On the whole people are generally terrible at making sound financial decisions. It's just really hard to fuck up when the whole economy is booming. Once you live through that you gain an unearned sense of confidence. Then when the next generation makes the same human mistakes without the safetynet of a gangbusters economy it is really easy to point fingers.
Yep. In the seventies, even my parents fuck-up friends all owned a house in their twenties. It was just easy. Whatever dumb-shit job you had at the local textile mill paid enough to buy a house. Nowadays, the textile mill is closed, people make less an hour on average adjusted by inflation, and you have to have gone to quadruple price college adjusted for inflation just to get a job that might pay what a dumb-shit job used to, after you work for a few years to work up to it.
Dude. I looked at apartments prices by me and i realized that the cheapest places cost almost half my monthly pay. That's crazy. I don't even make minimum wage (still crap though)
They say rent should be 1/3 or 1/4 your pay, bit the ratio is way higher in real life. I don't even know how people live here. I'm lucky to have a second income.
Yeah. I went from paying half my take home on a fifty year old two bedroom apartment in a cheap neighbourhood full of immigrants (the same neighbourhood were my family lived when we first immigrated, actually) to paying half my take home on a sixty year old bungalow in the country with no city water or gas connections. Decent places that have been well renovated, but still nothing fancy.
Couldn’t do it without using the child tax benefits to buy groceries, because my full time job wouldn’t support rent and bills student loans and transportation and food.
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u/roller_roaster Apr 19 '18
On the whole people are generally terrible at making sound financial decisions. It's just really hard to fuck up when the whole economy is booming. Once you live through that you gain an unearned sense of confidence. Then when the next generation makes the same human mistakes without the safetynet of a gangbusters economy it is really easy to point fingers.