If you were born in 1990, how do you plan on ever affording a house?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know it's tougher now. We bought in 2004 - with only 10% down and lucked out on a location and then getting out just in time for crash and then capitalized on crash to upgrade.

But also, I worked in a job that I hated for 15 years, we're talking grinding hours, lots of travel, for a big old monstrous corporation. And I made those sacrifices for the MONEY. I know it doesn't apply to all kids born in 1990, but it seems to me "do what you love and go where you feel 'respected'" is a mantra of your parenting generation that has made you all suffer financially. Hoping you're at least happier than I was in your rented apartment? My parents told me to get a job that paid.

I'm Gen X. Those jobs aren't easy to come by for the generation right below us. One advantage to being Gen X is that we are a much smaller group, so when we graduated from college, there were fewer of us clamoring for entry level jobs. The downside to being Gen X is that the Baby Boomers are all occupying the higher level positions and refusing to retire. So it feels like there's a bit of a plateau.

My husband works for a "corporation" and works long, grinding hours. But he will be the first to say, those jobs aren't easy to come by for people a decade younger (I was born in 1976). I should add that he doesn't make a lot of money. That's the other thing. Wages simply have not kept up with inflation. The pricing of housing has way outpaced salary growth. So younger people working those monstrous hours in a soul-sucking job still aren't making enough money to stash away.

[Anonymous]

it's all about priorities .

If you really want a house you can figure it out.
Live at home
2 years at Montgomery College $9000 tuition
2 years at U.Md $20000.

You have a degree in business , accounting , engineering or comp sci.

Get a job 75k.

Live in group house $500/mo. Student loan $300/mo
Other expenses $1000/ mo.

That's 34500 in the bank every year. With raises over 5 years it will be about $200000.

Get married . That person has $100000 saved since a little younger.

Put down 150000 on a 700000 home.

Loan amount is 550000.


PIT is 3000 a month but with tax write off its equal to $2000 a month .

Married Monthly income 75 k plus 50 k =125k

10450 gross. 6900 net. -3000 house. 3000 other expenses 900 savings/investment along with 150k you already have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:it's all about priorities .

If you really want a house you can figure it out.
Live at home
2 years at Montgomery College $9000 tuition
2 years at U.Md $20000.

You have a degree in business , accounting , engineering or comp sci.

Get a job 75k.

Live in group house $500/mo. Student loan $300/mo
Other expenses $1000/ mo.

That's 34500 in the bank every year. With raises over 5 years it will be about $200000.

Get married . That person has $100000 saved since a little younger.

Put down 150000 on a 700000 home.

Loan amount is 550000.


PIT is 3000 a month but with tax write off its equal to $2000 a month .

Married Monthly income 75 k plus 50 k =125k

10450 gross. 6900 net. -3000 house. 3000 other expenses 900 savings/investment along with 150k you already have.

Your math and assumptions are terrible, and do not account for health insurance, income taxes, retirement savings, etc. iOW, you're terribly clueless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^ sorry, meant which part is NOT relevant to someone born in 1990?

You're totally glossing over price levels and wages, especially for lowly ranked schools.

Nope. Stop the whining. We worked our butts off, started at the bottom career wise, and house wise, lived in crappy apartments and an awful fixer upper arhat we never really fixed up and played the long game. I'm 39, not a dinosaur.

Uh, to someone born in '90, yes, a dinosaur. The circumstances of the world sure as hell change in over a decade.

Yeah I'm 33 but baby brother is 23. Everything will be massively more expensive for him and I feel for the other kids in this age group.

I'm sorry, I don't get this. I graduated from college in 1991. After getting my Master's Degree, I made a whopping $15K a year. Houses were $150-$200K in bad neighborhoods. That might as well have been $3M. Felt the same as you feel now. People were buying in PG County then b/c it was much cheaper, just like it is now. It's all relative.

What did you major in? All the kids I know are majoring in practical fields ie comp sci, finance, pre med or dental, engineering. If you major in something thats hard and youre compensated well - it should be a stepping stone towards a decent middle class life.

