The fact that people experience this and then somehow don't say "burn it all down" is miraculous.

I was unable to obtain a mortgage for a decade because LexisNexis Risk Solutions was reporting a judgement inaccurately on my risk profile that they would not remove until I had a lawyer file suit against them and notified the CFPB. I received a $600 check as part of a class action settlement. I was lucky, and had the means to obtain creative financing when needed. Others are not so lucky.

I totally understand people who want to burn parts of the system down. Sometimes, they’re not wrong.

I agree 100%; what can a layman like me do to fix it?

You’re not going to like my answer. I don’t like my answer. It’s never ending work.

Always vote, run for office if you can, and/or become and stay engaged as a citizen activist. See something? Report it to regulators. Think something’s up? Go digging. Engage with other folks who are doing the same and provide logistical support if able to.

I spend thousands of dollars a year on FOIA fees and attorney opinion and correspondence costs, but I have the means and the time. Overarching thesis is “Find someone to help and help them.” -DeviantOllam [1] of “Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun.” Saintcon talk fame [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/deviantollam

[2] https://youtu.be/6ihrGNGesfI

I think the answer I was expecting was that it's a two-step process: 1) Be lucky, and 2) Don't be unlucky. My next-door neighbor is actually a local politician, but her party affiliation is the one I dislike, so I'm getting a life-lesson in humility.

I’ve never been good at delivering bad news, my apologies.

I don't know if this is what you intend, but it sounds like you're baiting an answer about vigilante style "justice" to the executives/board members of these misbehaving corporations.

That would be counterproductive and probably only cause them to treat us with less empathy than they do already.

I'm not advocating for "vigilante justice" either, but if that's the clearest / first thought you have when someone authentically asks "what can I do," that's probably a problem :P

Vote: both with your actual vote, and with your money.

The big banks lost all my business years ago. It's occasionally inconvenient, but overall I'm very happy with the decision.

If possible, leave USA. There are political systems around the world that aren’t broken and there are some that are actually being fixed by voters (e.g. Australia). But USA is broken for at least our lifetimes.

You only live once.

The reason those other places around the world aren’t broken* is because people had the mentality of putting in hard work toward the future. If everyone shared what you thought and fled at a moment of hardship, the whole world would go to shit really fast.

*your opinion, not mine. I don’t think USA is that bad of a place and I don’t put Australia on a pedestal.

If this is true, who is going to fix it and where will they come from?

If this is not true, then ... well then you're just wrong.

I’m leaving for Western Europe, all of the tools I need for advocacy and accountability work just fine from over there (laptop and mobile device are all that is required). I’m unable to run for office, I am not an ideal candidate for various reasons. I want the country improved long term, but am unwilling to suffer in the short term because of, for lack of a better words, the malevolent and troglodytes. In the case of voting, you can’t persuade some people even with evidence and data. You might just have to wait for old people to age out (1.8 million voters over the age of 55 age out every year) and younger folks (open to new ideas and mental models) to come of age, before there are improved chances of success. If you have to wait somewhere, don’t wait here if you don’t have to (life lesson: never suffer needlessly).

(I also contribute time to helping anyone wanting to expat out of the US get to higher quality jurisdictions, Europe, Australia, etc)

I grew up in Western Europe. I intend to die in the US.

Enjoy (genuinely). I don’t know where I’ll die, I just know where I don’t want to live. Everything is temporary, and I don’t have much hope near term here.

I don’t anticipate taking advantage of the advice, but can you share any references on navigating such a long term move to Europe? I’ve been told Portugal is a good starting point.

https://youtube.com/@OurRichJourney (Specially the videos about Portugal, not general investing advice videos)

https://old.reddit.com/r/expatFIRE (search for “Portugal D7 visa”)

What's your opinion on Canada jurisdiction ?

Solid jurisdiction to consider but too cold for my tastes and parts are expensive. If you can afford Vancouver or Toronto, or don’t mind living in Calgary or Montreal (one of my favorite places on Earth when warm, also the safest city in North America) instead, it’s a fine place to expat to while remaining close to US soil.

I think the real lesson, rather than "leave the USA", is "have a close-knit support structure".

The CFPB is so good. It's one of a small number of federal agencies that actually has teeth. I went 30 rounds with PNC after they devoured what was left of Simple before someone suggested filing a CFPB complaint. Basically, I received some mail for the account despite being assured it was closed before the Simple closure.

I asked for a letter stating in no uncertain terms that the account was closed and that I wouldn't be liable for anything if they screwed up. They bombarded me with emails and calls for a week trying to avoid working through the CFPB before finally answering the complaint with what I asked for. I was adamant that it happen with the CFPB so their statement would be on file. Now the PDF is there if the bank gives me any trouble.

People report similar success filing FCC complaints to get action from phone companies and ISPs that otherwise ignore them.

> The CFPB is so good. It's one of a small number of federal agencies that actually has teeth.

Naturally, the GOP has been trying to gut it for years.

They often do say "burn it all down".... But in the process of losing their home and car they end up homeless or in public housing. Since "everyone" knows folks on the streets and on welfare/assistance programs are just scum who are gaming the system to take away what hard-working, honest people earn (in the form of taxes), their pleas are ignored.

Ever wonder why the rich folks are often the loudest about that sort of framing? It's (in part anyway) because it lets them get away with the sort of shenanigans Well's Fargo just got slapped on the wrist for.

I just watched a younger man bring his elderly and handicapped father into a Planet Fitness to take a shower because they were both homeless.

I am homeless as well.

That fine should all go to ending homlessness. And if you vote for the D or R you are voting for the same party; the O Party, as in Oligarchs.

I'm sorry but if one thing America should have learned over the last six years is that the two parties are nothing alike, equating them as the same and making a poor faith effort that voting is useless is extremely moronic.

It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs...if you're wealthy enough, you can afford to distinguish between the two parties; if you're not, the two parties are the exact same.

I sympathize with that view, but nearly every decision you make, every day, at every price level, about everything, is a choice between flawed alternatives.

Sure they're different, my point being people only care about the differences once they've reached a certain comfort level.

Neither party is willing to solve homelessness by actually fucking housing people, and you're calling a homeless person a moron because their assessment of the two parties which, to avoid disturbing the existing economic order, mutually assent to that permanent state of crisis, doesn't include enough conciliatory language for you about how Orange Man Bad? Jesus Christ.

So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself.

I don't agree with this. I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing. Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

Treating the "homelessness" as a single problem is naive. I live near homeless encampments and near people who have been quietly living out of their vehicles for 5+ years. Some percentage of the homeless population can be fixed with cheaper housing. Some percentage of people can avoid being homeless altogether with cheaper housing. And some percentage will be homeless regardless of how cheap the housing is (i guess unless it's free and they agree to not break whatever rules/laws apply to them).

Meanwhile both sides just shout at each other and funnel millions of dollars into groups that don't make any real progress and have no accountability. It's the same useless polarization that exists in politics except I'm not even sure it's a political issue at this point given how 1-party the place i live in is.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

I'm happy to put it all out there so people can judge where I'm coming from.

I'm not an expert on homelessness, either in a scientific sense or a first-hand one. I have a few long-term friendships with people who have at various points been homeless for a year or more (some traveling, some local to an area). For a couple years, I worked near a few hotspots for where homeless people would gather during the day and/or sleep at night in the downtown of a relatively small city. In college, I often had neighborly chats with the local homeless people who regularly went through the dumpsters in my apartment complex's parking lot. We'd chat whenever we met while I walked out there to take out the trash or let my dog go potty. Shortly after I graduated, some friends (now moved away, employed, and safely housed up!) who were homeless (then as well as when I first met them) moved in with me for a few months when the weather around us was utterly brutal and physically dangerous for them. When it feels safe (and I'm not on my way to appointment), which is pretty often, I stick around to chat a bit when a stranger approaches me to beg or vent about their life or meet my dog or whatever, whether they seem likely to be homeless or not.

I have seen people violently raving to themselves or at passersby, and I have seen people fight viciously over spaces in which to sleep or beg. I've conversed with people who seemed very lucid and insightful in some ways and paranoid or mentally disorganized in others. I have nervously avoided some people who were so agitated and incoherent that it made me feel unsafe. But admittedly, I have not ever lived in a huge city which has truly massive encampments of desperate people.

Over the years, I have talked in depth with people, including presently and formerly homeless people, about housing, employment, physical health, mental health, capitalism, familial rejection/abandonment, drug addiction, etc., and how those things relate to homelessness.

Personally, I think homelessness is a problem that requires a multifaceted approach to make people physically and financially secure, and to embed them in meaningful personal and professional supporting relationships in their communities. I think that approaches to addressing homelessness falling under the broad banner of 'housing first' are humane, scientific, and workable. And to me, access to housing as a public good is indeed way more important than promoting individual ownership of single-family homes (fwiw, like you, I'm a renter who'd rather not be).

But my main point in that remark you're replying to is that it's useless and incredibly tone-deaf to scold someone who is currently struggling with that level of hardship and societal rejection/abandonment for not buying into the prevailing political system, or for having a perspective in which the important similarities between the two parties are more salient than their differences.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself.

