this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Median house prices are around $400k. The low end of down payments are 10% of the total price, meaning to buy a home I'd need to save an entire year's worth of income when I can barely manage $3k in savings, and I'm the most frugal person in my family. "While buying a house is not a luxury everyone can afford" is one of the most laughably privileged things I've read in a while. Please go outside and touch grass sometime this century.
You can go as low as 3.5% down with an FHA loan if you have a 580 FICO.
That's still $14k though and too much for a lot of people. I do know some people who were able to buy homes with FHA loans though.
Huh neat, I'll have to squirrel that knowledge nugget away just in case that ever becomes viable. Another snag in my situation which I expect a lot of people my age experience though, the longest I've ever been employed at any company is my current job for 4 years (often not by choice - the current job just fired 1/4 of the staff for "budget reasons" on what should be a high-margin contract), and I've lived in almost as many locations as I have years. Buying a home would tie me down to one location, and my life has thus far been too volatile to trust that I could stay in one place without needing to move 5 years later. Plus, I was a kid during the 2008 financial crisis so I saw first hand my parents buy a big house past their means only to lose it within a couple years. That one is more irrational/emotional but worth mentioning.
Then there's the hopium that the proletariat will be pressed by late-stage capitalism into ☭Glorius Revolution☭(TM) and/or AI removes labor from the labor-consumer-owner equation and causes economic collapse (can't be a consumer if you don't have money from labor, can't be an owner if no one consumes, can't be labor if no one can hire you), and buying a house will mean a big expense that gets nationalized by the end of the decade. Probably not. But I also have no idea what the next 20 years looks like.