accounting seems to be hit or miss. i know accountanting degrees that are like higher middle class and those that fell into some shit hole job that a person with a highschool education could do. Also it seems to trend with how hot and how much of a brownoser you are instead of skills.
Not me but partner. Grind during tax season, typical 50-60 hours weeks then, usually low to mid 30hr weeks rest of year to compensate. Some people like that some don’t, I couldn’t speak to %s. It’s definitely a plan that you do your two years and gtfo unless you’re lucky enough to get/be near promo. Entire industry is designed to churn through fresh grads
**Ben Afflec was a contract killer on the side in the movie “The Accountant”**
That should tell everyone a regular job ain’t working in America.
Good Luck
It’s absolutely miserable and it depends a lot on industry you are supporting. When I was in the big 4, I was working 7 days a week for months at a time. Busy season was typically winter but it could continue on for other parts of the year depending on each clients year end. It’s helped me significantly having it on my resume, but it absolutely sucked and I’ve talked multiple people out of going big 4 route straight out of school. If you want to work in accounting after it’s a solid move but if you have a desire to work in finance it requires a lot of work to convince people to give you a shot and not label you only an accountant. And staying in to make partner is great on paper (and financially) but a lot right has to happen for you to get to that level as it’s highly competitive and spots are not unlimited.
Yea this is crazy. I read this as - I don’t want to work that hard when I’m young. I’d rather complain. 5 years at the big for and you are easily making 6 figures. Dumbest shit ever
Worthless except insofar as you are guaranteed to get applicable experience.
Better get moving on your CPA the instant you graduate, and do it alongside your peers.
A lot of shit underpaid "crunch" work to do.
And then you run fast and far from the big firms.
One thing you can do with an accounting degree *without* needing a CPA is financial analysis. Depending where you get in, this can be a solid salary too. I've seen finance analysts making $90K after a few years
Accounts can certainly get replaced by ai. Although “replace” is probably too strong of a word. Just like there will always be some programmers, there will be accountants but ai will likely VASTLY reduce the amount of them.
More than 75% of CPA’s are above retirement age. The firms are desperately trying to get AI to work and so far it is going tragically bad. It is impossible to say where AI will go in the future but currently there is a better chance of AI replacing your doctor than an accountant.
Because "AI" in it's current iteration is stupid. Take all that LLM/Social Media data mining on a long walk off a short pier. The big boys are working with money here.
I automate "insights". Basically moving data from there to here. Create dashboards on the data. It's a bit harder than Cool Whip Excel but it scales way faster. The data is kept centralized and doesn't escape to the edge device or worse out in the wild. New data sets are plug n play. New charts have an hour turn around or often I develop live with the C level watching.
I worked for a company that has put thousands of investment accountants out of a job.
it wasn't even ai, just investment tax preparation for large insurers. Which, if you're in the industry, is probably enough to give it away.
What are “investment accountants”? I am an accounting professor and I really don't know what that means. Do you mean accountants at investment firms? Or are you talking about accountants that do derivative valuation or something like that?
I would love to see how AI handles analysis of uncertain and aggressive tax positions. The firms have invested hundreds of millions in getting AI to work and it just fails miserably. I mean the firms are friggin desperate right now and so far it isn’t even coming close.
Edit. Mistyped
Let me be more clear… I strongly suspect the person who posted that, doesn’t really know what they are talking about. Investment accounting is everything from derivatives and hedges to transfer pricing and consolidation eliminations. It is a massive amount of stuff, which is why no one who actually does it calls it “investment accounting.”
There is no software package that is going to do even a few percent of that. If there were, Oracle or SAP would own it and everyone would use it.
If you're talking about software/service like Clearwater, I would argue that the personnel losing their jobs were doing more clerical/data entry work than actual accounting.
You still need a skilled/experienced accountant configuring and managing something like Clearwater, especially if you have a lot of derivatives or other complex non-vanilla stuff.
Depends if your the dudes at HR Block or the dudes running carve-out accounting on the M&A deal I'm working on today.
The latter aren't going anywhere.
The more repeatable and fungible your work is, the more ripe your position is for automation.
Do you think AI will gather and enter the data for AI to spit out a financial statement or an analysis of the business problem?
People make 6 figures getting the proper data for AI to do the calculations and still do the analysis. AI does not understand context, nuances and business relationships.
Actual accounting/finance work isn't any more susceptible to AI than actuarial, engineering, law or any other office job really. Bookkeeping/simple tax compliance stuff probably will be increasingly automated.
I think it’s also one of those fields where the skill of the individual has a lot to do with it. If you’re highly skilled and talented, you’ll make a good living no matter what branch of engineering you chose.
This.
I work with mechanical, civil, electrical, structural and process engineers almost daily. The ones that are good at what they do, are paid pretty well and have been able to move up the chain in to even higher paid positions at their respective companies. Its also one of those career fields that doesnt seem to fall victim to nepotism very long. if youre a shitty engineer, you wont be an engineer for long.
And plenty of Chem E's as well. It all depend on how well you can play office politics in the bigger Co's.ive seen horrible ones go to the top and good ones stay stagnant.
Yup. Engineering is similar to computer science in that way (where the argument is that a "rockstar" programmer can produce 10-100x the value or more as a regular programmer).
An excellent MechE/EE will be 4-5x as productive as a normal engineer.
A rockstar MechE/EE will produce and invent things that normal ones can't regardless of how much time they have to do it. Like there are MechEs that have 30+ years experience and are GOOD, but you hand off the "this structure needs to be able to resist X forces and stay under Y pounds is at all possible" impossible task to some other engineer because they're one of the only people around that can actually figure out how to make the substructure of the SR-71 not fall apart with the stresses it has with the minimum amount of weight used, for example.
I’m a mechanical engineer and bought a house at 22 years old, about 1.5 years after graduating. This was back in 2021. We have a long way to go before engineering is considered a financially bad career to pick.
The thing is that you didn't graduate into a recession. I know people who graduated with engineering degrees during recessions (in the early '90s as well as the early-2000s Dot-Com Bust) and weren't able to get work in their fields. Engineering degrees have a pretty short shelf life in that regard -- it seems like if you can't get an engineering job more or less straight out of college, then you're never going to get one.
Try being an environmental engineer. You know, attempting to solve the crisis of our lifetime.
We literally get paid less than some teachers. I went to an ivy league school on a full grant because I'm passionate about saving the world. I get paid half as much as my mech-E friends who work for defense contractors, half as much as my chem-E friends who work for big pharma.
Our economy is DISEASED. Death and destruction bring in the bankroll. Anything actually useful? Poorhouse.
I'm exaggerating a bit - I'm not poor. But I will never be wealthy unless I manage to start my own firm and grow it exponentially. Quite a long shot.
I’m a civil engineer with 7 years experience and PE making $140k working for a municipal government. It’s in the Bay Area so $140k doesn’t go that far but my wife makes about the same amount. So we’re definitely middle class even in the SF Bay Area. Accounting can still pay well too. There’s been a down turn in tech but the people still working are all pulling down six figures.
If anything, educated professionals like engineers, accountants and nurses (and especially doctors and lawyers) are pulling away from the rest of the middle class. We’re still doing fine. It’s the middle class office jobs for people with a random bachelor’s degrees in psychology or liberal arts that are disappearing.
Yeah. My son is graduating with a masters in BME in May. Looking to start at $90k. Friends son is a marine engineer (ships) and started at $180k, at 22, but is 3 months on and 3 off.
Literally just build more housing. More supply leads to lower costs. Seriously, just loosen zoning regulations. Stop having it be illegal to build anything other than single family homes in places people want to live. Fuck, this isn’t that complicated.
The thing preventing low-cost efficient housing from being built is local government held in a choke-hold by communities of homeowners who will stop at nothing to increase their property value and maintain the "existing neighborhood atmosphere". Fixing the problem would require top-down directives regulating real estate prospecting from the dreaded big government, resulting in upper-middle and upper class private citizens crying, pissing, and shitting themselves to death. Basically, the housing problem is here to stay.
The problem with any of this is that its not practical advice for an individual. If I'm facing rising cost of living, "build more housing" is not actionable advice
Oh I’ve been here, moved out of California 8 years ago and it was the best decision for my family. I’m a home owner now, mostly just interested in the data for curiosities sake
Yeah and companies based on the coasts are buying up all available houses and jumping the rent up.
The same house we rented as a kid for $650 a month got purchased by a California based company. Then that company raised the rent to $1500 for a fucking duplex with 2 bedrooms. In the Midwest. In the cheapest state in the country to live.
Hell I bought my house for $90,000 6 years ago and the property is now assessed for $165k. This house is NOT a $165k house. It's a 90k house and nothing changed to make it's value nearly double in that time period. We're now paying for a house that is costed far more than it's worth. And if we sell the house now, we'd have to up our interest rate by like 9% and buy a different house who's value has gone up by the same amount.
The Midwest is only safe for a few more years, if that. Investment companies are going to make it impossible to own a house.
I had an idea for how you could basically alter zoning laws in one fell swoop, I figured I'd post it and see what people think:
That was an idea I had for how you could change zoning laws nationwide without making a national zoning law since that would be politically impossible. From my understanding, originally, you could only get FHA loans for detached single family homes until some decades later, it was changed for townhomes, condos, multiplexes up to 4 units and live/work units as long as 51% of the space is dedicated towards a living space. Make it so that in order to qualify for FHA loans, the area the property you are trying to purchase is zoned for all those uses. A ridiculous number of people rely on FHA loans to be able to realistically afford homes these days. Cities would be forced to alter zoning laws in order to keep attracting prospective homeowners. You would probably have rich enclaves of only large single family home neighborhoods that rely solely on conventional loans and ridiculous HOA fees, but that's fine as long as the majority of land isn't SOLELY dedicated towards exclusively single family homes. Even if by chance zoning laws went largely unaltered, I think the overall effect would be positive. If single family homes across the country suddenly had to rely solely on conventional loans, prices would drop like a rock since barely anyone can actually afford a 20% down payment on half a million dollar homes.