Who says it has to be your tax money? There are plenty of millionaires and billionaires in this country, and yet for some reason the only solutions that ever get traction are to put the tax burden on literally everyone other than the people with the most wealth. Hmm, gee, I wonder why? Probably nothing to do with the political duopoly said millionaires and billionaires bankroll, right?

> I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing.

It definitionally can and is solved by building housing for the people who lack housing.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates

Yes.

> While I cannot afford to buy a house myself

Affordable housing should be a right to everyone. Anyone, including you, should have the option to live in affordable housing that is nice, ideally with amenities and gardens and common areas if they cannot afford to pay for that on their own. Public housing, like it is in some other countries, should be not a stigmatized fallback but the normalized default. And that’s what the property taxes on the home I currently own should be paying for, so if — for whatever reason — I can no longer afford it or no longer want it, I can move into a dignified public housing accommodation too.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before

I have. And my conclusion doesn’t change— they should have housing. Nice housing and the help they need to get back on their feet. We all should.

The parties are different in all the ways that don’t matter.

This is an insane statement. Abortion rights do matter. Voting for veterans and 9/11 firefighters to get healthcare matters. Restricting voting right matters [0]. Not giving in to radical christians (as a christian myself) matters.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2pwhvt/the_differ...

Don’t you see the game they’re playing with you? All those things listed in the thread they haven’t passed. It’s not because one party wants it any other party doesn’t. It’s because they both don’t want them and they play the game of “we don’t have enough votes“. It’s like how Obama could’ve codified roe versus wade in the law, but never did.

> All those things listed in the thread they haven’t passed

He says while confronted with a list of every Democrat voting for important things, and important things ultimately not passing because Republicans block it.

> It’s not because one party wants it any other party doesn’t

It's literally only that. You can look at their voting records.

> It’s like how Obama could’ve codified roe versus wade in the law

Obama had a 2 month window of a supermajority, which he used to push the biggest healthcare reform the US has ever seen.

It's only a matter of time before that miracle starts to wear off - assuming it hasn't already started to wear off.

I'm reminded of this song by the late Trevor Moore: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TMHCw3RqulY

what an incredible loss. he was a national treasure.

Reminds me of It's a Wonderful Life.

I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face?

Seems to me it's better to try and be kind, and treat others right despite your horrible situation. The person you're treating cruelly because of your personal trauma could easily be going through a trauma worse than yours.

Apologies if I misunderstood what you were getting at, though. I wasn't clear on which social boundaries you'd propose to exempt people from.

No clue why you're being downvoted, what you say is the correct response. Suffering is all around us and deep, but that's not license to inflict more of it on others.

It ain't a license, true, but I have a much harder time blaming the one lashing out due to suffering than I do blaming the one inflicting that suffering in the first place.

Banks would rightly collapse if people took their business to credit unions. No random violence required.

the issue is that it's really, really hard to get that message out to everyone and have them understand the importance and the reasoning.

to paraphrase Frank Herbert, it is the mark of a human that they will remain in the trap, that they can kill the hunter and thus remove a threat to their species.

Credit unions are all the rage when the economy is roaring, but they are typically the first to run into issues or fold on first sight of troubled waters. Their history is full of examples of having to be rescued by the federal government, including all the times commercial banks had to be rescued.

The main difference in my view is struggling commercial banks get absorbed, where as struggling credit unions close.

I am not sure which one is better, but I am wary of all the calls to go all in on credit unions. They've been available for almost a century now. They have a noble goal in that they've always tried to serve those in need, but I am not sure they are the solution.

I did a thought experiment. If FDIC and NCUA deposit insurance didn't exist, would I trust a bank of a credit union more with my deposits? I landed with credit unions due to the overt malfeasance of banks.

The FDIC exists to keep banks afloat, because they're untrustworthy on their own.

If everyone moved their money to credit unions, they'd become just as bad as banks.

I don't consider size to be the primary determiner of how banks operate re: good or bad. I consider the ownership model to primarily determine incentives and behavior. They are, of course, are not uncorrelated, but rather when attributing primary cause, I see credit unions incentives aligned with their clientele because they are one and the same. Whereas banks have a larger discrepancy between owners and customers.

A bank exists to serve the interests of their shareholders, a credit union exists to serve the interests of their members. Unless you happen to be a significant shareholder in your bank, credit unions are more aligned with your interests.

All things exist to serve the interests of itself.

I don't think much of this is true. While corporate credit unions did participate in TARP[0], for example, that's not the common perception. Not only were they primarily corporate credit unions rather than consumer credit unions, far fewer of them participated in the program than banks: around 20% as many.

For people, credit union accounts are federally insured just like bank accounts are, but credit unions are typically much more resilient than banks given the additional restrictions on how much leverage they can engage in. They close less often than banks, and also seem to be more likely to merge than close[1], contrary to your claim.

You're welcome to keep banking elsewhere, but it's all credit unions for me and my extended family.

0. https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/bank-culture/tarp-on-cred...

1. https://www.bankrate.com/banking/credit-unions/list-of-faile...

Perhaps I summarized incorrectly, I was getting most of that information from here https://ncua.gov/about-ncua/historical-timeline

(your linked sources are horrible sources just in case you were not aware: both are paid media fronts designed to drive revenue through clicks, not reliable sources)

My bad on the sources, I searched for links to support my memories, and didn't pay close attention.

Good question, but I don't know. I'm not trying to recommend anything. Not sure it's even solvable.

Reading this article prompted this observation about myself.

I do wonder how often I have been wrong to get frustrated with someone, rather than extend more grace. I'll try to remember to consider this in the future.

The alternative is to hold the institutions that inflict this suffering on people proportionately accountable for it.

One of the reasons we don't, is because the socially required reaction to this abuse is to suck it up, and suffer in silence.

What is the equivalent of a bank having its home wrongly taken away from it? Locking the doors on one of its branch offices and boarding it up for a few months?

There's an enormous level of asymmetry in the damage a large institution can inflict on a person, either by accident, or malice, compared the reverse. And that's not okay, and we shouldn't consider it to be okay. We need to do better.

The solution is to weaken the liability limitation of LLCs. If a company willfully breaks the law, its shareholders need to be held responsible, in proportion to their ability to affect change in the the company.

That's not the problem. Wells Fargo shareholders won't be proportionately punished for this, regardless of whether it's an LLC or not. The root of the problem is that the firm itself isn't being proportionately punished.

Solve the second problem, and then maybe the first one will become the bottleneck.

There was that one guy who showed up at the bank with a moving truck, sheriff's deputies, a lawyer, and a court order to seize the bank branch's assets. When they started to take the bank manager's desk and chair, that finally convinced them to pay attention and pay up.

But this was after they tried to steal his home (which they didn't even have a mortgage on) and dragged him through court and refused to pay the court costs.

So, not optimal, but still something that should be happening more frequently. If a few hundred thousand bank branches got repo'd every year, one for each time they ripped someone off, that should cause them to take notice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wronged-homeowners-reposses...

> I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face?

I don't mean to put words in obblekk's mouth (text box) so what I perceived them as meaning is: I don't think the person you're replying to was advocating for direct person-on-person action. When we see people protesting or pushing back against or loudly saying "this is wrong and I won't have it and neither should you" kinds of things, we should consider how our personal situation could rapidly change to be like theirs. And, in a lot of cases, would have been like theirs but for some skill at leveraging a few strokes of uncontrollable luck.

To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?"

> To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?

Because if total salary income were uniformly distributed across the population, the average would be like $80,000 a year.

casting aside a debate of whether its true every job is 80k/yr...lets say it is. What then? the market...the free market would supposedly adjust for all required goods

I'm failing to see the problem with that. Sure, $80k is less than $90k, but it's a hell of a lot better than what the vast majority of Americans currently enjoy.

I'm responding to the point of why people don't ask "why can't I have that too?" The answer is because it's literally impossible--everyone can't be above average. I myself don't think a flat income distribution would necessarily be bad. But I think most people think garbage men should make less than the average income, and doctors or programmers should make more than the average income. We can argue about how much more and how much less, but if you take any level of inequality as a premise, you can't reconcile garbage men making $90k.

And that overlooks that whatever measures would be needed to flatten the income distribution like that would also shrink the overall pie, as in Europe. The fact is that, even accounting for what the OECD calls "transfers in kind" (such as provision of government health insurance) American households have a lot more disposable income than European households: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (select the "gross, incl. social transfers in kind" drop down under "perspectives").

Americans aren't irrational. The majority is deliberately voting for an economy that produces more disposable income for the top 60%, at the expense of the safety net for the bottom 40%. This feature of the economy is reinforced over time due to immigration. Europeans migrate here to work as programmers, because they can make $500k/year in San Francisco versus $150k/year in Germany. My immigrant mom just came back from a long trip to Australia the other day, complaining how "small and close together the houses were." She said "America is really a land of opportunity. You can get rich here. You can't get rich in Australia." She doesn't care about communities suffering in generational poverty in Appalachia or Baltimore. And she is a party-line Democrat voter!

