WSJ Affording a Family

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in the 1970s in upstate NY in a middle-class neighborhood. We had plenty of larger families (Irish Catholics and Italians!) in small houses. 5 kids for a 2-bedroom house would not have been unusual, although very likely as the kids got older, they would bump out the house or renovate an attic space or garage to add another bedroom.

So it certainly is one way that working class or middle class families can afford a large family- kids share bedrooms and you don't save for college.

I think this is a big part of the budgeting pain.
People overextend on mortgages for unnecessarily large properties. Add in the college savings anxiety.

When people talk about the prior decades of ease we forget that McMansions were not a requirement (a modest saltbox was acceptable) and saving for college wasn't widespread. And college costs were considerably more moderate compared to today.

Look…the US has become a place where important things (healthcare, childcare, elder care, education) are expensive and material crap is cheap.

My father was greatest generation and his father went to an Ivy League school…yet his father told him he wasn’t paying for college (even though he had plenty of money) because that wasn’t something parents do. The flip side is that when my dad went to college in 1949, Harvard total cost of attendance was $500 and my dad went to Michigan for $300 OOS. It wasn’t that hard for him to work summers and part time during the school year to pay for it.

Back then the median HHi was $4k, so Harvard was only 12%. HHI today is $80k and Harvard is like $92k.

Those who make 100k and under pay nothing.

Way to miss the point…by the way it’s nothing up to $250k at maybe 15 of the most elite schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in the 1970s in upstate NY in a middle-class neighborhood. We had plenty of larger families (Irish Catholics and Italians!) in small houses. 5 kids for a 2-bedroom house would not have been unusual, although very likely as the kids got older, they would bump out the house or renovate an attic space or garage to add another bedroom.

So it certainly is one way that working class or middle class families can afford a large family- kids share bedrooms and you don't save for college.

I think this is a big part of the budgeting pain.
People overextend on mortgages for unnecessarily large properties. Add in the college savings anxiety.

When people talk about the prior decades of ease we forget that McMansions were not a requirement (a modest saltbox was acceptable) and saving for college wasn't widespread. And college costs were considerably more moderate compared to today.

Houses are expensive because of the land not the house on them generally. Material coasts, building technology, have driven down the cost of building a house, so a saltbox or McMansion cost pretty similarly to build. It’s the land that’s expensive, and generally you can’t pack them in because of zoning and local community capacities like schools etc.

I dunno. When Fairfax property value goes up, the house goes down. When the house goes up, the property goes down. I look at the total house plus property bc the government is just making up numbers.