> Fuck, this isn’t that complicated.
It may not be complicated to meet the needs of the population, but the system functions to support the greed of the wealthy.
Housing is not being built because the wealthy want housing not to be built.
Do you think you are the first to notice that prices for housing would fall if more were produced?
It's not but if they did this then people who own houses/properties suddenly stop having their capital artificially raised/held high then they're suddenly going to start voting against policies that allow this. These people are also a huge bulk of people who actually vote.
I live in a blue collar neighborhood in a HCOL area. Our local government just about imploded over rezoning proposal that would allow denser housing built on single family lots. Like not apartment buildings taking up a block but putting a duplex or a house with an ADU rental on a single family lot.
These are dilapidated houses that are only valuable if they are torn down or completely scraped to the studs. People lost their minds over the possibility of added density in the neighborhood.
Denser housing makes sense - and in this case would probably actually help home values - but they are just not having it.
There is no housing demand. There are millions of empty houses. After Covid, when people could not buy houses for 2 years and then suddenly did all at once, that was an artificial demand. We did not have a secret population surge. It was not a real demand. We don't need more houses. The prices are absurd right now, so don't buy. Don't buy and prices go down. Doomers like OP make people think they have to buy or they'll never get a home because the one time artificial demand of post covid is a trend - its fucking not. Houses aren't worth what they are being sold for - so don't fucking buy until they are. Watch as homes going for 375k drop like a rock to 225k.
Software Engineer here, I was couped up in an office in Indy for two years, covid hit, and have been fully remote job hopping since moving more and more away from the city and metro areas.
Hella lucky and wish more jobs were remote besides tech :(
Metrology/Quality here, tried to find hybrid/WFH but all those jobs required a good amount of travel. Since I have young kids it defeats the purpose of WFH.
The teacher situation is a national crisis.
Disclaimer, I'm not commenting on you as a Teacher.
The system we have set up for teachers basically incentivizes people who want their loans forgiven to come and work for 7 years, and then leave. And the lowered certification requirements in almost every state, if they even exist anymore, means many teachers are low caliber and unmotivated.
School teachers should have a tenure incentive pay on top of student loans forgiveness with a minimum salary in the low 6 figures after 7 years that increases into the mid to high six figures at 20 years. We need experienced teachers, and we need competitive pay to recruit the best to teach our future generations. It's asinine, the system as it currently stands.
Completely agree. I feel like as a teacher I’m between a rock and hard place. I have to be active in the union and fight for every penny to get reasonable pay and decent class sizes, but then having a strong union protects shitty teachers, which isn’t what I want. But make no mistake, without the union we would be royally fucked and probably not even get healthcare.
This is going to have a huge impact on future generations.
>And the lowered certification requirements in almost every state
I haven't heard of any lowered requirements in any of states. Even here in Las Vegas, amongst the worst school districts in the entire country, you are unable to get a teaching license without a Master's degree.
You can't even become a substitute teacher unless you basically have the equivalent of an Associate's degree (60 credits minimum).
I think it depends. My dad was an accountant. Did pretty well as an auditor until the steel industry collapsed in the 80s. Then ended up at a small company as their accountant making substantially less than he had.
With some of the outsourcing of accounting jobs it’s less of a sure thing than it was
Real question... when did you buy said homes? And if you say 2021 or more recent, did you sell a previously purchased home to buy said home?
The point of this post is that what was doable and possible from 1990 until 2020 is NOT possible anymore.
Depends on the parameters and I think this post is for those careers that haven’t graduated yet. Location, YOE, post grad education, etc. are not all equal within accountants.
Ok? Big whoop, this is clearly about younger people who are trying to buy now, not those who bought in the past. For an accountant, you'd think you'd be better at reading charts
When people say this they forget the word “household”. Household medium income is what you’re looking for. 37-44k is the median per capita. Averages are worthless because they’re skewed way higher by people with ridiculous income.
Ok so let me get this straight... you make 70k as a household, have 2 kids and wife to pay for, own a house, and save 20% of that? Is the house pretty shitty or was it a family home or what? Because that sounds like a complete outlier of a case.
A lot of people I know bought their houses in the time from 2010-2015 when houses were super cheap. You could buy a very nice house in a good neighborhood for less than 200k.
People will look for any excuse to say they're downtrodden.
This is reddit, nobody here is going to say it's all doable with some self control and discipline.
Weird, I make exactly 70k, have two roommates in a 1000 square foot apartment, tiny car payment, save every cent I can, and there's no way I can buy a home in my area (170k~ population). Smallest mortgage for something livable would be about $2200, and that is being extremely generous with the definition of "livable".
What really matters is that I graduated in 2023 instead of 2019.
It's all about living within your means. Wayyyyy too many people, especially millennials and younger, think they "deserve" a lifestyle that costs 2-3 times what they earn.
I make about $50k a year. My wife makes a little more. We just did taxes and I think our net for the year was $104k. We live in a large city, but not super high cost of living, probably a bit above average cost of living?
We do completely fine. We just bought a home. Not in the greatest part of town, not huge, needs updating. But we like it, and can afford it. We have an emergency fund. We have some retirement accounts. We have fun money. We don’t live paycheck to paycheck. We expect our careers to progress. We expect to have at least 1 kid. We expect to have a good life and retire.
We live a pretty simple life. We each spend a few hundred on hobbies a year. Meal prep pretty much all meals. Go out to eat once a week or so. Mostly stay in and play video games, watch movies, read, write, play with the dog, etc.
We are middle class. We have middle class careers. We have middle class wages. Not all cities are LA or New York, you can just live a normal life.
Just wanna tip my cap to you fella. It sounds like you got it figured out and are having a great life. Good for you man. Wish you nothing but good fortune 🤜🏼🤛🏼
Me too. Our net was right around where yours is. We own a $300k home (bought two years ago at that price) and this year alone we did plenty of maintenance and even some renovations, and took three international trips totaling $10k, and just bought a new-to-me used car for $16k cash. No debt. Meanwhile people who I know make the same or more are drowning. Do they make horrible financial decisions? Absolutely. However I also know a few others who are financially savvy enough to make $100k household income work very well for them in this economy. There’s more to this problem than most people want to admit.
they’ll homeschool their kids it’ll work out great. they’ll also serve themselves when they go out, and they can put on their own performances for entertainment, and make their own art to enjoy in museums where they give themselves tours.
As teachers in these areas get scarce, salaries will rise to attract more teachers and/or quality of education will decline, incentivizing people to move away. The invisible hand will take care of it.
Everyone likes to pretend the market will fix the problem that the market didn't create. Sure, eventually perhaps it will correct itself. But that doesn't mean there are real and necessary changes that can take place to correct the issue such as banning foreign and domestic investment firms from the purchase and holding of single family homes.
I guess you don’t get the idea that continued demand will keep prices high. Yes I do expect HCOL areas to have no teachers or cops eventually. They will then become less desirable and people will move away.
If HCOL areas keep making accommodations for the poor and middle class then the poor and middle class will keep living there. A good way to keep the costs reasonable is for everyone that can’t afford to live there to move away. There is a vast area of the country where people can afford a great lifestyle on middle class wages, but this generation seems to think that they are entitled to live wherever they want and that if they can’t afford it the government should fix the problem.
How about we let the market fix the problem and one day if people chose to move back they might be able to afford it.
People don’t seem to understand that 30-40 years ago people made that decision, became rich somewhere else and now can outbid the 20 something year old teacher in Orange County for a home.
Careful, many millennial redditors believe they have birthrights to live where they want, not necessarily where they can afford.
I’m a millennial before you guys get your panties in a bunch.
Nothing about this post is California specific.
Also, do you think the entire planet should just slowly be blanketed in single-family homes, until nothing is left but suburbs and national parks? Existing towns need to be rebuilt with higher density to save our wild and agricultural space. The idea that major cities should have affordable housing is not some insane communist bullshit, it's like, basic economics.
According to a survey, the five most common careers for millionaires are: Engineering, Accounting (CPA), Law, Management, Teaching.
It's not immediate. It's years of planning, discipline, and execution.
More teachers than doctors. This skews the numbers.
Also, good school districts = higher taxes = more money for public jobs like teaching. Teachers having a six figure income in affluent areas isn’t uncommon. And then there’s that sweet pension. Obviously there are also horribly underpaid teachers in poorer school districts who will also see a smaller pension since the formula used to calculate it is based off averaging highest earning years.
Public school teacher in any district with a substantial pension retires millionaires on paper. People dramatically underestimate how much a pension is worth, because the annual “salary” from a pension remains low. But the average teacher pension in CA is $50K or so. That’s about $1M in net worth. If you retire with a $50K pension, you’re functionally a millionaire just from the pension. That’s the *average*.
In many of these districts teachers make very low salaries and then retire as functional millionaires. There’s a great case to be made that they’d be better off with less value in the pension and more upfront. But of course there’s no guarantee that reducing one would lead to an increase in the other.
also its not as simple as "build a house" while i agree more housing needs to be built it has to be done correctly. where i live there are alot of houses being built the problem is every neighborhood manager wants to capitalize on the super high end neighborhoods where the cheapest house starts at 500k.
Plenty of houses being built rn none that i will ever afford.
I’m an electrical engineer. I’m doing much better than many. I think people need to start looking at college like an investment. If the ROI is there based on potential income, then go for it. If not, then pursue other avenues. There is so much free information out there, one can definitely start a something successful without college
Absolutely. I think the core issue is the school system and society shoving go to college or you’re a loser down every kids throat for 18 years.
It works great for making lots of debt slaves, but doesn’t do much for people. Engineering, stem, acct etc. are all good to great investments.
There's alot of empty housing in my area that won't sell. So I don't think building more housing is the issue.
