I live in the USA, and our future seems more bleak than it ever has. Is not about politics, although politicians do have an impact on it. It’s really about our quality of life, and cost of living, which has not changed for the better, it seems, in a really long time. The cost of living keeps going up higher and higher, and much of our country still believes that even with increased cost of living, there is never any reason whatsoever to pay people more. So for instance, a job that paid 10 bucks an hour in the year 2002, that same job might still pay $10 an hour now. But I think we all know that the cost of living has dramatically gone up from 2002 to now.
Even White collar jobs though seem to be threatened to now, which is not something I’ve ever seen before. Positions like analyst, engineer, business intelligence, revenue management, whatever you want to think of. Any corporate office job, people are suffering. The cost of living is absurd, buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income and it better be nearly six figure dual income…
I just don’t see how Americans at large are going to survive the next 30 years?
buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income
Not in all areas of the United States. Houses routinely sell for under $200k in my city. There’s also many for under $100k.
Median income for the area?
Say city.
Check out much of the Midwest. Check out Detroit.
I haven’t checked since covid, but Philadelphia usually has at least a handful for under 100k and a load under 200k.
Granted they aren’t in great sections of the city and nearly all are row homes with existing issues.
How’s the job market?
I have absolutely no idea how to answer that question in any meaningful way.
I was struggling to find the right way to phrase the question, and I failed. I guess what I really wanted to know was: for a typical working class person, is a house at that price within reach? Or if you move there for the cheap houses and get a job, do you end up still barely able to afford the payments?
I had supposed that’s what you were asking, however I am fairly well removed from the job market as I have been for over a few decades now and so the reality of the situation is not near to my grasp well enough for me to know and/or be able to meaningfully give you any indication on how things actually are.
I moved to Detroit from a HCOL city I was established in. I was renting and the options I had to buy were not hopeful. The taxes alone would have kept me working for more money year over year for the foreseeable future.
I took what would have been a down payment and bought a place outright. I bought a project and it was cheap, only half my down payment fund.
Now I am all set up. I have no mortgage to pay. My house costs me taxes ($1700/yr) and insurance ($1500/yr) plus utilities ($50 internet, $150 gas&electric, $60 water) That is about $550/month.
In michigan, taxable value increases are capped at 5%.
I figure I can work any job and stay ahead of the bills. Yesterday I did a brake job for a friend of a friend for $200 and didn’t even need to leave the house. I can do things like this here and there and get by without even having a job.
I have never known this amount of stability in housing as an adult before. It is wild. I own this whole damn house and everything in it. I also made a bunch of equity right out the gate by fixing up an abandoned trap house.
Not trying to lay out a plan for others, just wanted to share how my plan has been a success and that Detroit is a place where home ownership is attainable.
Oh, couple other things. I have no kids and the schools were not a problem for me. Although the neighborhood kids are all wonderful.
I am not interested in living in “the country”. I am a city person, I want my resources close. I can walk to a hardware, grocery, and auto parts store from my place. No thanks on 30min drives to dollar general and TSC on the fancy days.
This story is inspiring. I feel like there are a lot of people who wouldn’t feel like it’s within reach (no building/renovating skills or experience, or certain neighborhoods that maybe don’t feel safe to a single woman for instance, and yeah schools as you mentioned if you’re a parent or planning to be)—but for the people who can do that, it sounds like an absolutely phenomenal route to take.
People say this kind of thing a lot, but I don’t really understand if they don’t have any family or friends, don’t care about their family and friends, or just think it’s reasonable to have to choose between your relationships and living in an affordable house.
It sucks but you have to do what you think is best maybe the savings allow for some road trips to visit.
My household is in the top few percentile, we’re fine. I just think everybody else should also have the luxury of not having to choose between relationships and shelter.
No contest.
Unfortunately, we live in a society
This is a circumstance born, in no small part, of the idea that manual labor and menial labor is meaningless and has no real value.