My understanding was that the GP wasn't saying that people should commit violence in the face of such a severe personal and institutional tragedy, but that we have this idea that people in tough enough situations reach a point where they're no longer in a place to act rationally. The surprise is that more people don't snap.

> then losing their home for no reason

Do we have more detail on how these homes were lost? It sounds like Wells Fargo refused, improperly, to modify a mortgage.

This is what it said

> On home loans, the CFPB said the bank improperly denied mortgage modifications over a seven-year span, with some customers losing their homes.

This says it started in 2011 (maybe earlier). If they already had a mortgage, in a good labor and good housing market, I doubt that many people actually lost their homes who wouldn't lose them anyway. Mortgage modifications are for people already behind on their payments.

I have a question, do people really protest in designated areas in the US? I know sometimes there are riots but from what I can see on the media it looks like people gather somewhere close to the subject and chant and wave banners.

I find it strange because in Europe the norm is to disturb the daily life. Farmers spray policemen with milk, train operators stop working, the younger and more anarchist ones burn cars and clash with the police, the more pacifist ones tie or glue themselves to something making a huge scene.

In the US, the police (and people not involved in the protests) will happily beat you up, run you over, or shoot and kill you for disruptive protests.

I mean, they won't just happily do _all_ of that. You're exaggerating a bit and using extreme cases as if they were the norm. In particular you may say this with a straight face only if you're unaware of how this actually is the common reality of other countries.

We've all heard of cases of police running over crowds in some circumstances, or of the odd shooting (actually when?). But that's not what the average protester in the US will realistically, honestly deal with on the average protest.

I've participated in quite a bit of peaceful protesting. I've never been shot at, but the number of times I've been teargassed for being in a park or on a sidewalk during the "permitted hours" and in the "designated zone" is much higher than the expected 0.

At least 830 documented incidents in 2020 including over 140 police violence incidents against journalists specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_violence_incide...

There have been 104 incidents of vehicles driving into protests between May 27 and September 27, 2020, with two fatalities in that time period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vehicle-ramming_incide...

While police violence is a problem, this comment is wildly off base.

I don't think it's wildly off base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-RWsl7l5c

This is a noteworthy outlier that received significant criticism. It is not normative. And while pepper spray is non trivial, it is a far cry from:

> happily beat you up, run you over, or shoot and kill you for disruptive protests.

Be fair. They'll do that for peaceful non-disruptive protests. Usually the term riot is applied after the cops start tear-gassing and the news can re-frame footage of people running away as "dangerous rioters".

Fun fact: most people arrested at protests end up arrested because they try to follow police instructions to disperse. The police keep directing them into a closed off area (aka bottling) and then arrest them in for failure to disperse.

In the US I bet any farmer who sprays police with milk would be instantly shot

Considering the inability of US police to successfully shoot farmers who spray police with bullets I think your bet might fail.

But consider this: what if the farmers have a darker skin color

Two years ago, we had protesters literally set police precinct on fire, and not only nobody got shot, but in fact nobody faced any consequences.

They didn't just set it on fire, they literally burned it to the ground. I watched live streams of the police abandoning the precinct building.

Elsewhere, people were firing fireworks mortars into occupied federal buildings, with little to no recourse.

"Good" protesters were overshadowed in media coverage of "bad" protesters, but I also saw a grocery store get completely ransacked for no reason other than people decided they could. There was so much damage that the store was closed for months to renovate, turning a poor neighborhood into a food desert.

Those "bad" protesters were from the "pro police" side: https://www.police1.com/george-floyd-protest/articles/man-se...

According to the article, only one of the five people charged was a member of the boogaloo boys, and he was charged for firing a weapon; he wasn't involved in any of the arson charges.

Also note the entire crowd chanting "burn it down".

This is a lie. They were convicted and sentenced to prison: https://www.police1.com/george-floyd-protest/articles/man-se...

Also worth noting that the people who started the fire were there because they thought people protesting police violence was bad - they weren't dangerous liberals or antifa or whatever other nonsense you'll spew: they were far-right "bugaloo boys"

Just remember they were 'fiery but mostly peaceful' protests according to the mainstream media.

> I have a question, do people really protest in designated areas in the US?

No, people can protest wherever they want as a rule, under the freedom of assembly clause in the first amendment. It's pretty clear, and is well established (as are the exceptions). The wording of Article 12 in the E.U. fundamental rights charter is, by my reading, purposefully more restrictive than how the Supreme Court has generally interpreted "Freedom of Assembly" in the U.S., but I am not an expert on that.

In practice, you sometimes see things like "Free Speech Zones", which are indeed Orwellian, but also controversial and exceptional. You shouldn't think of them as the rule, because you also see things like the CHOP in Seattle.

A long time ago someone wrote, "they have nothing to lose but their chains" and predicted massive social upheaval as a result. That person felt this was an inevitable consequence of capitalism and its tendency to concentrate wealth. I suspect they were imagining people like in your example, only worse off.

Maybe redirecting that anger against another segment of society is a way to avoid social upheaval while maintaining the status quo? That anger does seem prone to being co-opted, though.

That "person" was Rousseau and his writings contributed to the French Revolution.

Close. It was Marx I was thinking of. Not endorsing him, but it's interesting to consider historical materialism and today's events -- especially in light of the parent's comment.

It is with bitterness and misery people learn that sometimes violence is neccessary.

I agree, but why do we need to make it 50+ hours? What if they only worked 35 hours a week with horrible shifts at different times and no consistency at a non-physically demanding job? Work is still work unless you’re living your passion, the mainstream outside of tech work to put food on the table and they put up with a lot compared to the worst days we have in tech. Anyway just frustrated lately with this idea you have to work 60 or 80 hours a week instead of strategically.

Not the GP but I use 50+ hours as an example often because most people have worked unpaid overtime at one point in their life. Most people haven't done your strangely specific multi-job 35 hour thing.

It's about having a relatable example, that's it.

> I feel so much cognitive dissonance realizing that there are hard working people literally losing their home and shelter wrongly while I might be sitting across from them at any time, expecting them to behave within normal social boundaries.

It makes one realize that if you were put in such a disastrous position in life, the theoretical concept of an armed marxist uprising is not the most absurd thing ever conceived. And what root causes might possibly motivate groups of people towards such a thing.

The other poster replying to the same thread here says:

> " The fact that people experience this and then somehow don't say "burn it all down" is miraculous. "

I can’t even afford a home right now on a tech salary with sky high rent paying off my landlords 2% refi’d mortgage and student loans making it impossible at 6-7% fed interest rate hikes and inflated home prices after the insane COVID housing price bubble increase.

I feel like life won’t start for another 5+ years for people like me, unless we gamble on being underwater on an inflated mortgage entering at the peak of the housing market paying more for a fraction of the home you could get just 1-2 year ago. You can’t even refi an underwater mortgage, anyone have anny advice for people in my unenviable position?

> an inflated mortgage entering at the peak of the housing market

We are well past the peak of the housing market.

Houses aren't selling in hours anymore, sure. A ton in my area are sitting for days, but prices haven't come down all that much.

Median days on market is up, sale-to-list is back below 100%, price drops are a thing again, etc. Come spring, we should see the first normal housing market since before the pandemic.

Same here. I wasn't financially prepared to buy a house at insanely inflated Covid prices while interest rates were down in the 2% range, and I'm not excited to to buy a house at 7% while prices are still substantially higher than pre-Covid levels. Meanwhile rentals for anything other than a tiny box are just as expensive as a mortgage at those rates.

I don't understand how people who do not have 6-figure tech salaries are expected to have anything other than a poverty lifestyle when housing is so expensive.

I also don't understand these well-dressed young families parading around Boston and New York with their expensive baby carriages and $75k SUVs. Did I miss a memo on how to get rich at 30? Are they all going broke living like that? Did they all inherit a lot of money? Do they live in tiny apartments?

You and me both. Please share the memo when you it.

You would be surprised at how much family help those families often have. I’m not talking generational wealth. Often just upper middle class parents who saved prudently and did well in the real estate market who can afford to gift $500,000 for a house.

Good point, and I'm not personally so far removed from this same category.

But it's extremely disappointing and frustrating to feel like I personally will not be able to do this for my own children, despite having a higher income than most people my age.

I wish people would stop referring to 'pre-Covid levels'. We're never going back to that. At this point, it's been years. The government inflated away everyone's wealth & debt, what we got was rampant inflation. There is no 'undo' button on this.

All it takes to "undo" it is for inflation to slow down (already happening/happened), and wages to increase a little faster than inflation. A few years of that, and it will effectively be as if never happened (in aggregate, anyway).

No, that simply isn't possible. Slowing inflation means price continuing to rise.

wages increasing faster than inflation means that effective (sometimes called "real") prices fall.

If in year N an item costs $1000 and you earn $10k a year, but in year N+M the item costs $1100 but you earn $12k a year, the real price of the item has gone down.