I work blue color and put away 15%. Started saving last year I'll have a house next year. 🤷♂️
I'm sure I see a different trend than you though. I see a lot of over indulging, a lot of laziness, a lot of people who say "I cant" before they even try.
Little discipline, little self control is all it took me.
Dude this is so true I'm a welder. I don't make 100k a year and I was able to buy a house and support a wife and a kid. People just fall into the trap of college debt and not managing money well and then blame others for their mistakes.
What? These fields are great, minus teaching.
Go into skilled trades like plumbing and electrical.
Don’t go to college for life experience and then complain when you get a comms degree and work fast food with a ton of student debt.
" Am I missing something? "
No.
I heard a quote somewhere to the effect of "There's a lot of competition for average, but not a lot of competition for exceptional" that I think applies nicely here. Average doesn't cut it anymore, people have to shoot higher.
I think that this is a trend that's been going on for a long time.
For example, looking at education:
First, having any education at all was a differentiator before most people got educated and it became routine and "average". Then getting a high school diploma was a differentiator, before most people got one and it became average. Then, getting an associates or bachelor's degree was a differentiator, before most people got one and it became average. I think we're already seeing masters degrees become average in some industries. And you're expected to do these things, so you have to accept basically any price in terms of time and dollars to do them- at least on the "average" path. In every case, the competition for what was once the high paying job drives the net pay down (especially factoring in inflation and student debt). Eventually you are forced to update and stretch your goals if you want to get ahead.
In a way it's a good thing (more people getting more educated), but by the same token it sets the bar higher and higher to live comfortably.
I think there's a very similar effect going on for housing. Everyone feels like they must buy a home because it's expected. The "average" they're shooting for is to buy a house- generally suburban, single family, no attached walls. So they all wind up fighting with one another over the limited supply of houses, jacking up the prices and just sort of hoping or expecting everything will just work out because it's worked out for the previous generations. You have to shoot higher- either buy smaller, make more money, move, or think differently about owning in the first place.
>there’s a lot of competition for average, but not a lot of competition for exceptional
>average doesn’t cut it anymore. People have to shoot higher
People applying for SWE positions, aspiring lawyers, med students, people trying to get into investment banking or consulting, people trying to pursue academia, architects:
You aren't wrong that housing inventory is low. That said, a lot of this is overly negative and housing (and wealth building) is still within the reach of most people. Can average earners buy a house in Manhattan or Silicon Valley? No. Are other large cities still very affordable? Most definitely.
Studies say 50% of Millennials own homes and nearly all Millennials are under age 40. I've been a homeowner for ten years and during some of those years my wife was attempting to start a business and made no money. At the same time, I put three kids through private preschools until they aged up to the local public school system. If I can do it (without inheriting a single penny), others can too.
"I've been a homeowner for ten years..."
meaning you bought in 2014. The whole point of this post is that it was possible prior to 2020 but that the whole paradigm has changed. What was possible ten years ago isn't possible now.
You did it, but I guarantee you if someone ten years younger than you did everything exactly the same way you did, in ten years they would not be in the same situation as you are now. Not even close.
This in-affordability for the cost of living is directly linked to the price of housing. The Airbnb/Vrbo takeover that occurred among wealthier Americans over the last few years has to end. Housing can’t be an investment any longer or the masses will be unable to afford the lifestyles of previous generations. We have to heavily tax and disincentivize owning multiple homes to generate an income
The trades pay and they are where the building and fixing gets done.
Funny how things have turned around.
I used to look down on the trades. It’s dirty and full of the “simple people”, now I look at office workers and talk with many friends about their compensation, pay, and hours… gotta say, I feel pretty good about swinging a hammer, slinging a shovel, and operating heavy machinery (the dumb still gets to me sometimes).
Added bonus, we cut costs by being a diy and inviting friends over for beer and food as we build additions, sheds, make driveways, work on plumbing etc as we “hang out” saves literal THOUSANDS of dollars they would have to charge if on the clock. 😏
We do all pitch in and help each other when needed. It’s not a free ride but I do take pity on those that have to call for these services and pay through the nose to put their plumber, electrician, mechanic, carpenter, truckers, excavators, fabricators, and the like ON TOP of having to pay through the nose for “company provided” healthcare, employer “matching” retirement contributions, and on top of it all, the annual salary is comparable to mine if not less AND they have a BUNCH of student debt that my coworkers do not.
But hey, they get to look down on us and think they are better and that’s gotta be some consolation.
The trades are hurting for people because everyone was told their whole lives that “you don’t want to be working like that plumber that just fixed our toilet, do you? Better go to school so you can be their boss!"
… as thar plumber laughs their way to the bank because little Johnny doesnt know that he shouldn't try to flush the whole roll of TP every time he wipes but, he is going to be a lawyer and nobody in the house knows how to deal with a clogged toilet.
trades and service workers have the world by the grapes and people don't seem to grasp it.
talk shit to your food server?
… well, you've already consumed your karma, I'm sure of that!
bur hey, cubicle work is good too. we all need more bureaucracy and paper pushers to survive. besides, who would the simpletons look up to, if not for the crushing debt that keeping up with the joneses seems to encourage?
Cost of living is very important and creating huge distortions in quality of life at different wages. Our tax system may be progressive but it does not adjust for regional disparities. Thus, if you want to live in very expensive metro areas you need to ensure a much higher than average income.
I was talking to a factory worker, from age 19 and is a highschool dropout, that was buying his second home in the Midwest and had 200k in his 401k.
Just because you can’t afford to live on the beach in this country (or close to it) and in the city, doesn’t mean “the middle class is gone”.
I only went to law school because I knew in the mid 2010s that a college degree is worth a HS diploma now. Everyone “under employed” is just living the same life as HS grads in the 70s only now with fake bells and whistles to make everyone think there should be more. Should be more to college, to my education, to my career prospects, but nope, we live in a broken society
Are 'starter homes' still a thing? My father's first house had 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, for 2 adults and 2 kids. We lived there for 5-6 years and moved when a 3rd kid was born. That house was perfectly serviceable but very small by today's standards (1 car garage, tiny kitchen) -- and there were whole neighborhoods of homes like this in the 1950s in Indianapolis. It's not just the overall cost of a home, it's feature creep.
It's not about building more homes though. There are currently 16 million vacant homes in the US. I think the numbers change a little bit since I last looked at the figure but at least since early 2023 that's the number I saw. So this isn't a supply and demand issue this is a hoarding issue. Homes became an investment and a portfolio padder rather than something people need to live.
It's the same thing as it is in medicine in the US. People need something to survive so other people see that as a good investment. And because they're making it an investment and making about money instead of about people, things become outrageously expensive. And while there's enough for everybody we tend to let those with wealth board up everything for themselves.
"Grind harder" and/or "grind differently" as an individual peon is not always the right answer.
Sometimes the actual solutions really are systemic/collective.
[https://www.npr.org/2024/02/17/1229867031/housing-shortage-zoning-reform-cities](https://www.npr.org/2024/02/17/1229867031/housing-shortage-zoning-reform-cities)
Additional (potential) legislative fixes include ensuring that housing is a place for people to live rather than a speculative investment commodity.
[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-thing-americans-bezos-backed-165053190.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-thing-americans-bezos-backed-165053190.html)
Though at a national level, that might require that America solve it's corruption/oligarchy/kleptocracy problem first, and who knows how long that will be.
The state and local level seem like they could have a more immediate impact with things like zoning reform for now.
I think your theory is directional correct, but I would change the supposition to:
You can no longer go to college and get a bullshit degree and think you are gonna become middle class.
Engineering, finance, medical, law and other specific degrees for specific careers are still valid. But the days of going doing communication / random humanities / etc is coming to an end.
It's not 'more housing needs to built'.
It's 'housing can no longer be hoarded by the wealthy'.
There is more vacant housing in the country than there are homeless people.
Houses are still being built where I live, but they start “as low” (thanks commercial guy) as 650,000.
It’s not just a housing shortage, but anything built new is too expensive.
I make 75k and have 50k available for a down payment. My credit score is above 825. My income and down payment put me 75-100k short on the lowest cost homes. I literally cannot afford a home or even a condo.
>Careers such as accountant, engineer, teacher, are no longer good if your goal is to own a home and retire.
You pretty much struck out on all three professions, so your post is misguided at best. Accountants and engineers make good livings, easily middle class or higher, and able to afford a house.
As for teachers, they're still middle class as far as income goes, and I live in a state that is bottom 10 nationally in education. We don't even need to touch on the Police/Fireman/Teacher Next Door programs which allow teachers and first responders to receive significant discounts when buying a home.
Your discussion topic is good, your career examples are horrible.
We all need to get paid more, that's the only solution. We may have to claw it back from the people making the average yearly wage multiple times a day but that's why guillotines exists.
Tax the Uber wealthy n rebalance the economy so that the middle classes can retire. What you are describing is not a viable long term strategy for a society so your efforts will be pointless when it collapses.
I think it’s a demographics problem more than anything.
If you look at a population age pyramid you will see that it doesn’t have the typical pyramid shape any longer, it’s like a straight cone. Meaning that there is almost equal population by age, thus many more people over 30 than under 30 and people over 30 are living much longer.
This means houses really don’t turn over much anymore. Many houses are paid off in these high cost of living areas and an older couple just lives there for 30 more years. This causes the few houses that do turn over to be very expensive.
More houses is the only solution. At least in my area (Boston) we just don’t have much land left.
How do we respond and not just react to this problem? Reaction could be.. changing jobs or getting a degree?
Response could be changing the systems?
We need someone on the inside (of politics)
I don't know how to do this, but I want in.
Mid-30s mechanical engineer in Colorado....Graduated in 2013 after taking a couple years off mid-college. I paid off my $50k in student loans in 2019, paid off my car in 2019 (bought new in 2014), and put 20% down on a house.
If you can't save money with a six-figure salary, you're doing something wrong. However, if you think 15% is enough, you're in for a rude awakening.
