re: Americans need to earn 70% more than 6 years ago to comfortably afford a median price home

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Millenials seem to think everything is worse because it happened in their lifetime.

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Those events did not happen in a vacuum how stupid are you?

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Gen X had it great, and every generation after us has had it even better.

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Thanks democrats!!!!

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Well, I don’t think home prices have gone up by 70%….so there appears to funny math going on.

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We bought our house 8 years ago, if someone was attempting to buy our house currently, and put down the same percentage that we put down (which would still be more out of pocket than what we put down), their monthly mortgage payment would be ~67% higher than our current payment.

ETA: and that's just the price of a home, not to mention the prices of other things that have eaten into the budget of a prospective homebuyer.

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Good point, we've been in our house for 10 years and our monthly payment (mortgage, insurance, and taxes) is about 13% of our take home pay each month. I went online and looked at comparable homes in our area and if you include the equity we have in our house plus a little more cash for a down payment, it would jump to 29.5% of our take home pay each month going to housing. As I said in an earlier post, my wife and I have good jobs and live below our means and this would definitely change how much we could save and invest and live our lives. I can't imagine what it's like for people trying to get their foot in the door now.

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We're in the same boat. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but we're pretty much stuck in our house. In order to "upgrade" our current living situation we'd have to make a ridiculous amount of money more than we already make, and we do okay for ourselves.

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Good point, we've been in our house for 10 years and our monthly payment (mortgage, insurance, and taxes) is about 13% of our take home pay each month. I went online and looked at comparable homes in our area and if you include the equity we have in our house plus a little more cash for a down payment, it would jump to 29.5% of our take home pay each month going to housing.

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What percentage of your take home pay was it 10 years ago?

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Somebody would pay $450k in Dallas to buy the lot that house sits on and tear it down and build a $3MM home on it

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I do think that’s part of the problem. What constitutes a starter home today is nothing like what was considered a starter home even 20 years ago. And one of the drivers of this phenomenon is a lack of real starter homes. I think part of the problem there is if someone were to start building them, maybe even build a whole neighborhood of them, they’d be filled up quickly with government funded section 8 hood rats. Then no one would want to move in and neighboring neighborhoods would see their property values collapse because now they’re “in the hood”.

So basically a lot of it boils down to new home buyers avoiding low-cost starter homes, even if they can find them, because of the justified fear of what their neighborhood will look like in 10 years.

As someone who is 31 and smack dab in the middle of all this, everyone here is right, to some extent.

I think it is generally harder to "make it" financially than it was for my parents or their parents, the numbers don't lie.

But there is also truth to the idea that my generation expects bigger houses, more toys, etc.

These problems work hand in hand.

I also believe that there is probably a higher ceiling for someone these days than you may have had in the 70's-90's, simply by working hard and being smart.

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And a higher floor than people had then or especially than people had in the 20s-60s.

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I don't know, it just depends on how you judge it.

People have more gadgets these days but I think it was easier to buy a home and raise a family on a single income in the 80's or 90's.

In terms of home ownership specifically, I think there was a higher floor back then due to all of the factors discussed here.

I bought my home when I was 27 on a single income, I was one of the few people I know that had did that in my age group and I was only able to because I was extremely careful and also had some luck in timing.

It seems like it was fairly common to purchase or build a home on a single income in decades past, by at least your late 20's.

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The city is attempting to levy another prop tax hike on me—ensuring a 10% CAGR over the next 3 years when they reassess, which they did in 2022.

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Blame voters. In Houston, there's a reason the Fort Bend County assessor nails people with 10% increases in value year in and year out. Someone has to fund all those cricket complexes for Sugarland, "reimagining" a town square for a town with 10k people, a ridiculous gondola transit system (I wish I were kidding,) etc.