Yeah, except we're talking about returning to pre-Covid levels. Not whatever you just made up.

That would imply prices return to the previous levels. That will never happen with inflation.

No, it doesn't mean that at all. Real prices are a function of the ratio between the cost and earnings. If earnings rise faster than cost, real prices fall.

Now, whether or not that's a likely scenario is a separate question, but it is absolutely not impossible and has happened before.

Have you ever been into a store and had them list the price of an item as 0.00389% of your annual income?

Of course not. That doesn't make what I said false.

Have you ever had anyone say "cars cost so much more now, they were only $800 in 1942" and be taken seriously? (or whatever similar example you want to use)

Inflation has been going on basically constantly for centuries. Nobody is really expecting to buy a coke for a quarter or anything again, but people are expecting the prices to not grow 10% every couple months so that they’ll be able to switch to a job where things will feel affordable again (since jobs offering fair wage increases are basically a thing of the past).

Nobody would complain about $10 bags of chips if they made 4000x that a month.

Trust funds and “old money” from family fortunes are alive and well in places like New York, how some younger people can afford to live like this without the high paying job or business they run.

The Fed was responsible for low mortgage rates because they were purchasing MBS.

Mortgage rates are currently back to something more historically normal.

If you’re upset about anything, it should be a about rates being so low for so long, which drove up home prices.

These are some big facts. The down-voters may lack some historical perspective.

If you're living in a tech hub and really want to own a home in the short term, get a remote job and move somewhere cheaper. It sucks, but these places aren't going to get cheaper anytime soon. Meanwhile there's plenty of property in the rest of the country that's more affordable. When the market recovers, you might be able to sell your home for a profit and move back.

Seriously, now that starlink is out there are wide swathes of the country that become a lot more feasible to live and work in.

I am in a growing town that is quickly turning into a sprawling suburbia that I wanted to escape from originally and already have my eye on a little town that is a lot more slow paced and remote.

Pray for starlink then, because the experience in the rural part of NM that I live in seems to be that it/they cannot keep up with the previously promised service level as more people sign up.

I don't mean to marginalize your frustration, but I feel like you may have unrealistic expectations.

First, you have a tech industry salary, which is probably at least twice as much as the median wage, if not more. Not only is it white-collar work with practically no risk to your physical safety (assuming you exercise, eat right, etc), but monetarily this puts you _way_ ahead of most people right out of the gate.

If you literally can't find a home to buy (assuming you want to buy one), then either you live in an HCOL area (in which case, owning property was _always_ a fantasy even among the highly-paid), or you aren't looking hard enough.

As a landlord, I can assure you that landlords have never gotten 2% mortgages on their properties, unless landlord==bank or some ridiculously well-connected billionaire.

Except for 2008, the housing market has _always_ been at a peak. Prices may flatline if we head into a (worse) recession but they are not going down to where they were again. You only options are to accept that and adjust your budget/income/location appropriately, or opt to rent forever, which is not at all a bad thing since owning a primary residence is never an investment. (Although there is room for nuance here that I won't get into.)

In the US, the vast majority of people _never_ pay off their mortgage until late in life, if all at. This is because the "normal" thing to do is to buy a house and "upgrade" two or three times until retirement. When interest rates were low, it didn't even make financial sense to pay off a mortgage because the money could be put to better use buying investments.

Even with my high-paying jobs, I didn't manage to get above $0 in net worth until I was about 40. I think that's pretty good in a society where an increasing number of people have to work their whole lives for a number of factors, not all of which have to do with wall street and a broken government.

I don't know your age, but it sounds like you're still closer to the beginning of your career. Either way, life has "started" for you already, it's happening right now, and it will be even better if you make a concerted effort to understand the world and your place in it right now, and figure out which decisions you need to make that will benefit you the most in the future.

Since you asked for it, my advise is to live well under your means, save aggressively, set goals, and never stop learning. If you want to challenge yourself, look into a concept called "early retirement." Good luck.

> Since you asked for it, my advise is to live well under your means, save aggressively, set goals, and never stop learning. If you want to challenge yourself, look into a concept called "early retirement." Good luck.

Ah yes, glamorizing the hustle. You'll surely make it if you just "work hard enough," wink wink. Working a 9-5 career is (and has been) a net negative ROI for at least 2 decades, if not more. To be completely honest, this is why I'm on HN: doing your own startup is one of the few relatively low risk gambles one can take.

Thinking that it's okay for an entire generation (millennials), scratch that, two generations, (also gen-Z now)—that literally can't afford housing where they work is beyond societally harmful. Birth rates will continue plummeting, among other things.

This is all happening because Obama didn't have the balls to just let the shoddy banks crash and burn, and we continued QE for around a decade to alleviate blowback from 2008. This, combined with other factors (a lax policy w.r.t. foreign investments in real estate), will screw us in the long run.

> [...] doing your own startup is one of the few relatively low risk gambles one can take.

I was under the impression that around 90% of startups failed. Was I mistaken, have the numbers changed, or do we just have very different thresholds for "low risk"?

High failure rate ≠ high risk. Everything with a high upside will have a high failure rate, but working 10 hours on your own startup a week is definitely lower risk than gambling with options (which is what /r/wallstreetbets is doing) or gambling with crypto (even higher risk).

I know people that made low 7 figures last year flipping NFTs, but the risk profile (to me, at least) was untenable.

Ok, but the comparison was to a 9-to-5 job, not gambling.

That's even more of a no-brainer, as an average 9-5 has practically zero upside, so your net worth is likely to stay flat (if not even go down). We like to pretend that the /r/wallstreetbets or crypto people are crazy, but most are median earners that feel that there's no way to break out without gambling. When we look at the housing situation, most are sadly right.

What do people want? To marry a cute girl, buy a house, have a few kids, retire, go fishing; if they get that big promotion maybe even buy a boat. But this life is simply not attainable today.

I mean, you already probably know this, but the risk profile of a startup that fails is not that you keep your money constant. It’s that you’ve been spending it all on rent and utilities for the last 7 years and have nothing to show for it. You’re still gambling away your savings, at a much slower and controlled rate, and the house at least doesn’t have the advantage over you, but it’s still incomparable to the risk profile of a 9-to-5.

Yep, a 9-5 has no risk, but no upside. In my humble opinion, a startup provides the best "balance" between risk and upside for those of us that come from lower or lower-middle class. I think your 7-year example is a bit contrived, since (barring exceptions like biotech, space, etc.) if you're working on a project for more than 6 months without product-market fit and/or growth, you're doing something wrong.

I think think that is borderline dangerous advice. Most people don't have the mindset or proper understanding of the startup world. On avg if you enter the startup space you are going to get chewed up and spit out and find yourself looking in the mirror at a middle age face with nothing to show for a lifetime of work.

> That's even more of a no-brainer, as an average 9-5 has practically zero upside, so your net worth is likely to stay flat (if not even go down).

The average millionaire is just a schmuck with a high paying 9-5 job. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, generic corporate drones etc. I don't know where you got the idea that it's impossible to make more than a subsistence wage with a W2 job but you are wrong.

I personally find trading crypto to be lower risk than options trading. They have options-like returns, but without the theta decay - you have a longer time period to be on the correct side of the market.

The cool part is, you get to try again.

I have started a number of businesses, even what I considered the unsuccessful ones still made me more money than I would have made at any 9-5 I could have had at the time. You just have to be willing to do something boring and compete against businesses that aren’t currently being run well. Starting the 7,000th craft beer company is gonna be really hard but (for example) being the #1 powerwashing company in your town is boring but way more lucrative

The average enterprise dev in any major city in the US can make twice the median household income with 3-5 years experience.

That’s still not that much

It’s not that much yet people making the median household income are not living on the street going hungry.

That's a pretty low bar, though. There are many different levels of struggling but I don't think it is productive to deny challenges of someone just because they are better off than some others.

Do you mean “struggling” as in “I can’t provide myself with food and shelter” or do you mean “I can’t put little Johny in private school and buy the 3500 square foot house in the burbs and go on nice vacations twice a year”?

You can start a business that you get an dopamine hit from telling people about, or you can start a business that makes real money. Pick one.

Or you can create a cryto scam and have the best of both worlds.

What makes you think being the #1 powerwashing company is going to be any easier than making an equivalent amount of money in the corporate world? Do you have any reason to believe you are better at powerwashing than the other 99 guys in your town?

The point is to pick a boring business where it’s easy to become #1 in a market based on current competition, clientele, skills, etc.

In the corporate world you are still trading your time for money. When you own a business you decide what and how much you want to do, up to and including nothing at all while still making an income. Boring businesses make it easy to hire people to do the stuff you don’t want to.

There’s no such thing as a business that’s both lucrative and trivial. To the extent that you need finesse, hard work and luck to build a successful business, the same combination of finesse, hard work and luck could land you an equally or more lucrative corporate job.

You can also make passive income by investing your large corporate salary and earn extra income without working. There’s no such thing truly passive, zero labor income when running a business, there’s always some managerial overhead even if you delegate as much as possible. Index funds are truly 100% passive.