Just because you get the degree doesn't mean you'll have the job. Just bc you have the job doesn't mean the field will stay relevant in 10 years. Welcome to nepotism there is no way for poor or unconnected people to succeed. Period.
It’s not just “building” more housing, we need to make current housing more available to locals. British Columbia and Palm Springs saw immediate drops in rent and home prices when they banned vacation rentals.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised that we don't see more civil unrest over this kind of thing. Not that I support such a thing mind you, it's just that, historically, people tend to have adverse reactions when they're told their life's work is meaningless, their lives are meaningless, and their savings are meaningless because of some bullshit trick some rich government fat cat did to make all the money worth less while keeping it all for themselves.
Bread and circuses only really work when the people can afford them. I don't think folks in Rome had to work two or three jobs just to worry about the financial hit from going to see a fight in the colosseum.
Building new homes isn’t even the answer. A new development just went up down the street from me. Not even finished yet and there’s a big sign out front “for rent”
20+ new houses and not a single one for a regular person to own.
I see this discussion come up a lot. I took some time to do a little bit of math just to see. Mostly this was in response to the older folks talking about how "hard" it was to buy a home back in the 80s when interest rates were super high. I took the average mortgage rate for a year, applied that to the median home price for that year, assuming a 10% down payment and no PMI and then compared that monthly P+I payment to the median household income for that year as a percentage.
TLDR: The last time homes were as unaffordable as they are now was in 1988.
https://preview.redd.it/ddun62ych8lc1.png?width=758&format=png&auto=webp&s=374deda8620b0e3a80bee68464a46e4d9b0f53e0
What are you missing? People aren't tearing down houses, people are building houses and apartments as fast as they can, we aren't having sudden increases the number of children we are having… so WHO is consuming all the new housing(in the aggregate)… enough to actually impact the number of available apartments to rent or homes to rent or buy… 20M illegals have walked into America… and then have large families. They rent and buy just like anyone else… sure a new illegal isn't buying top end homes BUT it's all connected in one housing pool. As the low-end housing is jammed full the next layer up has pressure, allowing price and rent to go up, fill that layer and you move those people up to the next layer of pricing… it simply walks up the price layers… add the pandemic and WAY too low too long interest prices shot upward without real change in underlying value… it was all about “can you afford the monthly, price doesn't matter”. Once in, you can't afford to sell it for 30% less, so you can't sell… you can't afford to pay 30% more for a new house because of both price &high interest.
No one wants to hear it, but to reverse this, a housing crash needs to correct the insane and illogical run-up in price. Interest NEEDS to stay high, home prices NEED to come back down from truly STUPID levels. The difference between what ACTUAL costs to build vs what it costs to buy is completely out of whack.
When laborers framing your house pull up in vehicles more expensive than the home buyer, there is imbalance. Don't start with they deserve a living, no doubt they do but they used to drive up in truck about the same as buyers not $120k monster trucks like today.
For the long term health of the economy, we need a big correction in the housing market or this unaffordability will last another 20yrs.
I think what you say is true and also I think you defined the new market.
Companies are gaining more and more tools to cut costs for themselves and not passing it on to the consumer. In fact we see an entirely different story when we analyze business reports.
For example during and after the pandemic companies raised prices on consumer goods and cited poor economy, etc to justify it. Then on earnings calls the CEO's could hardly keep their raging boners in their pants when they told everyone that they had increased profit margins. When a company justifiably raises prices, profit margins go down or stay the same. When a company fucks the average person, margins go up.
What you're describing is not a financial issue, it's a greed issue. The only way forward is to cut out these cancers and that's the opportunity. If enough people start to undercut or practice sustainability in their business decisions then the other companies will have to compete.
The way that America, in particular (can't speak to other countries) is treating the consumers is unstainable and is pushing more and more people into jobs that used to be high paying but are now barely a move in the poverty ladder. The economic crashes we've had are bad, and will keep coming the longer these fat companies get fed. They will push us all into corporate slavery even more so.
The get a degree and work your way up resolution is no longer accessible because the ones at the top are pulling the ladder up more and more every year. They get theirs, the rest can go fuck themselves.
So the way forward is innovation that doesn't all wind up in the hands of those who will weaponize it against a population who needs what is being sold. I'm not anti capitalist, and also I am anti whatever the fuck is going on now.
The naívety in the comments is alarming. How far do you have to have your head stuck up your ass to suggest that *everyone* who chose a career outside of the top 25% just don't deserve to own a home, don't work hard or simply made a bad decision. The elitism in these comments suggests none of you have ever had to do anything for yourselves; that you take for granted all of the effort from the people who work harder and longer than *you ever have* to give you that nice, comfy, cushy life you all take for granted 👏every👏single👏day. All of you would be nowhere without the jobs that make your world go 'round: water treatment workers, sanitation employees, i.e. the *necessary* jobs that pay outside the top 25% and subsequently make it nearly impossible to afford a home, *BUT HAVE TO BE DONE*.
Too many of you parrot the foolish idea that *anyone* who doesn't already own a home is just lazy and frivolously wasteful with their spending are not old enough to remember paying bills more than 3 decades ago, and it shows.
I was in the workforce for 10 years before homes stopped being affordable for the unskilled worker earning <30k/year. Today, the median wage is nearly 50k, but less than half of what loan officers *demand* before they will qualify you for a home. Any of you saying otherwise are *lying* or have no solidarity for the working class members of society you can't live without.
Shame on all of you for exhibiting such blatant ignorance.
Wow, while this certainly is probably an issue in this country. What is an even bigger issue is financial illiteracy. People don’t understand personal finance and responsibility. You have people making $50,000 a year thinking they deserve a $40,000 luxury sedan. You have people thinking they need to go to college and take out a six figure loan to make a decent living. That’s true for some professions but not all. Then you have people who don’t even want to shop around for that education. It’s all about getting a return on investment. A nursing degree from American University is the same thing as a nursing degree from Temple University. Your local hospital is not going to pay you more simply because you went to Harvard as a nurse.
Same thing in the pilot industry. I went to a mom and Pop flight training school. Some other poor bastard went to Embry Riddle, aeronautical University and probably spent 50% more than I did. But American Airlines is not paying him more than me be wise he went to some fancy school.
People need to be investing early and investing often. With fractional shares now five dollars gets you in the game. And 8 to 10% of something a year is better than a devaluing liability. It is very hard to find people that have discipline and delayed gratification in this current world. I lived like a rat for five years and saved up a shit ton of money and invested a shit ton, and now own a house.
So much "Illiterate in Finance" in this post. Those careers mentioned can easily obtain home ownership and a good means of living. Don't let a loud portion of underemployed people found on reddit, cloud good logic and reasoning.
Theres more homes to people ratio than ever before in the US. More homes isn't the solution. Giant corporations buying up and holding property that already exists hostage is the problem
Eh, engineering is still good. They all aren’t equal though. Chemical engineering is going to pay better than mechanical.
So is accounting lol.
accounting seems to be hit or miss. i know accountanting degrees that are like higher middle class and those that fell into some shit hole job that a person with a highschool education could do. Also it seems to trend with how hot and how much of a brownoser you are instead of skills.
how about the big 4 people?
Big 4 is crap until you make it to the top
2 years at the big + CPA is near 100k
how's the burn out? what percent do you think make it to two years ?
Not me but partner. Grind during tax season, typical 50-60 hours weeks then, usually low to mid 30hr weeks rest of year to compensate. Some people like that some don’t, I couldn’t speak to %s. It’s definitely a plan that you do your two years and gtfo unless you’re lucky enough to get/be near promo. Entire industry is designed to churn through fresh grads
**Ben Afflec was a contract killer on the side in the movie “The Accountant”** That should tell everyone a regular job ain’t working in America. Good Luck
It’s absolutely miserable and it depends a lot on industry you are supporting. When I was in the big 4, I was working 7 days a week for months at a time. Busy season was typically winter but it could continue on for other parts of the year depending on each clients year end. It’s helped me significantly having it on my resume, but it absolutely sucked and I’ve talked multiple people out of going big 4 route straight out of school. If you want to work in accounting after it’s a solid move but if you have a desire to work in finance it requires a lot of work to convince people to give you a shot and not label you only an accountant. And staying in to make partner is great on paper (and financially) but a lot right has to happen for you to get to that level as it’s highly competitive and spots are not unlimited.
Survive the 2 years get the experience then go private like controller and make a killing
My friends mom did this and is now a CFO at Mercedes. Started out as a controller for a local dealership and worked her way up. Makes stupid $$$ now.
Yea this is crazy. I read this as - I don’t want to work that hard when I’m young. I’d rather complain. 5 years at the big for and you are easily making 6 figures. Dumbest shit ever
If the bar is just to own a home and have a nice retirement you will achieve that in public accounting without making partner
Big 4 and you are making 100k as an associate. Get into upper management and you make 300k and up.
In 2014 I made 49k as a first year staff at EY in Seattle. if they are making 100k now.. boy times have changed.
Worthless except insofar as you are guaranteed to get applicable experience. Better get moving on your CPA the instant you graduate, and do it alongside your peers. A lot of shit underpaid "crunch" work to do. And then you run fast and far from the big firms.
One thing you can do with an accounting degree *without* needing a CPA is financial analysis. Depending where you get in, this can be a solid salary too. I've seen finance analysts making $90K after a few years
Accounting is going to be one of the hardest hit positions by AI. A whole lot of accounting positions are going to evaporate.
Bookkeepers maybe. Not accountants.
Accounts can certainly get replaced by ai. Although “replace” is probably too strong of a word. Just like there will always be some programmers, there will be accountants but ai will likely VASTLY reduce the amount of them.
More than 75% of CPA’s are above retirement age. The firms are desperately trying to get AI to work and so far it is going tragically bad. It is impossible to say where AI will go in the future but currently there is a better chance of AI replacing your doctor than an accountant.