Our economy has been sold from beneath us, and the overall cultural ideologies result in most people avoiding these things. But it is the only thing that is actual production - the rest of the economy is all efficiencies or expenditure.
Slowly, the wealth has slipped away, and now it’s becoming apparent to people, and they don’t know who to blame.
Find or make an enclave and survive together.
It is about politics. You need to organise yourselves better into unions. Then, you strike until you get what you deserve.
Why does Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries have so high quality of living and happy people? Cause the people realized that you need to work together to get what you want. You need to have solidarity with your other workers to push for better compensation and work environments.
Do this, or you’re doomed.
Absolutely 100% this.
To be totally blunt, this doesn’t need political backing. This requires people collectively coming together, forming unions with single-focus, and pushing for an increase in pay to align with the cost of living. Hell, if anything it’s better if Trump and his lackies oppose this, because you ultimately have the power to cripple these businesses via strikes, forming your own cooperatives off the back of your soon-to-be previous employers, or simply signalling to businesses that if they cannot afford to pay people enough money they shouldn’t be in business.
Push for gradual increase year-on-year until pay is aligned. If this is missed, everyone walks. Push for the removal of limited sick pay, and for 25+ days minimum vacation time a year. Leave it at that, and you’ve got terms that 90% of workers will agree to. Can’t get a single company to agree? Create a professional body for your line of work and promote it as the place to be for those in your field. Push for accreditation for roles, and shun those that avoid it.
I’ve anecdotally heard that the reason Nordic countries rank high on happiness is because they have a relatively high level of cultural homogeneity, or similar ideals circulating around with most people. This is in contrast to a place like the US that has a relatively high variety of ideologies and cultures. In other words it’s easier to get along if we all generally agree. What are your thoughts on this?
True, but misleading.
Yes, if you got rid of all the Nazis in America, then Americans would be happier. On the other hand, if everyone in a country, say, Germany, agreed on establishing a fascist dictatorship, then Germans would be unhappy.
Norwegians aren’t just happy because they all agree. They’re happy because they agree, and they’re left wing. Agreement is important, but only if it’s agreement on people’s rights and decency.
Yea definitely don’t disagree with that. I think that is a factor too. But I think it also kind of goes hand in hand. Do you have similar ideas because you organized and kind of aligned your ideas, or did you organize because your ideas are similar and you easily agreed to organize? It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing.
I’ve also often thought that countries like the US are just too big. There’s too many people to take into consideration. A country like Denmark with ~6 million people is much easier to keep track of and the governance and politics is closer to reality.
Every other time I’ve encountered this argument, it’s been an argument in favor of racism and xenophobia, often a Nazbol argument like “socialism only works if no diversity.” It’s my instinct to refuse it.
But I couldn’t deny that, American conservatives and liberals + leftists, on the mental level, live in different realities, with not only different core values and worries, but different ideas of what is actually happening (and no, I actively believe American leftists do not live in a fundamentally different reality from American liberals the way conservatives do from liberals + leftists.)
You need to organise yourselves better into unions. Then, you strike until you get what you deserve.
It’s a system of bargaining. But if you have nothing that they don’t already have, you can’t bargain. How can you unionize, when they have so many applicants they can just fire you or outsource you to India and your government will never stand up for you? It’s not possible. COLLECTIVE bargaining. It doesn’t work if a few people do it, and I can’t control others.
This is why it’s important to work for class consciousness and worker solidarity. Look for ways that management and capital tries to divide us and point them out to your peers!
Sure, but what’s your idea for fixing that? It works in Germany where it’s extremely difficult to gain citizenship and immigration is extremely tight but in the USA when there are countless millions of people ready to fill in your job, and constant turnover due to the amount of people that live in the USA and the expensiveness of the country, what is your solution?
Of course it’s collective bargaining, that’s what I mean with “organize”. I don’t mean just organize within your workplace, I mean organize within entire fields and industries.