Not true. You hire a CEO if you really don’t want to do anything. And it is a lot of work but usually nothing that difficult for straightforward businesses.

If done right, such a failure only impacts the investors, and anyone who took stock instead of a proper wage. The savvy founder pays themselves a salary high enough that they are totally in the black long before the bank arrives to repo the furniture.

So an important point that people seem to be always ignoring in the housing discussion is that of the boomers, and I don't mean as in "the boomers bad they screwed us" sense. I mean in a demographic sense.

The boomers were the largest generation of Americans and also are close to retiring or starting to retire, at the same time their children's children are entering the workforce, all of which were still relatively large demographics. This has created a temporary situation where we have a lot of people currently in the property market, because the boomers haven't quite retired and left their homes at the same time the millenials and zoomers are entering the market.

In another 10 years as the boomers begin to move to retirement homes, and assisted living centers, and die off (the move to sedentary office work along with poor dietary habits led to this) we'll see the pressure on the housing market ease as the massive generation currently occupying homes, the boomers, cease to occupy these homes and put them back into circulation.

The biggest risk in this case is that investment firms, such as Goldman and Berkshire try and steal the housing without ever intending to release onto the market.

If that happens I would say "reasonable men [will end up doing] unreasonable things", Madame Guillotine becomes a popular political figure, and trees start getting watered and “Wo unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”[1]

1. Isaiah 5:8

> The biggest risk in this case is that investment firms, such as Goldman and Berkshire try and steal the housing without ever intending to release onto the market.

Pretty sure this is actually already happening at a furious pace — PE firms, right? In fact I’m pretty sure I’ve read HN threads about it.

FWIW, If you’re talking about the bank bailout in 2008, that was signed by Bush (not Obama).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabiliza...

> To be completely honest, this is why I'm on HN: doing your own startup is one of the few relatively low risk gambles one can take.

This take is relatively…naive

Most startups fail and you would be much better off “grinding LeetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions).

That’s just like people “starting their own business” and buying a franchise where their net profit is less than $70K a year and that’s only after the owner works 60+ hours a week.

Give me a cushy $BigTech job any day.

I disagree on a number of levels, but especially because big tech valuations were propped up by QE over the past 10 years, Tesla being the poster child there. But Amazon, Google, etc. have all been impacted by macro elements. So that “TC” people brag about has been heavily subsidized by the FED.

The irony of calling me naive when not even understanding macroeconomic effects is… something.

Even with todays valuations of FAANG stocks I can guarantee you that the standard new grad gets a better offer than you will statistically make starting your own company.

// You'll surely make it if you just "work hard enough," wink wink. Working a 9-5 career is (and has been) a net negative ROI for at least 2 decades, if not more.

Counterpoint - tech professional about 20 years out of college. Just bought a house in a nice suburb of NYC and all my neighbors are likewise working professionals. Some are in medicine, some in tech, some in things like construction management and education.

So seems like there is plenty of people for whom working has paid off.

Or to say it another way, who do you think lives in all these houses? Boomers and Russian oligarchs?

I mean you’re a gen X-er, it makes sense that you have zero idea what people that graduated college in 2008 went through. For context, people that had degrees in comp sci were working as Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

On the bright side, you timed the dot-com dip perfectly!

I am literally responding to your comment about negative ROI over the last 20 years. I graduated college on 2003 so that describes my timeframe exactly.

If you aren't talking about genx then what is your 20 year comment about?

I graduated then, from a smallish state school, with a degree in CS. Everyone in my graduating class got a decent to great job right out of school. You might be able to find individual examples of failures to launch but in the vast majority of cases it’s simply not true that CS majors went to Geek Squad.

> makes sense that you have zero idea what people that graduated college in 2008 went through.

Eh, I'm someone who graduated high school around that time and have a similar experience. Many of my peers have houses and work well paying 9-5's and have families and save for the future. They don't live in San Francisco though. There's plenty of homes for sale and tech jobs in markets that aren't Manhattan or Silicon Valley.

I graduated high school and lost all my college money from the 2008 recession. Yet here I sit as a home-owner for seven years now. I don't project my experience on my entire generation, and I would expect others to do the same.

> This is all happening because Obama didn't have the balls to just let the shoddy banks crash and burn, and we continued QE for around a decade to alleviate blowback from 2008. This, combined with other factors (a lax policy w.r.t. foreign investments in real estate), will screw us in the long run.

It also happened because most of the FBI agents who worked on white-collar fraud prior to 9/11 were reassigned to counter-terrorism work afterwards, and so the rampant fraudulent appraisals and mortgages prior to the housing crash were never investigated, let alone prosecuted.

Contrast 2008 with the reaction to the S & L debacle.

This is an interesting take that I’ve never really heard before. It makes intuitive sense, but do you have anything more in depth to read on it? Book or article or longer version of the argument, or a history of some kind? Very curious, thanks.

Not the original poster, but the book "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One" by William K. Black (former bank regulator during the S&L crisis) might shed some light onto the S&L crisis, if not 2008's comparative response, though not directly.

Check out the Calculated Risk blog, where I learned almost everything I know about the events leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, and the GFC itself.

What the… dude, the bank bailouts of 2008 were signed by bush and co. And (as a dem) were absolutely necessary. Obama, if anything, just kept the machinery moving.

If the government had let the banks crash in 2008 the economy would be in a much worse state today and everyone would be a lot poorer. Foreign investors hold a vanishingly tiny fraction of the real estate in America and are not responsible for whatever economic ills you are projecting onto them.

You've chosen to believe a lot of incorrect things in service of your ideological commitments. You should learn to distinguish between things that are actually true and things that you want to be true because it would validate your politics.

If you think people ever "had it easy" you're mistaken.

The recent run up in housing prices is nothing new, it's happened at least twice before that during my life time.

I'm a millennial and have been a homeowner for seven years now. I had average, if not below average, credit when I bought the house and I had no downpayment (i.e. I wasn't coming in strapped).

It sounds like I'm an extreme edge case, but I really don't feel that way. I have several co-workers in the same age range who also own property. The details being recapped in this thread are very foreign to me, so I feel like this must be a geographic issue and not a generational issue.

My experience could just be unique, of course.

It’s not unique.

A lot of my older millennial friends have paid off their houses in the last year or two.

Here in the Midwest (Pittsburgh), it’s not unusual if you’re fiscally responsible on even a single developer salary (2022, $120-200k) to both have bought a home and mostly paid it off especially if you bought within the last 10 years before the pandemic so we’re talking $140k-285k for a 4 bedroom, 3 bath, garage with yard and finished basement depending on your neighborhood preference.

The housing market was significantly different 7 years ago[1]. I'll agree that if you bought in your 20s as a millennial, you're in a much better position. Impossible to replicate that today though.

1.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS

Telling someone to spend less than they make is not exactly "glamorizing the hustle".

Their point is that you don’t have to sacrifice in order to get where you need to be. I’ll let you and anyone else reading this comment decide how much sense that makes.

If you think housing is nuts, wait until you hear about childcare!

That said, you turned on the prior poster for basically saying “set a budget” — that’s not “glamorizing the hustle” that’s “live with intention”.

Sure, millennials and gen-z can’t afford housing in LA — but basically the only generation that widely owned property is the boomers, and that corresponded with insane labor scarcity (thanks, WW2) and the era before housing moratoriums.

Want more housing? Vote against laws restricting housing. Or, move to where housing isn’t restricted. There are tons of millennials and gen-z buying property, it’s just not in SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, or Portland — those metros have spoken, and they’re 100% invested in not letting newcomers in unless they’re very rich.

> First, you have a tech industry salary, which is probably at least twice as much as the median wage, if not more.

This is exactly his point. If he can't make it with what he has going for him, who can?

> You only options are to accept that and adjust your budget/income/location appropriately, or opt to rent forever, which is not at all a bad thing since owning a primary residence is never an investment. (Although there is room for nuance here that I won't get into.)

You only list two options: (1) budget better, (2) give in to renting forever. I agree that, if the above poster wants a better shot, he should do his best to budget well. However, he should also help support policies that tax the dickens out of people who own more than their primary residence and maybe 1-2 other properties. There is more at stake here than just his own situation.

what about people that dont pay taxes i.e. every other chinese, saudi, indian, russian, EU and LATAM millionaire that owns several properties in miami, orlando, nyc, LA, dallas, houston, phoenix, etc.

What about banks and REITs that are passthru entities for the same folk above ?

What about SV out-of-staters that don't pay state taxes but work remote at places like LV, Salt Lake, or Boise ?

You want to fleece your own... but others you let just... walk in ?

Wow this is news to me, thanks for sharing the examples I’ve never knew about that are gaming the system. Very eye opening.

> You want to fleece your own... but others you let just... walk in ?

I don't recall the person you replied to mentioning that. Why is it impossible to levy property taxes on real estate in your own state from people who live somewhere else?