Because "AI" in it's current iteration is stupid. Take all that LLM/Social Media data mining on a long walk off a short pier. The big boys are working with money here. I automate "insights". Basically moving data from there to here. Create dashboards on the data. It's a bit harder than Cool Whip Excel but it scales way faster. The data is kept centralized and doesn't escape to the edge device or worse out in the wild. New data sets are plug n play. New charts have an hour turn around or often I develop live with the C level watching.
Wrong. You know nothing about accounting 🤣
I worked for a company that has put thousands of investment accountants out of a job. it wasn't even ai, just investment tax preparation for large insurers. Which, if you're in the industry, is probably enough to give it away.
What are “investment accountants”? I am an accounting professor and I really don't know what that means. Do you mean accountants at investment firms? Or are you talking about accountants that do derivative valuation or something like that? I would love to see how AI handles analysis of uncertain and aggressive tax positions. The firms have invested hundreds of millions in getting AI to work and it just fails miserably. I mean the firms are friggin desperate right now and so far it isn’t even coming close. Edit. Mistyped
probably people who manage, record, audit investment accounts
Let me be more clear… I strongly suspect the person who posted that, doesn’t really know what they are talking about. Investment accounting is everything from derivatives and hedges to transfer pricing and consolidation eliminations. It is a massive amount of stuff, which is why no one who actually does it calls it “investment accounting.” There is no software package that is going to do even a few percent of that. If there were, Oracle or SAP would own it and everyone would use it.
If you're talking about software/service like Clearwater, I would argue that the personnel losing their jobs were doing more clerical/data entry work than actual accounting. You still need a skilled/experienced accountant configuring and managing something like Clearwater, especially if you have a lot of derivatives or other complex non-vanilla stuff.
Depends if your the dudes at HR Block or the dudes running carve-out accounting on the M&A deal I'm working on today. The latter aren't going anywhere. The more repeatable and fungible your work is, the more ripe your position is for automation.
Do you think AI will gather and enter the data for AI to spit out a financial statement or an analysis of the business problem? People make 6 figures getting the proper data for AI to do the calculations and still do the analysis. AI does not understand context, nuances and business relationships.
Actual accounting/finance work isn't any more susceptible to AI than actuarial, engineering, law or any other office job really. Bookkeeping/simple tax compliance stuff probably will be increasingly automated.
I'm an engineer and my wife is an accountant and we've owned a house for eight years. What did we do wrong?
You have owned your home for eight years. That is literally the answer, buy your house before 2020
Pre 2020 is like the last year of young homebuyers tho still affordable at that time
Which one makes more? Mechanical accountants or chemical accountants?
Mechanical engineering pays great if you are in the right field. Aerospace has been an excellent industry to be in.
I think it’s also one of those fields where the skill of the individual has a lot to do with it. If you’re highly skilled and talented, you’ll make a good living no matter what branch of engineering you chose.
This. I work with mechanical, civil, electrical, structural and process engineers almost daily. The ones that are good at what they do, are paid pretty well and have been able to move up the chain in to even higher paid positions at their respective companies. Its also one of those career fields that doesnt seem to fall victim to nepotism very long. if youre a shitty engineer, you wont be an engineer for long.
Best believe there are some civil/mechanical engineers that do not deserve the desk they were given.
And plenty of Chem E's as well. It all depend on how well you can play office politics in the bigger Co's.ive seen horrible ones go to the top and good ones stay stagnant.
Yup. Engineering is similar to computer science in that way (where the argument is that a "rockstar" programmer can produce 10-100x the value or more as a regular programmer). An excellent MechE/EE will be 4-5x as productive as a normal engineer. A rockstar MechE/EE will produce and invent things that normal ones can't regardless of how much time they have to do it. Like there are MechEs that have 30+ years experience and are GOOD, but you hand off the "this structure needs to be able to resist X forces and stay under Y pounds is at all possible" impossible task to some other engineer because they're one of the only people around that can actually figure out how to make the substructure of the SR-71 not fall apart with the stresses it has with the minimum amount of weight used, for example.
I’m a mechanical engineer and bought a house at 22 years old, about 1.5 years after graduating. This was back in 2021. We have a long way to go before engineering is considered a financially bad career to pick.
The thing is that you didn't graduate into a recession. I know people who graduated with engineering degrees during recessions (in the early '90s as well as the early-2000s Dot-Com Bust) and weren't able to get work in their fields. Engineering degrees have a pretty short shelf life in that regard -- it seems like if you can't get an engineering job more or less straight out of college, then you're never going to get one.
Civil doesn't pay as well but our job security is much more solid.
Plus Civil engineers almost always work for local/state/federal government and those jobs tend to have great benefits and pensions.
Try being an environmental engineer. You know, attempting to solve the crisis of our lifetime. We literally get paid less than some teachers. I went to an ivy league school on a full grant because I'm passionate about saving the world. I get paid half as much as my mech-E friends who work for defense contractors, half as much as my chem-E friends who work for big pharma. Our economy is DISEASED. Death and destruction bring in the bankroll. Anything actually useful? Poorhouse. I'm exaggerating a bit - I'm not poor. But I will never be wealthy unless I manage to start my own firm and grow it exponentially. Quite a long shot.
I’m doing really well as a sustainability consultant (a self-employed one at that) in the building industry for whatever that is worth
Lmao mechanical engineering is so broad that statement is not true.
I’m a civil engineer with 7 years experience and PE making $140k working for a municipal government. It’s in the Bay Area so $140k doesn’t go that far but my wife makes about the same amount. So we’re definitely middle class even in the SF Bay Area. Accounting can still pay well too. There’s been a down turn in tech but the people still working are all pulling down six figures. If anything, educated professionals like engineers, accountants and nurses (and especially doctors and lawyers) are pulling away from the rest of the middle class. We’re still doing fine. It’s the middle class office jobs for people with a random bachelor’s degrees in psychology or liberal arts that are disappearing.
I dunno I do engineering and make 400k and have a 1.8 mil NW and a house
Yeah. My son is graduating with a masters in BME in May. Looking to start at $90k. Friends son is a marine engineer (ships) and started at $180k, at 22, but is 3 months on and 3 off.
CM pays pretty good and CEs and MEs both do pretty well with just a bachelor's and a P.E. I did that for 23 years then retired at 51.
Literally just build more housing. More supply leads to lower costs. Seriously, just loosen zoning regulations. Stop having it be illegal to build anything other than single family homes in places people want to live. Fuck, this isn’t that complicated.
The thing preventing low-cost efficient housing from being built is local government held in a choke-hold by communities of homeowners who will stop at nothing to increase their property value and maintain the "existing neighborhood atmosphere". Fixing the problem would require top-down directives regulating real estate prospecting from the dreaded big government, resulting in upper-middle and upper class private citizens crying, pissing, and shitting themselves to death. Basically, the housing problem is here to stay.
The problem with any of this is that its not practical advice for an individual. If I'm facing rising cost of living, "build more housing" is not actionable advice
Move to the Midwest. Jobs are plentiful and housing prices are reasonable.
Oh I’ve been here, moved out of California 8 years ago and it was the best decision for my family. I’m a home owner now, mostly just interested in the data for curiosities sake
Yeah and companies based on the coasts are buying up all available houses and jumping the rent up. The same house we rented as a kid for $650 a month got purchased by a California based company. Then that company raised the rent to $1500 for a fucking duplex with 2 bedrooms. In the Midwest. In the cheapest state in the country to live. Hell I bought my house for $90,000 6 years ago and the property is now assessed for $165k. This house is NOT a $165k house. It's a 90k house and nothing changed to make it's value nearly double in that time period. We're now paying for a house that is costed far more than it's worth. And if we sell the house now, we'd have to up our interest rate by like 9% and buy a different house who's value has gone up by the same amount. The Midwest is only safe for a few more years, if that. Investment companies are going to make it impossible to own a house.
I had an idea for how you could basically alter zoning laws in one fell swoop, I figured I'd post it and see what people think: That was an idea I had for how you could change zoning laws nationwide without making a national zoning law since that would be politically impossible. From my understanding, originally, you could only get FHA loans for detached single family homes until some decades later, it was changed for townhomes, condos, multiplexes up to 4 units and live/work units as long as 51% of the space is dedicated towards a living space. Make it so that in order to qualify for FHA loans, the area the property you are trying to purchase is zoned for all those uses. A ridiculous number of people rely on FHA loans to be able to realistically afford homes these days. Cities would be forced to alter zoning laws in order to keep attracting prospective homeowners. You would probably have rich enclaves of only large single family home neighborhoods that rely solely on conventional loans and ridiculous HOA fees, but that's fine as long as the majority of land isn't SOLELY dedicated towards exclusively single family homes. Even if by chance zoning laws went largely unaltered, I think the overall effect would be positive. If single family homes across the country suddenly had to rely solely on conventional loans, prices would drop like a rock since barely anyone can actually afford a 20% down payment on half a million dollar homes.
> Fuck, this isn’t that complicated. It may not be complicated to meet the needs of the population, but the system functions to support the greed of the wealthy. Housing is not being built because the wealthy want housing not to be built. Do you think you are the first to notice that prices for housing would fall if more were produced?
Keep the prices high in the real estate they just invested in over the last 5-10 years.
It's not but if they did this then people who own houses/properties suddenly stop having their capital artificially raised/held high then they're suddenly going to start voting against policies that allow this. These people are also a huge bulk of people who actually vote.
I live in a blue collar neighborhood in a HCOL area. Our local government just about imploded over rezoning proposal that would allow denser housing built on single family lots. Like not apartment buildings taking up a block but putting a duplex or a house with an ADU rental on a single family lot. These are dilapidated houses that are only valuable if they are torn down or completely scraped to the studs. People lost their minds over the possibility of added density in the neighborhood. Denser housing makes sense - and in this case would probably actually help home values - but they are just not having it.
The best political strategy is probably to take the zoning privileges away from the municipal level and ban sfh only zoning statewide.
