I grew up around a bunch of middle class conservatives in the Southern USA and almost all of them were into debt on house, car, often even taking loans to pay for kids private school.

And you'd never know until the family divorced and their lifestyle drastically decreases.

Dave Ramsey has to be relatively new because debt was extremely extremely common among conservatives in the US (no idea about liberals didn't live among them)

Houses are debt, but are generally and appreciating asset

Cars are a depreciating asset. It usually does not make sense to go into debt to get one

Houses are a depreciating asset. They require constant maintenance expenses just to hold their value. It's the land under the house that's the appreciating asset.

Sort of. In a lot of areas, the cost of the house has skyrocketed in the last few decades. One factor is that you can’t buy an empty lot and then build a 20 year old $250k house on it in most markets. If you want to build a house, that house will be new (obviously — relocating an old house is a real pain), and the costs of construction are silly. This effect inflates the value of old houses in a lot of markets.

Of course, in markets that don’t have plenty of inventory of both empty lots and lots with old houses, it can be hard to value the house by itself.

> relocating an old house is a real pain

Has relocating an old house even been done? (Assuming the house wasn't built to be movable.)

Somewhat recently in SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/23/san-francisc...

Yeah, it's a thing for a certain type of historic building.

See https://patch.com/massachusetts/lexington/historic-house-mov... as an example

It is done, albeit rarely due to how expensive and complex an operation it is. My friend's mother moved her house a few kilometers across some farmland. It was a rather large 2 story tall house, with a basement. It had to be moved to a plot that had a similar foundation and basement prepared for it.

As the other comments note, yep, it's been done.

It seems there's a whole spectrum from lifting houses to put a new first floor below them, to moving them a bit, to moving them several blocks in a city. (to big building projects too, historically)

I saw a house in progress being moved, 30 years ago. Great thing to take a kid to see!

Is there really a meaningful difference when you’re not able to buy one without buying the other?

Maybe - we’re trying to sell a deceased family member’s block of land that might be worth more in the market if we demoed the building because it’s unliveable.

While I agree with your point about land, Im not so sure it is true about the house, given changing costs of labor, code compliance, and materials.

It's not even really the land, it's the cuts + certificate of occupancy which have both been made artificially harder to get for a number of reasons.

It’s interesting how the language allows a weird cognitive out. It’s not debt, it’s a mortgage and they ‘own’ the home.

Nobody said it isn't debt. The difference is that it is debt that makes sense: you can't realistically buy land without it, and houses tend to appreciate so the interest costs are less of a problem - they just represent the time value of money.

Most other debts people incur personally are to buy things they could save for, which go down in value. Like cars.

That’s the out. I’ve seen many people explain what their debts are and don’t think of their mortgage as one.

It's not a weird cognitive out, there are major differences, legal and financial between say credit card debt and a mortgage on a house.

Cars are a necessity in pretty much most of the country. Even in areas with good public transit, people who are most likely to go into debt to buy a car are also more likely to live further away from public transit and commute for work. Outside of New York, I can’t think of another city where living without a car is really an option.

Chicago. Probably a few other big cities.

Yes, but you have to live in the City. The suburbs are impossible without a car.

Well, around Chicago some of the smaller suburbs have a nice little downtown and are on a train line into the city. If you lived near that you might get by just using online shopping and uber if you occasionally needed to go somewhere. There is bus service too but it's not that good.

But in general, and in the larger suburbs yes you would be pretty inconvenienced without a car. But that is true of suburbs everywhere.

You'd be fine in basically all of the inner-ring suburbs except maybe on the south side.

Boston. DC. Chicago.

I’ve heard Philly and SF as well, but have never been.

Bay Area (including SF) public transportation is generally terrible, definitely not at all a great option for people who can’t even live in SF but have to commute to SF because of how expensive it is.

San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the US for public transit usage. You can see the stats here: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

If you are forced to commute into SF for your job, then make living close to BART a top priority. (Many years ago, I met many people who suffered through that daily commute, but refused to make living near BART a priority. It was dumb to watch.) BART is a miracle train system (hybrid commuter rail/metro/subway), even if the coverage isn't great.