Its not impossible. That's not the point What i mean is real estate taxes as they are today are not a factor to seriously dent foreign or corporate wealth from vacuuming all properties available.

10k year in property tax is a pittance to a Sheik, a shenzen factory owner, an indian tech entrepreneur, your average venezuelan govt bureaucrat, or a REIT.

10k is not peanuts to the average wage earner in the US.

The former all buy in USA to keep their wealth safe from confiscation and leverage the US justice system and FDIC. Because back in their home countries they are 1 election away from communism or a bank collapse.

We have no adequate means to raise the cost of entry for them, and mentioning change to favor local purchases, is almost taboo.

Meanwhile, we say "tax the rich" here. Yet foreigners keep loading up on real estate and US citizens end up renting forever..

That’s what happens when we live well beyond our means for decades and trade dollars for real goods - those dollars come back to buy up assets.

> real estate taxes as they are today are not a factor to seriously dent foreign or corporate wealth from vacuuming all properties available

That can be fixed - namely, via land value taxation, at a rate as close to 100% as possible.

Great. Now retired grandma , who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca, is stuck with high taxes. She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs...now must pay half her retired in come due to land value taxation.

This literally describes 2 people I know.

Grandma didn't do anything to you or me.

Why would you punish granma who just want to live out her retirement ?

Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?

> This literally describes 2 people I know.

For every "retired grandma who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca", I can show you dozens if not hundreds of grandmas who already got pushed out of town because of skyrocketing rents - thanks in no small part to your homeowning grandmas stubbornly insisting on living in a single-family home in the middle of Downtown, on a lot that could and should be housing dozens or hundreds of households.

And I haven't even begun to dig into the socioeconomic safety nets like citizens' dividends that a land value tax could readily fund, thus producing a negative tax burden for all renters and the vast majority of homeowners.

Why would you punish those hundreds of grammas who just want to live out their retirements? Not to mention the thousands of working Americans who just want a place to live that doesn't entail multi-hour-long commutes?

> She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs

There are these things called "moving companies" which would be happy to move her and her stuff into an apartment nearby. With the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in equity she's accumulated due to her property appreciating in value, she can almost certainly afford to hire such a company to move her and her stuff. With LVT motivating the construction of said apartments to amortize said LVT across as many tenants as possible, she will have no trouble finding a new home - and the denser urbanization would mean that the grocer and pharmacist and GP and such would be right around the corner instead of involving a half-hour bus ride through sprawling suburbia.

> Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?

Because that is far from the only cause of housing shortages. You could play whack-a-mole with ad hoc taxes specifically targeting foreign investors and domestic investors and property management companies and Old Money billionaires and wannabe AirBNB moguls and agricultural conglomerates and commercial/industrial landlords and everyone else directly profiting on the very land speculation driving costs of living through the roof... or you could just tax land value, and thus address all that in one fell swoop with a tiny fraction of the bureaucratic overhead and with countless social and economic benefits on top of that.

This is a pretty shallow argument. Americans should be glad that foreign citizens are funding housing because it means they can build more housing with that money. It is Americans who get to choose whether to build more or not and they have decided to instead block new housing.

Nah.

If it weren't for foreign "investment" in real estate, there would still be housing in the U.S. It would just be cheaper.

Real estate is a finite resource. More people showing up and bidding just drives the price up for the people who were already at the auction.

No reason for me to be happy about it.

> What i mean is real estate taxes as they are today are not a factor

Right. Which is why the person you replied to specifically mentioned supporting efforts to change those policies.

Do you have a sense of how many properties are owned by folks from other countries, as a percentage of the total housing stock? The national association of realtors[0] put out a press release saying their purchases accounted for about 1.6% from April 2021 through March 2022, however it's not clear from their figures whether that is all existing homes or a mix of new and existing. If that is right that doesn't seem too bad, at least for a year. Dunno what the total ownership stats say.

0: https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-i...

I bet that 1.6 are mostly in high cost areas like the coasts pushing up prices.

That’s a lot of whatabouts. I’m not sure why you’re attacking the previous poster who obviously wants people to be taxed.

Because he wants to freece people that mostly work and do productive things for a living, and meanwhile (some) randos come to the US with stacks of cash derived from US foreign aid, from selling copycat goods on amazon, from selling govt offices in their home country, or with wads of cash from straight up corruption / criminal activity... and they get the white glove treatment.

A non-us citizen real estate tax (in the style of NZ) is like the 3rd rail of politics. God forbid anyone daring to mention a ~200% FV tax on any residential property purchase by a non-us citizen.

If coercing the wealthy on housing issues constitutes “fleecing”, then I’ll take several sweaters, please.

> but others you let just... walk in ?

My guy we can do both, we can fleece all the third and fourth home owners, foreign and domestic, it’ll be glorious, join us

> You want to fleece your own... but others you let just... walk in ?

Sorry for the late reply...

No, I don't want these people to just "walk in."

I support BTFO'ing all of the above people with punitive taxes.

I might give the SV bros a pass if they only have one house that is their primary residence or maybe one other place. It's the people (and organizations) who have many properties who frustrate me.

> This is exactly his point. If he can't make it with what he has going for him, who can?

Presumably they are living in a HCOL area, so definitely not indicative of life in America in general.

I know a few folks who live in the mid-west (typically derided as "fly over country") who have blue collar jobs making $70,000 who bought a house in their twenties.

You're not going to get too much sympathy from them when you're making 3-5x their salary and complain you can't afford a $1.5M single family home in the most expensive cities in the US.

> You're not going to get too much sympathy from them

Why not? That someone makes much more than someone else and endures a higher cost of living does not establish anything other than that the people who work those kinds of jobs want to live in those kinds of places (or the companies want to be there but it is hard to disentangle the two). Lack of sympathy because someone is in a different situation seems somewhat course considering that there are problems which either party does not experience but are objectively bad and should be remedied. Because they are different does not mean they are less impactful to quality of life.

> Because they are different does not mean they are less impactful to quality of life.

No, sorry.

Both might be "struggling", but there is a massive difference between "I make $500,000 per year and can't buy a $3M home" and "I make $60,000 per year and can't afford a $300,000 home."

The person making $500,000 per year in another stratosphere of economic wealth that someone who makes $60,000 can't even fathom.

It's like someone who makes $1M per year complaining they can't afford a private jet. Sure, they are experiencing an "impact to their quality of life", but no, it's nowhere close to the same situation, hence they get no sympathy from people who have actual financial difficulties.

Comparing a home to a private jet is not valid. Of course life in HCOL areas is 'better', that is one reason why they are so expensive, but to compare someone who cannot afford a home in the city they work in with a millionaire ($500K/year is kind of ridiculous, I think $100 - 300K is more realistic) is not fair. Please open your mind a bit more and consider that treating people without sympathy tends to get you no sympathy in return, and I would wager mid-westerner's could use some as well.

Sorry, but the comparison holds.

I have little sympathy for someone who is in the top 1% of income earners in the US not getting what they want.

> Why not?

You said it yourself:

> the people who work those kinds of jobs want to live in those kinds of places

In other words, rich people get to live where they want. They get to live in the cool places with good schools and nice houses far from the freeways and toxic waste dumps and with lots of interesting things to do. Poor people have to make do with whatever is left over.

Great, yes. I do that too. Also, I live somewhere that falls well below my salary (COL wise) and I live beneath my means. I don’t live poor or poorly, but I don’t live like a hundred-thousandaire like we all used to see around 2008.

There is happiness and fulfillment to be found in a very reasonable dedication range. I work, like WORK work barely 5 hours a week from home and make $300k a year. My company is over the moon with my contributions.

I didn’t graduate last year. I put in the work, learned the craft and I have valuable contributions to give from my experiences. You will too someday. But right now you need to learn.

spoken like a true landlord. “good luck” defending your property when more and more people can’t afford renting or owning, and are starving yet armed.

Approximately zero people participating in HN need to see this type of reply to a comment. I suggest you assume good intent in GP’s message and respond in a constructive manner.

Wrong; vastly more people need to see that type of reply to a comment. If landlords don't like the idea that they're actively robbing working-class Americans to the extent that said working-class Americans are decreasingly hesitant to respond to that violence in kind, then said landlords are kindly encouraged to, you know, stop robbing working-class Americans. Nothing stopping them from working an honest living like the rest of us instead of existing on our teat against our will.

Where I live, I was fortunate to be able to borrow to purchase a very modest, poorly maintained house for $X, about 63% the price of a comparable reasonably well maintained house on the same street.

Five years later everything on the street is now $2.75X while my wage has increased by about 6% in that same time. Rents have also been going yo quite dramatically.

This is in a regional city of about 100,000 in Australia.

The idea that all you need to do is realign your expectations, and work harder, is embarassing.

Congrats and I agree, their sentiment is “I got mine, try harder”

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I mentioned 2% interest rates meaning in the <3% range. I know family who invested in real estate that trivially refinance to 2.85% on 30 year fixed mortgages with all the equity they had gained in their homes during the run-up in housing prices, 15 year loans were being redo’s to 2.25% all day as well. I’m sure you know this was a steal in the past few years if you are a homeowner in the past decade and gained major equity on your property.