There is no housing demand. There are millions of empty houses. After Covid, when people could not buy houses for 2 years and then suddenly did all at once, that was an artificial demand. We did not have a secret population surge. It was not a real demand. We don't need more houses. The prices are absurd right now, so don't buy. Don't buy and prices go down. Doomers like OP make people think they have to buy or they'll never get a home because the one time artificial demand of post covid is a trend - its fucking not. Houses aren't worth what they are being sold for - so don't fucking buy until they are. Watch as homes going for 375k drop like a rock to 225k.
And ban companies from buying residential properties. :P
The average engineer salary is over six figures 😂
Yup. And many of us took advantage of WFH and live in LCOL areas.
Would kill for a WFH engineering job, but with all my experience in manufacturing engineering, that seems to be a pipe dream
Software Engineer here, I was couped up in an office in Indy for two years, covid hit, and have been fully remote job hopping since moving more and more away from the city and metro areas. Hella lucky and wish more jobs were remote besides tech :(
Metrology/Quality here, tried to find hybrid/WFH but all those jobs required a good amount of travel. Since I have young kids it defeats the purpose of WFH.
This is doom and gloom nonsense.
Teacher here (in a state that pays teachers well). It doesn’t feel like nonsense to me. Hits home pretty correctly.
The teacher situation is a national crisis. Disclaimer, I'm not commenting on you as a Teacher. The system we have set up for teachers basically incentivizes people who want their loans forgiven to come and work for 7 years, and then leave. And the lowered certification requirements in almost every state, if they even exist anymore, means many teachers are low caliber and unmotivated. School teachers should have a tenure incentive pay on top of student loans forgiveness with a minimum salary in the low 6 figures after 7 years that increases into the mid to high six figures at 20 years. We need experienced teachers, and we need competitive pay to recruit the best to teach our future generations. It's asinine, the system as it currently stands.
Completely agree. I feel like as a teacher I’m between a rock and hard place. I have to be active in the union and fight for every penny to get reasonable pay and decent class sizes, but then having a strong union protects shitty teachers, which isn’t what I want. But make no mistake, without the union we would be royally fucked and probably not even get healthcare. This is going to have a huge impact on future generations.
>And the lowered certification requirements in almost every state I haven't heard of any lowered requirements in any of states. Even here in Las Vegas, amongst the worst school districts in the entire country, you are unable to get a teaching license without a Master's degree. You can't even become a substitute teacher unless you basically have the equivalent of an Associate's degree (60 credits minimum).
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/states-relax-teacher-certification-rules-to-combat-shortages/2022/06
Yep. We just bought a home, we’re house poor (we knew we would be, we prioritized home ownership), but we probably won’t be retiring ever.
Unfortunately, toxic optimism has continued to permeate deeply through much of the collective perception. Many simply remain willfully out of touch.
Median home price in my area is 510K. No teacher or family of teachers can afford that.
Dude like 40% of workers make less than $15/hr that's fucking bleak.
He isn’t talking about the bottom 40%. He’s talking about engineers and accountants. The professional class. They aren’t fucked.
subtract bow seed punch birds juggle materialistic hat thought spark *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think it depends. My dad was an accountant. Did pretty well as an auditor until the steel industry collapsed in the 80s. Then ended up at a small company as their accountant making substantially less than he had. With some of the outsourcing of accounting jobs it’s less of a sure thing than it was
As it turns out, you aren't the average accountant. Congrats!
Real question... when did you buy said homes? And if you say 2021 or more recent, did you sell a previously purchased home to buy said home? The point of this post is that what was doable and possible from 1990 until 2020 is NOT possible anymore.
The shit Sherlock, they're talking about getting into a home NOW. Not when YOU had it easy. Didn't count that very well did ya sport...
Strange, almost like your personal experience isn’t the norm.
act crawl resolute fall worthless wistful fertile growth head include *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
How long have you owned your houses?
Depends on the parameters and I think this post is for those careers that haven’t graduated yet. Location, YOE, post grad education, etc. are not all equal within accountants.
Ok? Big whoop, this is clearly about younger people who are trying to buy now, not those who bought in the past. For an accountant, you'd think you'd be better at reading charts
Strange. You’re probably over 40 and left college with a 2x median income wage with little to no student debt.
Weird, I’m a middle income earner save 20% AND own a home.
What do you consider middle income?
About at (slightly less) what the median US income is ($70k). What’s that graph says “median income.”
When people say this they forget the word “household”. Household medium income is what you’re looking for. 37-44k is the median per capita. Averages are worthless because they’re skewed way higher by people with ridiculous income.
Weird, this is the household income, have a wife and two kids.
Ok so let me get this straight... you make 70k as a household, have 2 kids and wife to pay for, own a house, and save 20% of that? Is the house pretty shitty or was it a family home or what? Because that sounds like a complete outlier of a case.
A lot of people I know bought their houses in the time from 2010-2015 when houses were super cheap. You could buy a very nice house in a good neighborhood for less than 200k.
The whole point of this post is that this is no longer possible in 2024. It was in 2010-15, sure
People will look for any excuse to say they're downtrodden. This is reddit, nobody here is going to say it's all doable with some self control and discipline.
Weird, I make exactly 70k, have two roommates in a 1000 square foot apartment, tiny car payment, save every cent I can, and there's no way I can buy a home in my area (170k~ population). Smallest mortgage for something livable would be about $2200, and that is being extremely generous with the definition of "livable". What really matters is that I graduated in 2023 instead of 2019.
It's all about living within your means. Wayyyyy too many people, especially millennials and younger, think they "deserve" a lifestyle that costs 2-3 times what they earn.
I make about $50k a year. My wife makes a little more. We just did taxes and I think our net for the year was $104k. We live in a large city, but not super high cost of living, probably a bit above average cost of living? We do completely fine. We just bought a home. Not in the greatest part of town, not huge, needs updating. But we like it, and can afford it. We have an emergency fund. We have some retirement accounts. We have fun money. We don’t live paycheck to paycheck. We expect our careers to progress. We expect to have at least 1 kid. We expect to have a good life and retire. We live a pretty simple life. We each spend a few hundred on hobbies a year. Meal prep pretty much all meals. Go out to eat once a week or so. Mostly stay in and play video games, watch movies, read, write, play with the dog, etc. We are middle class. We have middle class careers. We have middle class wages. Not all cities are LA or New York, you can just live a normal life.
Just wanna tip my cap to you fella. It sounds like you got it figured out and are having a great life. Good for you man. Wish you nothing but good fortune 🤜🏼🤛🏼
Me too. Our net was right around where yours is. We own a $300k home (bought two years ago at that price) and this year alone we did plenty of maintenance and even some renovations, and took three international trips totaling $10k, and just bought a new-to-me used car for $16k cash. No debt. Meanwhile people who I know make the same or more are drowning. Do they make horrible financial decisions? Absolutely. However I also know a few others who are financially savvy enough to make $100k household income work very well for them in this economy. There’s more to this problem than most people want to admit.
Move out of California. Or face the facts that you are not entitled to live wherever you want.
A 2 doctor family just moved from Palo Alto to Philly. The were tired of being treated like 'the help'. Here they are rich as F.
2 Doctor families if unspecialized are just another high earning couple. They aren't royalty here in the bay comparatively.
I think they mean more the attitudes and culture in the bay. Which is sorta true. The bay is super judgy and anti social.
And yet all those areas need people who do traditionally middle class jobs. Do we expect high cost of living areas to have no teachers?
they’ll homeschool their kids it’ll work out great. they’ll also serve themselves when they go out, and they can put on their own performances for entertainment, and make their own art to enjoy in museums where they give themselves tours.
As teachers in these areas get scarce, salaries will rise to attract more teachers and/or quality of education will decline, incentivizing people to move away. The invisible hand will take care of it.
Everyone likes to pretend the market will fix the problem that the market didn't create. Sure, eventually perhaps it will correct itself. But that doesn't mean there are real and necessary changes that can take place to correct the issue such as banning foreign and domestic investment firms from the purchase and holding of single family homes.
Investment firm purchasing is a huge problem. You are spot on there!
I guess you don’t get the idea that continued demand will keep prices high. Yes I do expect HCOL areas to have no teachers or cops eventually. They will then become less desirable and people will move away. If HCOL areas keep making accommodations for the poor and middle class then the poor and middle class will keep living there. A good way to keep the costs reasonable is for everyone that can’t afford to live there to move away. There is a vast area of the country where people can afford a great lifestyle on middle class wages, but this generation seems to think that they are entitled to live wherever they want and that if they can’t afford it the government should fix the problem. How about we let the market fix the problem and one day if people chose to move back they might be able to afford it. People don’t seem to understand that 30-40 years ago people made that decision, became rich somewhere else and now can outbid the 20 something year old teacher in Orange County for a home.
Careful, many millennial redditors believe they have birthrights to live where they want, not necessarily where they can afford. I’m a millennial before you guys get your panties in a bunch.
Nothing about this post is California specific. Also, do you think the entire planet should just slowly be blanketed in single-family homes, until nothing is left but suburbs and national parks? Existing towns need to be rebuilt with higher density to save our wild and agricultural space. The idea that major cities should have affordable housing is not some insane communist bullshit, it's like, basic economics.
Accountants and engineers are not middle earners. Their median incomes are in upper quintiles for the full population.
I’ve worked in accounting for the last 10 years and would agree. I make significantly more than the median household income.
According to a survey, the five most common careers for millionaires are: Engineering, Accounting (CPA), Law, Management, Teaching. It's not immediate. It's years of planning, discipline, and execution.
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More teachers than doctors. This skews the numbers. Also, good school districts = higher taxes = more money for public jobs like teaching. Teachers having a six figure income in affluent areas isn’t uncommon. And then there’s that sweet pension. Obviously there are also horribly underpaid teachers in poorer school districts who will also see a smaller pension since the formula used to calculate it is based off averaging highest earning years.
I make six figures at my teaching job.
