Reply to What is it like to be “house poor”?

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Reply to "What is it like to be “house poor”?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]No eating out. No vacations. No activities for your kids. No splurges. No new clothes. No going to the movies. No replacing things that get broken that aren't necessities. No upgrading phones. No streaming services.
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This is how I grew up.  Nice house.  Nothing else.  It also means extreme stress in every recession or downturn.  Even as a kid, I constantly worried that we'd end up homeless because there was no padding.  It was our really nice house or, if my dad lost his job, our car.[/quote]

Sounds terrible. Why did your family decide to buy a house they couldn’t afford?[/quote]

Probably rich public schools. [/quote]Nah. My parents had an idea in their head of success and wanted a house that matched that view of themselves.  They thought their income would increase more than it did.  They thought they could make it work, but they missed things in their budget.  Then there were a few unexpected expenses, a drop in housing prices, a job loss, and unplanned kid, etc.

Even now they're paying for that decision in retirement.  They have smaller retirement accounts because they didnt contribute as much to afford that mortgage.  Now they can't afford to live near their grandkids, who live in a HCOL area.  They had to sell their nice house and now live in an okay house in a very poor area.  They have to worry a lot about crime--last week someone stole the gas out of their car's gas tank while it was parked in their driveway.  It's a classic story of living beyond your means.[/quote]

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