I doubt we’ll ever see those low interest rates again in the next decade.

Obviously they are in a HCOL area, but you know whats worse than being underwater on a mortgage where you want to live? Being underwater on a mortgage in the middle of nowhere, where nobody else wants to live. I know plenty that got stuck in small towns in 2008-onwards servicing the debt on their home. Places that only were beneficiaries of broad speculative demand have the steepest price drops there is no real demand.

These are frightening prospects for people that want to play this game.

(I live in London) You didn't save til 40, now own multiple properties? Yeah our generation can't do that. While having a high paying job is great, it usually comes hand-in-hand with HCOL and obscene local property prices, meaning you have to either a) move to and live somewhere else (work remotely?), b) have to settle for living somewhere basic for a few years, c) rent forever.

That decision really sucks and previous generations did not need to make it. Yes of course, we have to set our expectations accordingly. But some acknowledgement from people like yourself who got started in easier times, and didn't actually go through this would be appreciated.

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

Is it really true that previous generations didn't have to sacrifice to buy homes? That seems patently false to me.

First, previous generations were significantly more thrifty which meant more cash on hand. Don't believe me? Let's say you save 30 bucks a day starting at 20 (most of us can easily do that by controlling how much we eat out) - that means you have 110k in your bank for a down payment on your 30th birthday (ignoring interest). How much of the current generation thinks that way and cares about saving 30 bucks a day?

Second and perhaps more obviously - our parents generation and their parents traded off affordable housing for long commutes. They weren't buying 3 bedroom apartments on park avenue, they bought 3 bedroom houses in the burbs and commuted an hour+ each way every day.

Compare to that, your options of working remote or living somewhere basic for a bit sound obviously better.

If you aren't willing to trade off what you want long term for something you can give up now, you won't have anything. And neither would anyone in a previous generation.

$30 a day is almost $1000 per month, that's completely unrealistic for 90+% of under 25s, most people don't hit that kind of saving power til they are 30. And I don't see any evidence in your post that previous generations did that? My parents certainly didn't, they started saving at 30 on teacher's salaries and bought a house three years later. That house (in Cambridge, UK) is now worth £800k, I can't afford that, despite earning far more than their salaries at retirement put together.

We are not talking about "90%+" here. This thread is in response to someone who "can't afford a house on a tech salary." Tech comp has been over 100K/year out of college for a while now, and even on somewhat less you should either be saving a ton or have much fat to trim in your expenditure.

OK well tech comp is very much not that high in the UK, so I won't speak to that, but the fact remains that things are objectively, numerically harder for us, and getting a lesson in life from those who had it easier is not very convincing.

// But the fact remains that things are objectively, numerically harder for us

So I never dug into this before but I found this interesting chart from the US government [1]

It does seem like a relatively smaller percentage of young people own homes today vs 40 years ago - but not as shocking as you'd imply:

Percentage of people <35 who own a home: 1982: 41% 2021: 38.5%

Percentage of 35-40 who own a home: 1982: 70% 2021: 62%

So while the trend is down - it still seems like over a third of people under 35 own a home, and over 60% of those 35-40 do.

That sounds very far from impossible.

[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

Small sample size, but many of the people that I know that are that age and own a home inherited it, they didn’t buy it.

This happens in each generation

I suspect the numbers would be worse if you looked at households instead of individuals due to declining marriage rates (but I'm not willing to put in the effort to find numbers).

I don't understand what you're saying. To me, if the rate stays flat but represents fewer married couple, then this same rate actually means more homes are owned by people of that age.

Meaning - if guy and girl are married and own a house together, that counts as 2 people towards home owner bucket.

If they are not married, they'd need to each own a house for the same rate to hold.

It is true that good money can be made in tech, and that some companies pay > 100K/year out of college, but it's worth pointing out that even in the US this isn't true in general or in the majority of cases. There are a lot of people in tech making less than that even years out of college - it's largely a function of where you live and whether you land your first job at a handful of particular companies.

You can refer to https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/..., or https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... - those people are all in tech, and most aren't new grads. Median salaries for "computer programmers" and "software developers" are 91K and 107K respectively.

> Tech comp has been over 100K/year out of college for a while now

The vast majority of IT work in the US pays around half that.

Even taking that figure at face value...

> or have much fat to trim in your expenditure.

Yeah, fat like exorbitant rents that landlords keep jacking up year after year solely because they have the power to do so. Fat like corporations charging more for less because they can get away with it. Fat like our federal government and the banking system it artificially props up debasing our currency and whittling away at the buying power of those dollars.

The fat to trim ain't in individual working Americans' budgets. The fat to trim is systemic - and by God are we overdue for some trimming, no matter how badly it might hurt the feelings of the ownership class.

> Is it really true that previous generations didn't have to sacrifice to buy homes? That seems patently false to me.

Take a look at average home price by year: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price...

Now compare that to average wages: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awidevelop.html

Now look at the double digit interest rates they paid on those mortgages. You pay the monthly payment, the top line number is largely irrelevant.

https://www.atlanticbay.com/knowledge-center/history-of-mort....

They didn’t have cellphone or internet bills. Financing cars wasn’t really a thing.

Trade offs.

Those add up to <$100/mo if you do it right, and you generally shouldn’t finance cars.

Student loans though...

State schools, not living on campus, and community college though. You are going to college to learn, not to party, right?

In state tuition is well into 5 figures in a lot of places. Even Community College is more expensive than it used to be - my local is almost $3k/yr

So a 4 year degree is on the order of 30k, aka what a lot of people pay for one year on campus. That’s pretty easily achievable on entry level salary (I know, work while you’re in school, le horror). Even if you have to take loans the whole way that’s a car note.

Are there people who this is out of reach of? Yes. Would it be cool if it were free? Of course. Is it crippling debt that makes a comfortable life impossible? Don’t be absurd.

Okay. You now have a harder time at being accepted at the highest paying companies because you didn't graduate from a select few universities. Hell, in law, most companies where you can really earn a good wage don't even hire outside of harvard.

Sounds like a hidden bonus; encouraging people not to be lawyers!

Ok, if you get into Harvard, go to Harvard. Your opportunities in the long run should outweigh any sort of student loans you have to pay back. If you're going to NoName Private College that's 90% of the cost of Harvard, go to state school instead.

And apply to scholarships. Lots and lots of scholarships.

Don't forget that until about the mid 90s most people were only buying with one income. And even into the 2000s that second income was often significantly lower.

So that graphs never align that well when you look back and try to say 'in the past it was 3x salary for a house, now it is 6x'

That is as buyer are now competing for houses with two good salaries to buy with.

To add to this, the low interest rates have added the ability for these joint income purchasers to bid higher to win the property they want.

In the UK at least, the move has broadly been in line with the 3x joint salary with mild adjustment for increased borrowing opportunities, but largely driven by the increase in joint salary.

Landlords can (could) get in the 2-3% range for sure. Maybe not on a new purchase, but a refi like the commenter said.

> As a landlord [...]

> [...] opt to rent forever, which is not at all a bad thing since owning a primary residence is never an investment. (Although there is room for nuance here that I won't get into.)

I suspect you "won't get into" it because you know full well that you're the one who stands to benefit from that advice, at the expense of the vast majority of everyone else.

I mean this as kindly and respectfully as possible: landlords - you included - are a large part of the reason why there is a housing crisis here in the US (and, from what I gather, other "developed" countries). Y'all buy up housing as investments, acting in a literal-rentseeking capacity and offering no value beyond maybe maintenance that tenants themselves could be performing (whether directly or by hiring the same professionals you'd be hiring). People like you are the ones who exploited my father until the day he died, who continue to exploit the surviving members of his household, who continue to exploit myself, my friends, my coworkers, my neighbors, all for that nice cushy "passive income". People earning "at least twice as much as the median wage" are unable to escape the rent treadmill because of people like you keeping them on that treadmill in the first place - not to mention having the gall to suggest that being stuck on said treadmill is "not at all a bad thing".

Out of respect for Hanlon's razor, I'm going to assume that you genuinely lack the self-awareness to understand how your income derives from economic parasitism; the alternative interpretation - that you are indeed aware of the externalities you impose on the rest of us, and yet choose anyway to peddle advice that's patently to your benefit and to the recipient's detriment - is far less charitable.

You're welcome for all that rental income. You can properly thank me and every other American stuck subsidizing you and your fellow landlords by selling your rental properties to your tenants - at the prices you paid, minus what they've already paid back to you in rents.

Figure out some way to opt out of the insanity of American knowledge-work metro areas. My wife and I rage quit DC back in 2016 and bought a house in an exurban county. In part because the mortgage payment on our 3,000 square foot waterfront house begins with a “1” we had two more kids and my wife quit her job to start a business. Hopefully with remote work becoming more accepted that will be a more practical option for more people than it used to be.

> tech salary with sky high rent

literally one of the few jobs you can do from anywhere and you probably picked downtown SF.