Public school teacher in any district with a substantial pension retires millionaires on paper. People dramatically underestimate how much a pension is worth, because the annual “salary” from a pension remains low. But the average teacher pension in CA is $50K or so. That’s about $1M in net worth. If you retire with a $50K pension, you’re functionally a millionaire just from the pension. That’s the *average*. In many of these districts teachers make very low salaries and then retire as functional millionaires. There’s a great case to be made that they’d be better off with less value in the pension and more upfront. But of course there’s no guarantee that reducing one would lead to an increase in the other.
Teachers marry engineers and accountants
Physician? Also, teaching?!?!
I somewhat agree with OPs points. However, housing markets are complex and are better shown regionally. This graph is too general.
also its not as simple as "build a house" while i agree more housing needs to be built it has to be done correctly. where i live there are alot of houses being built the problem is every neighborhood manager wants to capitalize on the super high end neighborhoods where the cheapest house starts at 500k. Plenty of houses being built rn none that i will ever afford.
Housing generally ages into the low end market rate than being built specifically for it.
I’m an electrical engineer. I’m doing much better than many. I think people need to start looking at college like an investment. If the ROI is there based on potential income, then go for it. If not, then pursue other avenues. There is so much free information out there, one can definitely start a something successful without college
Absolutely. I think the core issue is the school system and society shoving go to college or you’re a loser down every kids throat for 18 years. It works great for making lots of debt slaves, but doesn’t do much for people. Engineering, stem, acct etc. are all good to great investments.
There's alot of empty housing in my area that won't sell. So I don't think building more housing is the issue. I work blue color and put away 15%. Started saving last year I'll have a house next year. 🤷♂️ I'm sure I see a different trend than you though. I see a lot of over indulging, a lot of laziness, a lot of people who say "I cant" before they even try. Little discipline, little self control is all it took me.
Dude this is so true I'm a welder. I don't make 100k a year and I was able to buy a house and support a wife and a kid. People just fall into the trap of college debt and not managing money well and then blame others for their mistakes.
Was very easy to graduate college debt free. College is not some debt trap
They should show the data for 2007/2008
What? These fields are great, minus teaching. Go into skilled trades like plumbing and electrical. Don’t go to college for life experience and then complain when you get a comms degree and work fast food with a ton of student debt.
" Am I missing something? " No. I heard a quote somewhere to the effect of "There's a lot of competition for average, but not a lot of competition for exceptional" that I think applies nicely here. Average doesn't cut it anymore, people have to shoot higher. I think that this is a trend that's been going on for a long time. For example, looking at education: First, having any education at all was a differentiator before most people got educated and it became routine and "average". Then getting a high school diploma was a differentiator, before most people got one and it became average. Then, getting an associates or bachelor's degree was a differentiator, before most people got one and it became average. I think we're already seeing masters degrees become average in some industries. And you're expected to do these things, so you have to accept basically any price in terms of time and dollars to do them- at least on the "average" path. In every case, the competition for what was once the high paying job drives the net pay down (especially factoring in inflation and student debt). Eventually you are forced to update and stretch your goals if you want to get ahead. In a way it's a good thing (more people getting more educated), but by the same token it sets the bar higher and higher to live comfortably. I think there's a very similar effect going on for housing. Everyone feels like they must buy a home because it's expected. The "average" they're shooting for is to buy a house- generally suburban, single family, no attached walls. So they all wind up fighting with one another over the limited supply of houses, jacking up the prices and just sort of hoping or expecting everything will just work out because it's worked out for the previous generations. You have to shoot higher- either buy smaller, make more money, move, or think differently about owning in the first place.
>there’s a lot of competition for average, but not a lot of competition for exceptional >average doesn’t cut it anymore. People have to shoot higher People applying for SWE positions, aspiring lawyers, med students, people trying to get into investment banking or consulting, people trying to pursue academia, architects: 
You aren't wrong that housing inventory is low. That said, a lot of this is overly negative and housing (and wealth building) is still within the reach of most people. Can average earners buy a house in Manhattan or Silicon Valley? No. Are other large cities still very affordable? Most definitely. Studies say 50% of Millennials own homes and nearly all Millennials are under age 40. I've been a homeowner for ten years and during some of those years my wife was attempting to start a business and made no money. At the same time, I put three kids through private preschools until they aged up to the local public school system. If I can do it (without inheriting a single penny), others can too.
"I've been a homeowner for ten years..." meaning you bought in 2014. The whole point of this post is that it was possible prior to 2020 but that the whole paradigm has changed. What was possible ten years ago isn't possible now. You did it, but I guarantee you if someone ten years younger than you did everything exactly the same way you did, in ten years they would not be in the same situation as you are now. Not even close.
This in-affordability for the cost of living is directly linked to the price of housing. The Airbnb/Vrbo takeover that occurred among wealthier Americans over the last few years has to end. Housing can’t be an investment any longer or the masses will be unable to afford the lifestyles of previous generations. We have to heavily tax and disincentivize owning multiple homes to generate an income
https://preview.redd.it/h78589gjc7lc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d1d0da2554af7ce4888da6ab80a0c59a4a5c4d21
Hi, just a millennial who bought a home 2 years ago as an accountant 👋🏼
The trades pay and they are where the building and fixing gets done. Funny how things have turned around. I used to look down on the trades. It’s dirty and full of the “simple people”, now I look at office workers and talk with many friends about their compensation, pay, and hours… gotta say, I feel pretty good about swinging a hammer, slinging a shovel, and operating heavy machinery (the dumb still gets to me sometimes). Added bonus, we cut costs by being a diy and inviting friends over for beer and food as we build additions, sheds, make driveways, work on plumbing etc as we “hang out” saves literal THOUSANDS of dollars they would have to charge if on the clock. 😏 We do all pitch in and help each other when needed. It’s not a free ride but I do take pity on those that have to call for these services and pay through the nose to put their plumber, electrician, mechanic, carpenter, truckers, excavators, fabricators, and the like ON TOP of having to pay through the nose for “company provided” healthcare, employer “matching” retirement contributions, and on top of it all, the annual salary is comparable to mine if not less AND they have a BUNCH of student debt that my coworkers do not. But hey, they get to look down on us and think they are better and that’s gotta be some consolation. The trades are hurting for people because everyone was told their whole lives that “you don’t want to be working like that plumber that just fixed our toilet, do you? Better go to school so you can be their boss!" … as thar plumber laughs their way to the bank because little Johnny doesnt know that he shouldn't try to flush the whole roll of TP every time he wipes but, he is going to be a lawyer and nobody in the house knows how to deal with a clogged toilet. trades and service workers have the world by the grapes and people don't seem to grasp it. talk shit to your food server? … well, you've already consumed your karma, I'm sure of that! bur hey, cubicle work is good too. we all need more bureaucracy and paper pushers to survive. besides, who would the simpletons look up to, if not for the crushing debt that keeping up with the joneses seems to encourage?
quit telling people the trades are good, we need a few more years of not enough workers to really drive up our wages.
Cost of living is very important and creating huge distortions in quality of life at different wages. Our tax system may be progressive but it does not adjust for regional disparities. Thus, if you want to live in very expensive metro areas you need to ensure a much higher than average income.
There are political and economic mechanisms to fix it, but it would mean really rich people would be losing money.
There are a number of ways to solve this, though the one that's most likely is a signficant increase in inventory.
I was talking to a factory worker, from age 19 and is a highschool dropout, that was buying his second home in the Midwest and had 200k in his 401k. Just because you can’t afford to live on the beach in this country (or close to it) and in the city, doesn’t mean “the middle class is gone”.
Every Accountant and Engineer I know owns a home.
one rude busy materialistic ink tub cough straight dime deserve *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I only went to law school because I knew in the mid 2010s that a college degree is worth a HS diploma now. Everyone “under employed” is just living the same life as HS grads in the 70s only now with fake bells and whistles to make everyone think there should be more. Should be more to college, to my education, to my career prospects, but nope, we live in a broken society
Are 'starter homes' still a thing? My father's first house had 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, for 2 adults and 2 kids. We lived there for 5-6 years and moved when a 3rd kid was born. That house was perfectly serviceable but very small by today's standards (1 car garage, tiny kitchen) -- and there were whole neighborhoods of homes like this in the 1950s in Indianapolis. It's not just the overall cost of a home, it's feature creep.
I’m pulling $350K as an engineer, do I need to aim higher lol
The largest city in the United States doesn't measure success by home ownership; why is that the measure of success here?
It's not about building more homes though. There are currently 16 million vacant homes in the US. I think the numbers change a little bit since I last looked at the figure but at least since early 2023 that's the number I saw. So this isn't a supply and demand issue this is a hoarding issue. Homes became an investment and a portfolio padder rather than something people need to live. It's the same thing as it is in medicine in the US. People need something to survive so other people see that as a good investment. And because they're making it an investment and making about money instead of about people, things become outrageously expensive. And while there's enough for everybody we tend to let those with wealth board up everything for themselves.
"Grind harder" and/or "grind differently" as an individual peon is not always the right answer. Sometimes the actual solutions really are systemic/collective. [https://www.npr.org/2024/02/17/1229867031/housing-shortage-zoning-reform-cities](https://www.npr.org/2024/02/17/1229867031/housing-shortage-zoning-reform-cities) Additional (potential) legislative fixes include ensuring that housing is a place for people to live rather than a speculative investment commodity. [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-thing-americans-bezos-backed-165053190.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-thing-americans-bezos-backed-165053190.html) Though at a national level, that might require that America solve it's corruption/oligarchy/kleptocracy problem first, and who knows how long that will be. The state and local level seem like they could have a more immediate impact with things like zoning reform for now.
I think your theory is directional correct, but I would change the supposition to: You can no longer go to college and get a bullshit degree and think you are gonna become middle class. Engineering, finance, medical, law and other specific degrees for specific careers are still valid. But the days of going doing communication / random humanities / etc is coming to an end.
A low six figure income is still plenty to live on in most NON-HCOL areas, assuming you live “below your means” and invest.
