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

Forum Index » Real Estate

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just venting here. Seems like every major coming of age event in my life is met with huge hurdles. I finally was able to save for a down payment after working for a lousy post-recession corporate job, and now the housing market has completely exploded and interest rates are going up. I don't know what to do to get ahead in life anymore. [/quote]

Back to OP's post - it is a combination of luck, timing, hard work, and sacrifice for most people.  Now that we are past the recession, have you moved to a better job that pays more money?  You don't want to job hop just for money, but rather be aware that changing jobs can sometimes be the way to get that salary bump.  Be excellent at what you do so in the good economic times you get those raises and/or easier to get that next job.

You know lots of people mentioned their story included sacrificing immediate gratification and even making tradeoffs when buying.  I think the strong emotions when someone tells their story and everyone chalks it up to luck is because this memories are real to the person telling the story.  It brings them back to when they felt like the odd person out and tries the undermine the  feeling of it being "worth it". It's like you are retelling the story of the ant and the grasshopper but saying the ant only had food due to luck of there not being 10 feet of snow that winter or if the grasshopper got to both party all season and have fun AND have enough food for the winter. I lived in crappy apartments because that was all I could afford to live there on my own and rent was cheap.  There is a part of me that wished  that I could have lived in the cool post college places but that ship has sailed and that was the tradeoff that paid off for me.

The other part of the story was part luck of picking a lucrative field, IT, part planning on my part of  going where the money was within my field in the early stages, being good at what I do, and changing jobs for better careeer and financial opportunities.  I also made a conscious decision to move from an even more expensive area, greater NYC, to D.C. Metro because I knew I wanted to be a homeowner someday and that seemed an even higher bar in that area. When I made more money, I followed my mom's advice and lived on what I was making prior to the increase and saved the raise/bump.  So my spending always lagged my income.  When I made 60K, I continued living like someone that made 40K.  When my now DH moved in with me (by that time I bought a townhouse) once we were engaged, we banked what he had been paying in rent.  Everyone has "luck" in that you happen to look at the job postings the day the perfect job happened to be open, or you met your husband at a party you almost didn't go to (assuming you are happily married that was good luck) etc.  Those are the things you can't control.  Being able to take advantage of that "luck"  is what you can control. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics