the point in going "home" to sleep?
> Why would you commute for 6 hours for $200 when you could stay in a hotel during the week?
Tax residency.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
In pretty much every analysis involving housing costs, I try to mention that percentage of income spent on housing is not a great metric. A better metric is absolute income minus housing costs. All else being equal, I would gladly earn $1 million per year and spend 75% of it on rent, because that remaining 25% would be a heck of a lot of money. I doubt this metric would significantly change the conclusions of this ar…
It’s not about you , it’s about aggregate housing costs. If everyone was earning $1mn and spending $750k on rent, the remaining $250k may not be a lot of money. But of course you’re right, everything else being equal I would also be happy to earn $1bn and spend 99% on rent.
I guess his point is that what is important is the amount of money that is left after paying rent that you can use to raise kids (at least in this context).
An homeless person spends 0% of his income in rent, but he's not in a good position to raise kids
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#209From previous: " In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white…
In pretty much every analysis involving housing costs, I try to mention that percentage of income spent on housing is not a great metric. A better metric is absolute income minus housing costs. All else being equal, I would gladly earn $1 million per year and spend 75% of it on rent, because that remaining 25% would be a heck of a lot of money. I doubt this metric would significantly change the conclusions of this ar…
If you are earning a million a year you are in the outliers where percentage cost is fairly irrelevant. For people on "normal" salaries it makes more sense to use a percentage.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#210Speaking for the UK, it is certainly the case that couples put off having children until they've bought their own home, and the shameful reason for this is that renters have no security of tenure here. Unless you're in state subsided social housing you live with the permanent threat of being turfed out of your home at only two months notice, for no better reason than the landlord wants to do something else with it. Finding a new home and organizing a move is difficult and unsettling enough for a young working couple, but with children involved its on another level, not least because it could well mean a change of school, or result in siblings in different schools.