Friend, you don’t know how unions work at a core level.
This sounds kind of condescending and mean. In Denmark we have large unions that cover whole industries and fields and they work very well for collective bargaining and securing good levels of compensation, vacation and good work environments. I am myself a member of such a union. So please don’t assume that I don’t know how unions work.
Sorry, didn’t intend for it to sound man and realized afterwards. I edited that part out. Read my other response. I don’t believe it’s as easy to unionize here in the USA as it is in Denmark. Denmark is extremely restrictive with immigration and is such a tiny country. If they started losing workers in a large number it would be very difficult for them to replace them. In the USA, we have 50 states, and incredible amount of land mass. People move around quite a bit for jobs, and when people start unionizing, they just fire everyone or make everyone terrified to lose their job. Just look at what happened with The Home Depot, largest hardware store in the USA. Basically, Home Depot lobbies strongly against it and provides severe amounts of misinformation to mislead people into thinking that they’re going to be a lot worse off, that they’ll get rewarded for voting against unions. These people are basically fighting against themselves and trying as hard as they can to screw each other over in hopes of a reward that never comes. And it’s totally perfectly legal, companies can basically paint unions as a nightmare that you will never recover from
when people start unionizing, they just fire everyone
Yea this needs to be made illegal obviously. But that’s hard. And that’s where it becomes political. You can’t get around the fact that it is political unfortunately.
You really believe we’re all going to die in the next 30years?
Or are you being hyperbolic?I can’t speak for everyone, but if I’m not dead in the next 30 years I’m going to be extremely disappointed.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 30 years
@Emperor Ok, I will remind you on Saturday Nov 21, 2054 at 4:47 PM PST.
If I’m not dead in 30 years I’ll absolutely make sure I’m dead! I just need to wait out my older family members and then I can finally just stop.
I’m 72. Pretty likely I’ll be gone by then.
Heading upwards or downwards?
Nowhere. I’ll just be gone
I’m 53. Can’t we not talk about the next 30-years?
The america empire is following in the exact same footsteps of the Roman empire. If you fail to learn from history then history will repeat itself. The great American empire will fall and there will be nothing u can do about it no matter how hard u try.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
— Dylan Thomas
The greatest trick Yahweh ever pulled was convincing people that “light” can be a euphemism for metaphysical goodness.
It’s been falling for a while now.
In history, a century isn’t that long.
Like a train crash in slow motion
You get milked by the big corpos. Money flows from the poor to the rich.
And as long as you have only these two extreme right wing parties, there is nobody who would change it.
To be fair the USA seems to have the brightest future compared to basically any other country because you guys don’t have this imminent demographic collapse like most other developed countries like Japan, Korea, China, Germany, Italy, etc. And because of your geography and size you are would only be mildly affected by a WW3.
Perhaps it helps to look at other parts of the world and see how comperativelly well you guys have it.
I guess the biggest challenge is to minimize the huge divide between the rich and the poor. Sadly you missed the opportunity to choose Berny Sanders as your leader a couple of times, that would have helped a lot.
Lol we do once the borders close.
heh, and republicans are going to lose their fucking minds when they start to see the consequences of the choices their leaders made. Like when fruit is like $10/lb because its all rotting in the fields because everyone who normally picked it is locked in a border
concentrationreeducation camp.Too bad we have to live with the consequences of their choices too.
Lose their minds? Why? Their gameplan is destabilization and collapse. It’s on purpose. They will celebrate when things collapse, not cry.
Leaders will. The poor ignorant voters who thought they were promised positive change will be totally boned.
Yeah those voters aren’t turning against Republicans. Trump will piss enough people off that, if there’s a free and fair election in 2028, Democrats will win. However, every problem Trump causes will get blamed on Democrats, who won’t win a large enough majority to override their token centrist villains and pass meaningful reform, so we’ll end up with another even crazier Republican administration in 2032. From there climate change fucks us all up and we die in the water wars of 2035 or the great famine of 2038 or some other horrible thing that we’re too stupid to address before it slaps us in the face.
