Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 321 posts

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#131

Post by gg2488 »

I'm behind the paywall but I'm wondering if this is because, just maybe, younger people understand finances better. When I wanted to buy a house, I waited until I save up the 20%. I know plenty of friends in their late 20s and early 30s who have the same attitude. Me and my wife also paid for our wedding in cash, we waited until we could afford it. You have the millennial generation looking at their parents still working and we're desperately trying to achieve financial independence so we don't suffer the same fate. I see so many articles about how bad millennials are burdened with student loan debt, but that's made us more concerned about finances than any other generation before us.

So maybe it's less than we can't afford houses with high incomes. It's that we're less willing than our parents to take on financial risk instead of renting.

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#132

Post by aledalgrande »

soren_dahl wrote: post #111
aledalgrande wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is a lot of companies get smart and "pay by location". I've seen big cos from the Bay offering half the salary (before currency exchange) for workers in Vancouver.

Gitlab, for example. You can see the multiples in the json used for the salary calculator (eg. Vancouver 57.367 % of a SF salary): https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json

Nebraska has a higher factor than Vancouver :facepalm:

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#133

Post by mikebonnell »

swlkr wrote: post #119
sjdb77 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work is becoming more "real" by the day, so it's certainly possible in the age of the internet to work remotely in a low cost location while making a salary competitive with a higher cost of living city like SF/NY/LA.

I do this and I want other people to know it's possible too. I'm putting together a list of the best places to live for remote workers with families, hoping to turn it into a little website that you can filter by schools, available internet speeds, median house price, that sort of thing. Hopefully it will help someone out there when there's more data. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X2JihFpA97EEAMz8kD-j...

How would one contribute to this?

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#134

Post by bumby »

jriot wrote: post #98

I am 34 years old working remotely as data scientist, making $107k TC. My wife who I've been married to for 13 years is a stay-at-home mother as we have two children in grade school. Since they are in the school she is turning in our half-acre into a sustainable garden with chickens. We own our home, are financially comfortable while saving $1500 a month, and travel. We were planning a 2-month trip to Japan this upco…

You touched on the education without student loans is a major benefit to the military. Another is the ability to buy a home with no money down and not have to pay mortgage insurance. It's easy for those in the military to feel like life is passing them by as they witness cohorts graduating earlier etc. but those benefits can make a big difference in the long run (not to mention the intangibles you brought up).

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#135

Post by rwmurrayVT »

Yhippa wrote: post #121
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly don't need to be drowning in student loan debt to reach that. You could go to a state school and get an excellent job. That's just poor financial decision making. Where I live you could go to UVa, VT, or maybe VCU.

Don't forget the highly underrated community college systems in VA.

I hear community colleges put out there as an option to move into a 4 year state school often. I can't help but think it applies to many more states than I expected initially.

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#136

Post by KoftaBob »

Tehchops wrote: post #10

There's very few places where there is an overlap of "jobs that pay $100k" and "homes that can be afforded at $100k salary".

Austin and Chicago definitely fit in that overlap. On top of that, when you compare SF to say, Cleveland, sure the median salary in SF could be 2x as high, but the median home price is close to 10x as high.

NIMBYism is going to absolutely choke the bay area over time, and newer generations of startups, VCs, and accelerators will wise up and broaden their horizons. The frequently parroted argument of "SF has the best pool of engineering talent" only goes so far.

Especially when quality engineers can move wherever they want, and Stanford and UC Berkeley aren't pumping out nearly enough CS grads to justify the absurd cost of operating for startups to stay there.

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#137

Post by sjdb77 »

icedchai wrote: post #129
sjdb77 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah...seems to incentivize day trading.

Not really. It's only zero on long term capital gains if total income is below a certain threshold.

Isn't short term cap gains taxed like earned income, which below $50k a year is 0 in CA? For federal if you make <$52k (w/ standard deduction) you only pay like a 11% tax rate.

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#138

Post by dfxm12 »

jonheller wrote: post #87
dfxm12 wrote: post #19

I'm behind a paywall, so I'm sure they pick up on this, but the biggest problem I ran into when I thought I could afford a house was the down payment. You can make $100k (or less!) and quite easily afford a monthly mortgage payment, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have enough saved up for a down payment.

Agreed, but it's that way for a purpose no? Maybe not a whole 20%, but enough of a buffer so that you won't be underwater on a mortgage in a down housing market.

I don't mean to comment about how much a down payment should or shouldn't be, but that affording a house takes more than just money coming in (i.e. a good salary). You also need savings. This makes it hard for a lot of first time house buyers, and I think especially, young people, to buy.

Hopefully, you can save at a rate higher than the rate at which the down payment increases due to house prices generally going up.

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#139

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

rwmurrayVT wrote: post #101
chadlavi wrote: post #27

I know millennials with combined household incomes in excess of $200k who can't afford to buy, because huge student loans are required to get that kind of income if mommy and daddy aren't rich in the first place.

You certainly don't need to be drowning in student loan debt to reach that. You could go to a state school and get an excellent job. That's just poor financial decision making. Where I live you could go to UVa, VT, or maybe VCU.

You realize that out-of-state tuition for UVA is about $65k a year, right?

https://sfs.virginia.edu/cost/19-20

Re: $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home

#140

Post by mixmastamyk »

hadlock wrote: post #104
nxpnsv wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine the house you could build from 500000 Vietnamese beers...

Heineken actually, briefly, ran an experiment where they made the bottles more rectangular, so that they could be filled with earth and then cemented together as glass bricks: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-heineken-bo... Glass is a pretty good insulator and generally weather-proof, UV-resistant etc, and cheap to produce.

> In Sima Valley, California

That's Simi.

Post reply on HN