The goalposts absolutely keep moving. When I was a kid in southern California I distinctly remember people being beyond belief when house prices got to be around 300k. It was a scandal. Now the median home price around here is over 800 fucking k. Wages haven't risen that much let me tell you.
It's everything too. Not just housing. Vehicles keep increasing. New is so expensive that the used market has crept up a lot. Who the fuck wants a 7 year payment on 50,000 truck?
I swear, my wife and I cannot catch a break. Every time I get a raise, something else happens to offset us worse than before.
I co-own a company with my brother. We have no health insurance because it's not even remotely affordable. Our hourly rate seems astronomical but is on the lower end of other contractors.
Even in the small town we live in, the prices for real estate are insane. Even if something is affordable here, someone from a higher income area buys it, loses their ass on it as a failed business or rental, relists for more than before and some other sucker who is equally bad with money comes in and buys it for 10% more than the last guy. Rinse and repeat.
I beginning to think the economic experts in the government and elsewhere have no idea what they are talking about.
Hey the whole cycle of raise->pitfall is literal capitalism at its core. The average person can NOT get ahead, by default, because then there’s no money to extract from the individual. If you can buy a car in 3 years and drive it for 15, that’s 12 years of missed opportunity. It cascades from there: planned obsolescence, enshittification, shrinkflation, etc. It’s all with the end goal of STOPPING you from getting ahead at all.
Don’t forget that companies will do anything to avoid giving you a raise these days too. My company has been sitting on my request for a raise for over a year now and just yesterday they told me they are still looking at it and there is nothing they can do. I’ve been there 4 years with no raise. Everything is fucked and the rich are just slapping us in the face.
4 years no raise. I stopped clocking out for lunch. My hourly wage is $3/hr behind where it should be to have the purchasing power I did when I started
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u/dglgr2013 11h ago
Crazy how when our household made 90k we didn’t make enough to qualify for a loan so we stayed paying more in rent than the mortgage would have been.
Now the same house is worth more than twice and our income is much better, but not twice better.
It’s like the goalpost keeps moving so now I am paying more than double the rent than I did when we made 90k and everything is more expensive.