You can survive on very little, it just will be a lower quality of life than previous generations which feels bad, but you do what you need to in order to get by.
The simplest way to deal with all of this is to actually perform the financial calculations to see what’s the best situation for you.
A $80,000 a year job in a city may actually leave you with a lower quality of life than a $40,000 a year job in the middle of nowhere if you’re spending $4,500 a month on rent for a two bedroom apartment in the city, and it would only be $1000 for a two bedroom house the middle of nowhere.
Calculate some possible budgets for different areas and different lifestyles, and find out what works best for you. Being in a city is not as good as it used to be financially speaking.
If you’re having trouble “surviving” either way, you need to figure out how to reduce your costs and/or up your income.
Common things like sharing a home (with a partner or roommate) can reduce your costs massively, trying to live alone is pretty stupid financially right now.
Learn how to cook things yourself, it’s not hard with Youtube these days, you can massively slash your food budget by not eating out or buying pre-made food. One of the stupidest things I see is people picking up a second job, making very little per hour, and then spending 6 hours of their income on a dinner from a restaurant (eat in, eat out, doordash, etc.). You would have been better off just buying decent meal ingredients for 2 hours of your wage, and then spending 1 hour cooking and cleaning. Then you’ve got 3 hours worth of time back that you can either use to work for more money for other things, or just not bother working at all to have more time for you.
If you’re stuck in a dead end low wage job, invest time in getting new skills that will enable you to get a better job. It’s never too late to retrain for a better position unless you’ve already retired.
Learn how to live in poverty and go unnoticed, because no grand and noble revolution is coming
Revolutions are never grand and noble.
(But some history books have been written by the survivors)
and it’d* better be a* nearly six-figure dual income
With what’s about to happen, I do not know
For the last 40 years through free trade we’ve had a large population join the market from countries like China, Russia, India etc.
Free trade with China has given us cheap consumer goods but at the cost of our own manufacturing which suppressed wage growth and inflation for a long time. We hit the peak of this just before Covid and we are now feeling the after affects.
China’s dramatically aging population along with geopolitical instability means that the logistics and manufacturing capacity that existed overseas for 20 years Is now failing. The US forced to reshore or nearshore (Mexico) much of its manufacturing capacity. Basically if we want to continue to have stuff we need to find somewhere else to make it besides China. This isn’t a cheap process and it won’t be as efficient as the old system.
Russia’s war with Ukraine has huge implications on resources and energy. Russia exports a lot of raw materials, fertilizer products, food, energy and aluminum. Taking them offline has affected international trade and has many many markets.
Our institutions that support labor have also withered over the last 40 years. Labor unions don’t have the sway they used too and politicians have ignored their needs for decades. Big business will not just give wage increases much like in the 20s and 30s Labor will need to grow and become more combative than it currently is to see any improvements.
In short the world order that we all grew up in is breaking down and changing. It will be at least a decade before these changes finish shaking out and we see solutions to the problems we are facing fully materialize.
Is not about politics
It’s all about politics. Just not about the 24/7 clown show that passes for politics in the US.
It’s about who gets what, how the spoils are divided. It’s obvious how the deck is stacked against ordinary people: the middle class is being bled dry and the hoarder class is taking off with all of it.
What’s extraordinary is that that somehow passes for ‘natural’ and ‘not about politics’.
Well capitalism is based on the horrible unfeeling cruelty of nature, that we originally created human society to escape.
So that’s why it feels natural. It’s the unfair unfeeling system of nature that society is not supposed to be
Not bees. Bees cooperate with each other, nurture their young, operate according to democracy, take nectar freely given by plants, and only use their stingers for self defence.