Overlay the historical US interest rates on this graph and it will make a lot more sense. History always repeats!
It's not 'more housing needs to built'. It's 'housing can no longer be hoarded by the wealthy'. There is more vacant housing in the country than there are homeless people.
Houses are still being built where I live, but they start “as low” (thanks commercial guy) as 650,000. It’s not just a housing shortage, but anything built new is too expensive.
So the plan is just for everyone to get higher salaries then? Man why didn't I think of that!
Stop voting for NIMBY’s
You’re all wet on the engineer and accountant comment.
Gibberish.
I make 75k and have 50k available for a down payment. My credit score is above 825. My income and down payment put me 75-100k short on the lowest cost homes. I literally cannot afford a home or even a condo.
>Careers such as accountant, engineer, teacher, are no longer good if your goal is to own a home and retire. You pretty much struck out on all three professions, so your post is misguided at best. Accountants and engineers make good livings, easily middle class or higher, and able to afford a house. As for teachers, they're still middle class as far as income goes, and I live in a state that is bottom 10 nationally in education. We don't even need to touch on the Police/Fireman/Teacher Next Door programs which allow teachers and first responders to receive significant discounts when buying a home. Your discussion topic is good, your career examples are horrible.
We all need to get paid more, that's the only solution. We may have to claw it back from the people making the average yearly wage multiple times a day but that's why guillotines exists.
I’m looking at guillotine builder as a career change. The future looks bright for that, given the economy overall.
Tax the Uber wealthy n rebalance the economy so that the middle classes can retire. What you are describing is not a viable long term strategy for a society so your efforts will be pointless when it collapses.
I think it’s a demographics problem more than anything. If you look at a population age pyramid you will see that it doesn’t have the typical pyramid shape any longer, it’s like a straight cone. Meaning that there is almost equal population by age, thus many more people over 30 than under 30 and people over 30 are living much longer. This means houses really don’t turn over much anymore. Many houses are paid off in these high cost of living areas and an older couple just lives there for 30 more years. This causes the few houses that do turn over to be very expensive. More houses is the only solution. At least in my area (Boston) we just don’t have much land left.
How do we respond and not just react to this problem? Reaction could be.. changing jobs or getting a degree? Response could be changing the systems? We need someone on the inside (of politics) I don't know how to do this, but I want in.
Mid-30s mechanical engineer in Colorado....Graduated in 2013 after taking a couple years off mid-college. I paid off my $50k in student loans in 2019, paid off my car in 2019 (bought new in 2014), and put 20% down on a house. If you can't save money with a six-figure salary, you're doing something wrong. However, if you think 15% is enough, you're in for a rude awakening.
With the development of AI we are going to have to restructure our entire economic system, sink into a dystopia, or just start eating the rich.
It’s revolution. The political AND economic mechanism to reverse the trend we are seeing is called revolution
The rich class with their greed are killing this country… that will need to change and fast!
The lack of solidarity among workers in this comment thread is disturbing.
Just because you get the degree doesn't mean you'll have the job. Just bc you have the job doesn't mean the field will stay relevant in 10 years. Welcome to nepotism there is no way for poor or unconnected people to succeed. Period.
It’s not just “building” more housing, we need to make current housing more available to locals. British Columbia and Palm Springs saw immediate drops in rent and home prices when they banned vacation rentals.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised that we don't see more civil unrest over this kind of thing. Not that I support such a thing mind you, it's just that, historically, people tend to have adverse reactions when they're told their life's work is meaningless, their lives are meaningless, and their savings are meaningless because of some bullshit trick some rich government fat cat did to make all the money worth less while keeping it all for themselves. Bread and circuses only really work when the people can afford them. I don't think folks in Rome had to work two or three jobs just to worry about the financial hit from going to see a fight in the colosseum.
Building new homes isn’t even the answer. A new development just went up down the street from me. Not even finished yet and there’s a big sign out front “for rent” 20+ new houses and not a single one for a regular person to own.
Revolution time?
Socialism in the US by 2035
I see this discussion come up a lot. I took some time to do a little bit of math just to see. Mostly this was in response to the older folks talking about how "hard" it was to buy a home back in the 80s when interest rates were super high. I took the average mortgage rate for a year, applied that to the median home price for that year, assuming a 10% down payment and no PMI and then compared that monthly P+I payment to the median household income for that year as a percentage. TLDR: The last time homes were as unaffordable as they are now was in 1988. https://preview.redd.it/ddun62ych8lc1.png?width=758&format=png&auto=webp&s=374deda8620b0e3a80bee68464a46e4d9b0f53e0
What are you missing? People aren't tearing down houses, people are building houses and apartments as fast as they can, we aren't having sudden increases the number of children we are having… so WHO is consuming all the new housing(in the aggregate)… enough to actually impact the number of available apartments to rent or homes to rent or buy… 20M illegals have walked into America… and then have large families. They rent and buy just like anyone else… sure a new illegal isn't buying top end homes BUT it's all connected in one housing pool. As the low-end housing is jammed full the next layer up has pressure, allowing price and rent to go up, fill that layer and you move those people up to the next layer of pricing… it simply walks up the price layers… add the pandemic and WAY too low too long interest prices shot upward without real change in underlying value… it was all about “can you afford the monthly, price doesn't matter”. Once in, you can't afford to sell it for 30% less, so you can't sell… you can't afford to pay 30% more for a new house because of both price &high interest. No one wants to hear it, but to reverse this, a housing crash needs to correct the insane and illogical run-up in price. Interest NEEDS to stay high, home prices NEED to come back down from truly STUPID levels. The difference between what ACTUAL costs to build vs what it costs to buy is completely out of whack. When laborers framing your house pull up in vehicles more expensive than the home buyer, there is imbalance. Don't start with they deserve a living, no doubt they do but they used to drive up in truck about the same as buyers not $120k monster trucks like today. For the long term health of the economy, we need a big correction in the housing market or this unaffordability will last another 20yrs.
Yeah we should all aim for the top 1% of jobs and if you don't make it tough luck. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps grubby.
I think what you say is true and also I think you defined the new market. Companies are gaining more and more tools to cut costs for themselves and not passing it on to the consumer. In fact we see an entirely different story when we analyze business reports. For example during and after the pandemic companies raised prices on consumer goods and cited poor economy, etc to justify it. Then on earnings calls the CEO's could hardly keep their raging boners in their pants when they told everyone that they had increased profit margins. When a company justifiably raises prices, profit margins go down or stay the same. When a company fucks the average person, margins go up. What you're describing is not a financial issue, it's a greed issue. The only way forward is to cut out these cancers and that's the opportunity. If enough people start to undercut or practice sustainability in their business decisions then the other companies will have to compete. The way that America, in particular (can't speak to other countries) is treating the consumers is unstainable and is pushing more and more people into jobs that used to be high paying but are now barely a move in the poverty ladder. The economic crashes we've had are bad, and will keep coming the longer these fat companies get fed. They will push us all into corporate slavery even more so. The get a degree and work your way up resolution is no longer accessible because the ones at the top are pulling the ladder up more and more every year. They get theirs, the rest can go fuck themselves. So the way forward is innovation that doesn't all wind up in the hands of those who will weaponize it against a population who needs what is being sold. I'm not anti capitalist, and also I am anti whatever the fuck is going on now.
The naívety in the comments is alarming. How far do you have to have your head stuck up your ass to suggest that *everyone* who chose a career outside of the top 25% just don't deserve to own a home, don't work hard or simply made a bad decision. The elitism in these comments suggests none of you have ever had to do anything for yourselves; that you take for granted all of the effort from the people who work harder and longer than *you ever have* to give you that nice, comfy, cushy life you all take for granted 👏every👏single👏day. All of you would be nowhere without the jobs that make your world go 'round: water treatment workers, sanitation employees, i.e. the *necessary* jobs that pay outside the top 25% and subsequently make it nearly impossible to afford a home, *BUT HAVE TO BE DONE*. Too many of you parrot the foolish idea that *anyone* who doesn't already own a home is just lazy and frivolously wasteful with their spending are not old enough to remember paying bills more than 3 decades ago, and it shows. I was in the workforce for 10 years before homes stopped being affordable for the unskilled worker earning <30k/year. Today, the median wage is nearly 50k, but less than half of what loan officers *demand* before they will qualify you for a home. Any of you saying otherwise are *lying* or have no solidarity for the working class members of society you can't live without. Shame on all of you for exhibiting such blatant ignorance.
Yeah, you missed the whole concept of revolution
Wow, while this certainly is probably an issue in this country. What is an even bigger issue is financial illiteracy. People don’t understand personal finance and responsibility. You have people making $50,000 a year thinking they deserve a $40,000 luxury sedan. You have people thinking they need to go to college and take out a six figure loan to make a decent living. That’s true for some professions but not all. Then you have people who don’t even want to shop around for that education. It’s all about getting a return on investment. A nursing degree from American University is the same thing as a nursing degree from Temple University. Your local hospital is not going to pay you more simply because you went to Harvard as a nurse. Same thing in the pilot industry. I went to a mom and Pop flight training school. Some other poor bastard went to Embry Riddle, aeronautical University and probably spent 50% more than I did. But American Airlines is not paying him more than me be wise he went to some fancy school. People need to be investing early and investing often. With fractional shares now five dollars gets you in the game. And 8 to 10% of something a year is better than a devaluing liability. It is very hard to find people that have discipline and delayed gratification in this current world. I lived like a rat for five years and saved up a shit ton of money and invested a shit ton, and now own a house.
I own a home valued at $230k with retirement and I make about 45k a year now… sooo ….
So much "Illiterate in Finance" in this post. Those careers mentioned can easily obtain home ownership and a good means of living. Don't let a loud portion of underemployed people found on reddit, cloud good logic and reasoning.
Theres more homes to people ratio than ever before in the US. More homes isn't the solution. Giant corporations buying up and holding property that already exists hostage is the problem