No shortage of peeps with degrees in fields that you think are 'hard' that aren't well compensated (or even can't find work in that field). I'm old enough to remember when doing Linear Programming was the key to a great job. Who even knows what that is now! Times change folks, you are a fool if you think otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Furthermore, it's been public policy in recent years (most egregiously post-2008 fin crisis) to move heaven and earth to keep housing prices AS HIGH AS POSSIBLE! Think about that: the government works to make a fundamental human need as expensive as it can. When you understand that this is concurrent with policies to suppress wages as much as possible, you should see this as a very bad situation.

Can you explain a little more about these policies- who is making these decisions and what is the mechanism that carries them out? Thanks!

Bank bailouts, conservatorship of Fannie/Freddie, and QE. 37% of home purchases were made by investors last year. Yeah this is sustainable.

What do you mean when you say, "...the government works to make a fundamental human need as expensive as it can." Who is forming this public policy? Elected officials? Or private business people? Where is the policy coming from?

Whos in charge? Boomers. What does their base need to retire? Home equity because they havent saved a penny. Who votes the most? Boomers.

Heres another one. Who defaulted during the last crisis? Regular people a few had bad credit but most had good credit. Who owned their houses? The banks owned the mortgages. Who was bailed out when they went red? Hint - not the regular people. Banks were able to write off bad mortgages without taking a hit bc who is in charge of the banks? Wall st. Who has lots of money to affect policy in their favor? And it continues.

And to top it off - during a recession when regular people are either a) unemployed or strugglig who benefits the most from low interest loans with tight underwriting? Companies with oodles of money. Fed themselves admitted that qe was partly to reflate housing prices.

The entire country and economy benefit from mortgages requiring down payments and tight underwriting. Banks etc always own mortgages. We're better off requiring no grant/financing down payments of a minimum 5% . Source of cash? Historical bank statements or gifted money. You seem to forget that most boomers scrounged/worked to get 10% down and paid higher interest rates, pmi, etc.

In the `1990's and forward the federal govt decided to increase home ownership and that policy dribbled down to financing down payments and sub primes. Those junk loans were bundled the same as good loans.

The alleged negative effects of "higher interest rates" were accompanied by massively lower prices as a % of income and inflation that often paid for much of those boomers' mortgages. When inflation> interest rates, people were being compensated for taking out mortgages: this happened to the boomers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:it's all about priorities .

If you really want a house you can figure it out.
Live at home
2 years at Montgomery College $9000 tuition
2 years at U.Md $20000.

You have a degree in business , accounting , engineering or comp sci.

Get a job 75k.

Live in group house $500/mo. Student loan $300/mo
Other expenses $1000/ mo.

That's 34500 in the bank every year. With raises over 5 years it will be about $200000.

Get married . That person has $100000 saved since a little younger.

Put down 150000 on a 700000 home.

Loan amount is 550000.


PIT is 3000 a month but with tax write off its equal to $2000 a month .

Married Monthly income 75 k plus 50 k =125k

10450 gross. 6900 net. -3000 house. 3000 other expenses 900 savings/investment along with 150k you already have.

Your math and assumptions are terrible, and do not account for health insurance, income taxes, retirement savings, etc. iOW, you're terribly clueless.

All the math is based on net after taxes. Retirement savings could be the 150 k you still have invested or in the bank after the down payment and the 900 a month being saved now. You're only 27 at this point.

[Anonymous]

^^On parents insurance till 26 and now no healthcare tax penalty is being enforced . Just wait till you get sick to sign up for insurance .

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:it's all about priorities .

If you really want a house you can figure it out.
Live at home
2 years at Montgomery College $9000 tuition
2 years at U.Md $20000.

You have a degree in business , accounting , engineering or comp sci.

Get a job 75k.

Live in group house $500/mo. Student loan $300/mo
Other expenses $1000/ mo.

That's 34500 in the bank every year. With raises over 5 years it will be about $200000.

Get married . That person has $100000 saved since a little younger.

Put down 150000 on a 700000 home.

Loan amount is 550000.


PIT is 3000 a month but with tax write off its equal to $2000 a month .