Fun fact: old scientists believed the queen controlled the hive for purely political reasons. They wanted evidence in nature for the existence of monarchy. They were wrong. Bees are communists and monarchy doesn’t exist in nature. Neither does capitalism. No animal profits purely from owning something, they all have to put in work to get what they need to live.
Trees actually cooperate and share resources.
This horrible cruelty shouldn’t be accepted as natural.
Many of us will not.
I know this wasn’t your point, but I’ve been confused on a particular point for awhile:
buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income and it better be nearly six figure dual income…
Just the general idea of it being impossible to afford to buy a house. And don’t get me wrong, the prices on houses have gotten ridiculous! At the same time, we talk about landlords buying houses and charging exorbitant rent (suggesting at the very least more than what they pay).
So if rent is more than the mortgage, insurance, etc, then how is it impossible to buy a house if it is possible to rent (an equivalent home)? Is it the down payment (if any)? Costs involved in purchasing? Because it seems like month to month it would be cheaper.
I say this as someone who has rented and owned, and owning felt significantly cheaper.
(Full disclosure, I’m in the military, so I had access to a VA loan… though not really sure what that did for me except maybe allow 0% down… if other people are absolutely required to put up a percentage then I can definitely understand it).
I didn’t downvote you.
Many homes are being sold very fast, and very competitively. You need to be pre-approved AND have a down payment before the target house is even listed. If you don’t put enough down, you have mortgage insurance which makes the monthly payment go up quite a bit.
Some very competitive places homes are being bought for cash, then often remortgaged to free up the cash you put in, but, you have to have it in the first place.
many buyers are telling their broker/agent “If a house comes up in xyz neighborhood, and it has these basic criteria, get my bid in sight unseen”. It’s going that fast. Your normal work a day, save your pennies home buyer doesn’t stand a chance.
This doesn’t even touch on investment firms doing this at an enterprise scale.
I have the same question. It seems like a doable goal for me, and I only have an Associates Degree. Are people just bad at saving and paying their bills on time?
My question was less about how doable it is, and more… if you can’t afford to buy a house, how can you afford to pay rent (and thus someone else’s mortgage plus a little extra)?
The last place I lived, I could afford my mortgage but I wouldn’t have been able to afford to rent an equivalent house. Hence my confusion.
I’ve owned a house for a long time, but the issue is paying their current rent/bills while also saving enough for a down payment.
Your questions are stating false comparisons. The only alternative to buying a house you listed is renting an equivalent house. But there are several other alternatives. To buy a house you must qualify on you and your spouse’s/ Co buyers proven income. So even if you intend to have a roommate, you cannot included the rent they’ll pay in your income. But it’s almost trivial for two couples (4 incomes) to rent a house together. There are also apartments, or trailer parks, or living with parents.
But let’s get back to equivalent homes.
A young couple makes 80k/yr and wants to buy a 250k house. They can’t afford much of a down payment and finance 225k. They’re paying roughly 2500/mo in a mortgage tax and insurance. That’s roughly half their take home income.
Older couple makes 160k/yr and just sold their previous home walking away with about 100k in equity. They also add 25k more for the down payment and finance 125k. Now their mortgage is 1200/ mo and they make more money so that represents a far lower percentage of their take home income as well. Even if they still only made 80k the fact they were already in a home with equity still leaves them with far more spending money each month.
The young couple is going to be in an apartment, or a trailer, they’re never getting into that home, even as a rental, unless the owners bought it during a low market and have a low mortgage and are not trying to get “today’s market rates” for it.
Va loan helps to make it favourable but also you need to consider that investors can structure it better than first time home buyer. Sometimes it aont about out running the bear just the next guy
Mortgage interest rates are very high at the moment, and many people “feel” like that’s never going to change, but it very likely will, significantly increasing what they’ll be able to afford. Home prices in my city have been falling for a couple years since they went out of control bonkers during the pandemic, and I don’t think they’ve hit bottom yet.
Point is, these things are typically cyclical and temporary
