11–20 of 117 posts
The FED implicitly transferred trillions from poorer renters and young people to wealthy older homeowners.
Where I live, many of the houses were built by the same builder or at least using the same basic plan (I've even seen houses built 20 years later than mine with the same basic layout). My wife and I purchased in 2015. A short bit after, there was some regret as prices were still falling. I recently went to pick up my child at a classmate's house. They just purchased last year. I walked in and, sure enough, roughly th…
Have you try to inflation-adjust that? You may find the price jump is not that great for the last ~10 years.
Where I live, many of the houses were built by the same builder or at least using the same basic plan (I've even seen houses built 20 years later than mine with the same basic layout). My wife and I purchased in 2015. A short bit after, there was some regret as prices were still falling. I recently went to pick up my child at a classmate's house. They just purchased last year. I walked in and, sure enough, roughly th…
> it cost $300,000+ more. Have you try to inflation-adjust that? You may find the price jump is not that great for the last ~10 years.
Where I live, many of the houses were built by the same builder or at least using the same basic plan (I've even seen houses built 20 years later than mine with the same basic layout). My wife and I purchased in 2015. A short bit after, there was some regret as prices were still falling. I recently went to pick up my child at a classmate's house. They just purchased last year. I walked in and, sure enough, roughly th…
(EDIT: Inverse of) Median income to the average house price, across America, is at its highest point since the 80s (when we started measuring) [1].
Where I live, many of the houses were built by the same builder or at least using the same basic plan (I've even seen houses built 20 years later than mine with the same basic layout). My wife and I purchased in 2015. A short bit after, there was some regret as prices were still falling. I recently went to pick up my child at a classmate's house. They just purchased last year. I walked in and, sure enough, roughly th…
I'm a Millenial; my partner is on the cusp of Gen X. In terms of fucked generations, I'd argue those born in the early 80s are our currently most fucked (followed shortly by Gen Z). This is the generation that had perfectly-spaced financial crises in the dot-com and then financial crisis that wiped out two decades of aborted starts towards wealth. (In contrast, younger Millenals got the ZIRP era to build wealth and b…
I'm also not where I should be financially despite the lucrative field, compared to others in my field, due to several setbacks (and also in part because I never had a Silicon Valley job).
But thankfully I did choose the fairly lucrative field of software engineering, so even though I'm behind most other software engineers (including those younger than me), I'm still better off than most people around my age.
I also lucked out and finally bought my first house in 2018 before the big run up in prices. I had to get lucky on cryptocurrency to help afford the downpayment though (bought ~$300 worth of Ethereum at ~$20 and sold it at $1300 just before it crashed hard).
The FED implicitly transferred trillions from poorer renters and young people to wealthy older homeowners.
Why blame the Fed? The low interest rates that made it easy to buy homes (driving up the price) also should have made it cheap to build homes which would have driven down the price. It was local regulations that prevented building homes.
This is the primary way for citizens to acquire wealth too, and the primary source of boomer wealth. The politics of this thing transcends the current Red/Blue paradigm, at least until battle lines will get drawn with various policy prescriptions and the winner/losers of each of them chooses a side. Will be the biggest issue facing American politics for the next 10+ years I think while the Boomers age and try to cash…
In the US the boomers are in for a world of hurt. Senior care is extremely low quality, increasingly scarce, and already unaffordable. The US medical system is completely unprepared for that entire generation to age out. It is already a crisis. At least they can spend down money from their homes to pay for some of it. The subsequent generations probably won't be as lucky.
Calling it luck makes it sound like there are uncontrollable forces at work. However, these consequences are entirely downstream of artificial, man-made policies.