Just because it’s in top 10 within the country doesn’t mean it is great and that people don’t need to rely on cars most of the times. “Just live near BART” is a laughable proposition since half the BART stations outside of SF do not have enough housing around them and the ones that do, have high density luxury apartments that aren’t exactly affordable to people outside tech and other high paying careers. Then there’s the question of “do I also work near BART?”, “buy groceries near bus stations?” Or “go to the hospital only near public transit?”. Answer to all of those questions is “No and I still need a car”.

Or Caltrain. The new electrified Caltrain is a massive improvement: it runs at least every half hour all day, every day. I don’t know whether it was intentional on the part of the agency, but they stumbled upon the obvious phenomenon that many people will not use a transit system that runs too infrequently and that, conversely, if you have infrequent trains with low ridership, your ridership might return if you increase frequency.

Most of the people I knew lived in East Bay, but you raise a great point! The peninsula also has insufferable car traffic, but can be avoided during daily commutes by carefully planning your home around Caltrain.

Philly's transit access can be hit or miss, but when transit lines up, it's transformative. I moved from central PA to a Philadelphia suburb in 2006, a three minute walk to a regional rail station. It was an hour fifteen into the city (most of the time), and I'll take 1:15 on the train over 0:45 of driving every time. After a few months of figuring things out, we dropped from two cars to one.

Now I own a rowhome in the historic district of the city, we're opening the first floor as a museum within the next year, and I walk everywhere. All forms of transit (bus, trolley, trackless trolley, subway, light rapid transit, train, ferry) take contactless payment (finally) and these days, rideshare fills in the gaps.

Wages are higher in the suburbs, but I can get to a sizable international airport in 15 minutes by car, to the Amtrak station in 20 minutes via $3 subway, and I can walk to grocery/hardware/bakery as well as bars/restaurants/galleries/venues/museums/etc.

A car used to be a very, very important part of my life, and now it's more of a luxurious convenience.

New Orleans.

A good portion of them did get a mortgage. To my knowledge none of them have car payments, most drive used beaters like I do.

Ramsey is very niche. People who are good with money will find his advice some combination of obvious and bad. People who are bad with money will tend to either not want his advice, or have a hard time following it. A few people are in a sweet spot where they’ll actually follow it.

Dave Ramsey is perfect for the type of people who need Dave Ramsey. If you’re a standard deviation or two above the median person in terms of having your shit together and being smart about personal finance you can do a few things more optimally than he would recommend, but the advice that works for that person could easily ruin most people.

I was always confused why he was popular until someone told me to think of Dave Ramsey like vaping. It's great if you're currently a 2 pack a day cigarette smoker, but bad if you don't currently smoke. That cleared it up for me.

Agreed. For example, he strongly advises paying off one's house first. While this is good advice for many/most who struggle to save and invest, it's not optimal for maximising returns on a given portfolio. If the interest rate is below expected investment returns (minus tax and other subsidies, discounted for volatility), it can often be optimal to invest rather than pay down mortgage debt. It also means more liquidity in the case of sickness and redundancy. Equity in one's home can be difficult to access without some hefty fees or interest rates.

> I think that really depends on what part of America.

And the age of the cohort... Millennials (1980 to '95-ish) have had student loans since as far back as they can remember. What's _another_ never-ending monthly payment?

My wife and I are millennials and we paid off our student loans within a couple years once I started my career. I don’t even remember if it was before or after we got married and we’ve been married for over a decade now. Maybe we’re fortunate but I can’t imagine still having a monthly student loan payment.

Of course I also absolutely hated being in debt and having a monthly payment to begin with so I made it a priority to solve that problem asap. Likewise, I have always paid cash for every car I’ve bought. My only never-ending monthly payment is my mortgage and the alternative to that is paying rent which I like even less.

Fundamentally it’s a mindset thing. I also don’t buy taxi rides for my Chipotle orders.

I have a very similar mindset, but, man, mortgages hurt. At least when paying rent the money goes towards a real person. With a mortgage such a big chunk of the payment is the interest that just goes to this faceless entity that is the bank.

How does it not bother you? :)

Most of my landlords were faceless entities too. Obviously I’d rather the house be paid off but I didn’t have $300,000 in cash and I have to live somewhere.

Yep okay, fair enough!

I'm a younger (1994) Millennial and borrowed just $10k to finish my degree. I paid it off the first year I was employed. Very few of my friends still have loans. I'm pretty sure if you got yourself into a never-ending monthly payment situation you probably shouldn't have gone to college to begin with.