I'm extra judgmental because due to my ADHD, I basically can't do 100% remote jobs

I bought my first two houses over the last 10 years and each time I thought we were at the peak, and I was way wrong. First mortgage had over 5% mortgage rate and 2nd was the same.

Outside of closing costs mortgage rates are temporary (can always refi). Land is a finite resource. It should continue to go up.

You really think the people who got a <3.5% interest rate loan will let go of their properties in the next 5 years to purchase a 5%+ mortgage for a more expensive monthly payment? What incentive do they have?

"Starter homes" (1-2 bedrooms) see lots of turnover as families outgrow them.

I just let go of my 2.25% mortgage to move out to the boonies at 7%. It's painful but still makes sense given the cost of living difference between here and the insane Bay Area. I am admittedly gambling that rates will come back down to something at least in the middle within a few years, but who knows?

// I can’t even afford a home right now on a tech salary

As another poster commented - where have you looked and what have you tried?

From recent experience, a nice but modest house in the suburbs of NYC is like 1.5 million. An equivalent house in a nice suburb of Cleveland is like 500k, and a smaller 3 bed/2 bath there can be had for under 300. If you are willing to go further afield (but still be in a town with a decent school etc) you can get that for under 170 [1]

What's the thing you can't afford, the 1.5 mil or the 170k house? And if you really can't swing the later on a tech salary, maybe we can talk about what's going on there because you should be able to.

Also heuristically, whenever someone talks about stuff like their landlord's mortgage rate rather than factors under their own control, it's a bad sign.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/9672-E-Idlewood-Dr-Twinsb... for example.

I dunno, I "guess" I'm the previous generation. It sucked back when my parents bought their home at 9%, and we thought we got an amazing deal at 6%. Then things happened and interest went down and everybody refinanced a few times as it dropped.

Before we bought a house we rented a bedroom in somebody else's house, then a crappy apartment and bought basically nothing else. It sucked, but we lived below our means and saved up. It took a few years, and then we were in.

I think that two things are simultaneously true:

1 - The housing situation isn't great today and isn't getting better.

2 - The up and coming generation has unrealistic expectations of what it's taken to get into home ownership based on stories from very out of date economic conditions from before the Vietnam war and some strange ideas that they should be able to buy a single family home in the central business district of a big city for 30% of minimum wage.

Here's the tip: Live well under your means, grind hard, commute long distances, rent the cheapest place you can practically live in, and save your money. When you have 20% of a house, buy it, refinance if you can for lower rates, grind hard, commute long distances, and save your money. Turn the growth in equity from that house and the new money you saved to buy either what you want or where you want. This is how it's worked in most medium-big metro areas for at least three generations.

Here's how to action this tip (assuming the Bay Area):

The average 30-year Mortgage Rate since 1971 is 7.76% -- that's your baseline.

20% down on a $800k is $160k -- if you live around the Bay Area, that's your target. Why? That's around the jumbo loan limit for the Bay Area (check your local limits). This is how you get the lowest rate.

I checked, there are plentiful properties under that amount, within commuting distance from San Francisco. Commuting distance should be calibrated at under 90 minutes each way during off-peak traffic conditions. Either travel early or late. I picked both Oakland and Lafayette/Walnut Creek areas.

Assuming you make Bay Area pay as an engineer, it's not unreasonable to assume you bring home more than $100k after taxes. We'll use $100k to make it simple.

Rent should be around 30% of your income. I found plenty of current listings where you can live by yourself within commuting distance of downtown San Francisco that are under $2000/mo. You can always room with somebody, or look for single room rentals.

Looking up some average cost of living indexes let's say it costs about $2500/mo to exist. So we need about $4500/mo.

That leaves us with $46k/yr in raw savings towards that down payment. That's 3.5 years of tough disciplined savings. Voila, you can buy a home.

You said you have student loans? Okay, looks like you did the math, 5-6 years is not unreasonable. Voila, you can buy a property.

Get a roommate, a live in significant other, or a spouse, and you can dramatically reduce these numbers by increasing income and/or lowering living costs. Voila you can buy a property.

Over 3-6 years you'll most likely get raises, bonuses, and other opportunities. Voila you can buy a property.

This pattern has been remarkably persistent since the 70s at least. It sucks, but it's what it is.

Why do you think your life won't start until you buy a house? It's psychotic how people put so much psychological weight people put on homeownership.

To be fair, it's tough to start accumulating furniture and other big heavy objects until you have a permanent place to put it. Buying tons of these items while renting is a risky gamble - if your landlord decides to gouge you, it's not such an easy thing to just pack it all up and move.

IKEA furniture tends to be quite movable…

> It's psychotic how much psychological weight people put on homeownership.

When the options are "pay hundreds to a couple thousands of dollars per month for 30 years or less" v. "pay hundreds more than that per month in perpetuity", it should be entirely unsurprising that the former is vastly preferable.

Renting is not in general more cash flow negative than having a mortgage.

It takes all of five minutes clicking around on Zillow to prove without a shred of doubt that yes, it is more cash flow negative than having a mortgage, by a margin on the scale of hundreds of dollars at minimum.

This really should not be surprising, considering the number of SFHs owned by landlords using their tenants' rent payments to pay for the mortgage and property taxes and profit on top of that (that being the situation of my now-deceased father and still-living stepmother, whose landlord has on multiple occasions jacked up the rent to cover the new mortgage payments from refinances).

Both owning and renting will cost you money (on average).

Generally if you are living in a place where you can't afford to buy, you also shouldn't rent in the same neighborhood.

But that's not what happens -- e.g. people move to San Francisco and then see the high house prices and convince themselves they can afford to rent there but not own. It's not cheaper to rent, on average [there is a lot of variability and opportunity for trading gains in real estate due to leverage] -- but overall, the price of these two is comparable, however renting is a more accessible way to overspend than owning.

As a result of this increased accessibility, rental property prices are higher than they should be, due to increased demand, and what actually happens is that people who rent tend to lose more, on average, than those who own, because they are more likely to overspend on rent, given their income and financial situation.

If prospective renters had to go through the same third party vetting processes as those who take out a mortgage - everything from an independent assessment of the value of the property, an inspection, third party vetting of your financial history -- you would also see a reduction in foolish renting choices and then renters would not, on average, experience greater losses than owners.

But right now they do.

No, it's psychotic that you think one should learn to live with the fact that half of their wage vanishes into a black hole at the end of the month, without any value to show for it.

If renting is strictly financially worse than buying, why do so many fabulously wealthy corporations rent instead of own their offices and stores? When you buy a home you have to pay mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance costs, HOA dues, and you have the opportunity cost of not being able to invest your mortgage principal instead of locking it up in your house. There are pluses and minuses on both sides which people rarely rationally evaluate because they are brainwashed by society into thinking that only losers don’t own their homes.

> If renting is strictly financially worse than buying, why do so many fabulously wealthy corporations rent instead of own their offices and stores

Because they can claim that expense on their tax report and dynamically downsize or upsize if they are growing or shrinking fast?

You literally can not compare private homeownership with large companies owning their offices.

> When you buy a home you have to pay mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance costs, HOA dues, and you have the opportunity cost of not being able to invest your mortgage principal instead of locking it up in your house.

All negligible compare to the fact that you own actual property, you have the freedom to do what you please and the value of your home is one of the best assets against inflation, because housing is always needed.

If owning a home was not worth the trouble, how come gigantic corporations like blackrock are buying homes 30% over asking price as soon as they can?

Of course it‘s not true that only losers don‘t own their homes, but in the last 30 years, if you do own yours you‘ve automatically won. Housing prices are so astronomically high that suburbian property beats anything else.

Don't live in a tech hub then. It's not worth it.

If you are not attending conferences, going to meetups and participating actively of the tech scene in a way that advances your career, you will be just wasting money in rent.

If you're under 30 this is normal.

> Incidents like this make it easier for me to understand "protest voting" against the system politically. Not sure of constructive ways to prevent this more broadly.

One useful thing a person could do is try to come up with a means of teaching a larger percentage of the population to have the ability to think in the manner that you have here. It is a very tricky problem space, but the payoffs could be huge.

> there are hard working people literally losing their home and shelter wrongly

I don't get this. Would it make it any different if they weren't "hard working people"?

If so, how and why?

If not, why even mention that?

There are systems of voting that would allow voters to both "protest vote" and yet also vote for policy. So-called "approval voting" (where the voter gets an infinite number of votes) helps mute the damage done by blind-rage protest voting, and can help discover the signal sent by voters, regarding policy:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-a-system-of-voting-a...

I don’t know how to say this that isn’t going to come off judgmental, but I’ll try: thank you for trying to see past your role and understand the people who are affected whether you could have any impact or not. It’s more than most people do.

Protest voting is shouting into a void. Cognizant voting is voting in a way that supports your beliefs and their place in the world. If you don’t see a representative who represents your beliefs, then you need to consider running for office yourself.

> Incidents like this make it easier for me to understand "protest voting" against the system politically.

Hell, it makes me understand arson and kidnapping.