Married Monthly income 75 k plus 50 k =125k

10450 gross. 6900 net. -3000 house. 3000 other expenses 900 savings/investment along with 150k you already have.

Lots of 40-year-olds don't make much more than that (even with business and engineering degrees). I don't know what planet you are living on.

[Anonymous]

Well even if you have tech /comp sci/engineering degrees you are at the mercy of HB1 and now [since 2015] HB4. That 500,000 jobs in the USA problem grew ...

What's immune? Nursing, doctors, dentists. Cops? For boomers it was harder to get into med than dental school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know it's tougher now. We bought in 2004 - with only 10% down and lucked out on a location and then getting out just in time for crash and then capitalized on crash to upgrade.

But also, I worked in a job that I hated for 15 years, we're talking grinding hours, lots of travel, for a big old monstrous corporation. And I made those sacrifices for the MONEY. I know it doesn't apply to all kids born in 1990, but it seems to me "do what you love and go where you feel 'respected'" is a mantra of your parenting generation that has made you all suffer financially. Hoping you're at least happier than I was in your rented apartment? My parents told me to get a job that paid.

I'm Gen X. Those jobs aren't easy to come by for the generation right below us. One advantage to being Gen X is that we are a much smaller group, so when we graduated from college, there were fewer of us clamoring for entry level jobs. The downside to being Gen X is that the Baby Boomers are all occupying the higher level positions and refusing to retire. So it feels like there's a bit of a plateau.

My husband works for a "corporation" and works long, grinding hours. But he will be the first to say, those jobs aren't easy to come by for people a decade younger (I was born in 1976). I should add that he doesn't make a lot of money. That's the other thing. Wages simply have not kept up with inflation. The pricing of housing has way outpaced salary growth. So younger people working those monstrous hours in a soul-sucking job still aren't making enough money to stash away.

This is all fair. But, OP is 27 years old and she and her spouse only make $45K/year each. She's going. To have to move out of D.C. Or clean up the resume - it just is what it is. I mean, nannies and bartenders make more - so I'm guessing she went into academia or has a worthless grad degree in right field.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/21/the-dc-area-has-the-highest-median-income-in-the-us-again/

[Anonymous]

I think there is one bitter poster on here that keeps discarding people's well thought out, practical plan for sacrificing and saving for a reasonable home.
I certainly hope they are not representative of all millenials and that some people are reading and getting valid tips.
These posts are usually about "how can I buy a nice home right now" when the question is "how can I start to prepare right now to eventually buy a nice home in 10 years"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there is one bitter poster on here that keeps discarding people's well thought out, practical plan for sacrificing and saving for a reasonable home.
I certainly hope they are not representative of all millenials and that some people are reading and getting valid tips.
These posts are usually about "how can I buy a nice home right now" when the question is "how can I start to prepare right now to eventually buy a nice home in 10 years"

For anyone making less than $200k, the only answer is never. Or move to lower COL city. Prices appreciate faster than middle class can save.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there is one bitter poster on here that keeps discarding people's well thought out, practical plan for sacrificing and saving for a reasonable home.
I certainly hope they are not representative of all millenials and that some people are reading and getting valid tips.
These posts are usually about "how can I buy a nice home right now" when the question is "how can I start to prepare right now to eventually buy a nice home in 10 years"

For anyone making less than $200k, the only answer is never. Or move to lower COL city. Prices appreciate faster than middle class can save.

Oh FFS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there is one bitter poster on here that keeps discarding people's well thought out, practical plan for sacrificing and saving for a reasonable home.
I certainly hope they are not representative of all millenials and that some people are reading and getting valid tips.
These posts are usually about "how can I buy a nice home right now" when the question is "how can I start to prepare right now to eventually buy a nice home in 10 years"

The least well-thought out poster on this thread is the one who offers a 'method' that sounds like an infomercial. It might increase your likelihood, but only an idiot discounts circumstances so much.

[Anonymous]

I was born at tail end of 80s (29) and bought a house last year. Saved for four years, as I worked my way up GS-Scale. Attorney.