Reply to My aunt started working as a maid at the Watergate after graduating HS & bought a home in Arlington

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "My aunt started working as a maid at the Watergate after graduating HS & bought a home in Arlington"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My family is much like the maid in the OP.  Middle-school educations, came to US in the early 1970s.  All bought houses throughout the 1970s and 1980s, are now multi-home owning landlords.  Here is how they did it.  
1.  They WORKED.  I don't mean just a single job.  Watergate maid was likely doing housekeeping work for other families who (key point) paid her under the table.  My family was in various businesses - restaurant, construction, painting.  The key thing is that they all ran cash businesses and they worked from 7am to 11pm, 6 days a week.
2.  They spent VERY LITTLE MONEY.  Think beans and rice, heat set to frozen, cold water showers.    No cable TV, no dinners out, no health insurance and no doctors visits unless you were literally dying. Kids activities?  LOL.  Kids activities was having us join them at their jobs.

Housing now is more expensive relative to wages, yes.  But you are still seeing immigrant families buying property, even in many close-in neighborhoods.  This is how they do it.  They live very spartan existences and work crazy hours.  My 9-5 work life is a true luxury.  My parents worked their *sses off so that I can experience it!
[/quote]

I agree. I came to US in 2000 as an Au-pair. Long story short, I stayed in US, studies and worked hard, got married to an American, and became eventually US citizen. I live in a house worth about $950000 that will be paid off this year. Yes! And that's working on my and my spouse's combined annual salary of $150000. I grew up without any BS like eating out, nail salons, spas, vacations, kids activities etc. I can live spartan life. I also like luxuries purchases from time to time, don't get me wrong; but am very careful overall with any purchases. I guess, I don't waste money on an everyday basis like most Americans.[/quote][/quote]
Did you read the part about no health insurance/doctors, and double shifts 6 days a week?  Under the table work and creative accounting?  I forgot to mention that they never paid for daycare - daycare was a (barely) older cousin or tagging along at their jobs (you can do that in many manual labor/ blue collar situations).  They lived dangerously in order to get ahead.  The major reasons (usually white) americans give for not being able to afford housing are: healthcare costs, education costs, childcare costs.  They didn't have their own education costs - most of my family didn't even go to high school.  They weren't paying for health care, they just prayed no one got sick or hurt.  People who needed treatment would sometimes go back to their home country to get it because that was cheaper than paying for insurance/treatment in the US.  Other than my mandatory shots for school, I NEVER went to the doctor or dentist until I was 21 and had my own health insurance.  I know that now US-born children of low-income people can get WIC/medicaid.  If that was available back then, my family was unaware.

[quote]It amazes me that people can tell stories like this and actually believe that it was cutting coupons that allowed them to own a million dollar house and not marrying someone with a much larger income and having the luck to be born at a time where that house that costs $950,000 today probably cost $400K or less.  It's like those people who credit God with curing their cancer and not their Oncologist or the scientists who spent millions of man hours and billions of dollars coming up with state of the art therapies.  [/quote]
People want to know how it was possible and I'm telling you how it was and how it still is for many immigrants.  You are right, it isn't coupon clipping that brings you out of poverty -- it is doing things that most native borns would never tolerate.[/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