I think they meant more like they wouldn’t have been able to afford the same house 4 years later, due to appreciation of the house, the increase in property taxes on that appreciation, and higher mortgage rates to boot. That or they had a variable APR loan.

The former case happened to us and is how my coworkers and I sometimes discuss the housing market - house values increase so fast where we are, buying a month later would have gotten us an appreciably worse home. A month later, worse again. Prices were increasing 25+% YoY. If we hadn’t locked in when we did (Dec 2020) I’m not sure we would have found a place. The mortgage rates seem to not matter because so many of the buyers scooping up houses are older families with lots of money buying investment properties, or whole ass corporations (often foreign corporations) willing to pay 20% over asking, in cash, and waive inspection, to lock out any other prospective buyers.

Insurance is about 50% more than when we bought the house and taxes are maybe 10% higher due to rate increases and the increasing value. We would barely be able to afford half the house we’re in if we bought today.

The only reason we switched from doing our own to paying a CPA is when my wife started operating her own business. This was more to have someone to ask questions about making sure she covers all of her tax obligations who can answer authoritatively and back us up if anything comes back to us in the future (since she is sole prop. and going it alone). We paid $200 the first year, and considering turbotax would have been about that much, getting our taxes filed for us was practically just a bonus. She charges a little more now, but it’s still worth it IMO just to not have to deal with doing the actual paperwork and having someone who will help us out if anything does come back to us. I would say anyone who just has W2 income and maybe some stock sales doesn’t have a complicated enough situation to warrant a CPA, and should just use FreeTaxUSA (and hopefully over the next couple years, the auto filing program with the government will eliminate the need for that, too).

Thoughts? I have to admit I’ve been nervous about this for a while now, with “once in a generation” events happening on a seemingly yearly basis, I started saving for retirement in 2019 and it seems like things have essentially traded sideways since then - my accounts are barely worth more than the money I’ve put in to them. The article is quite gloomy.

The people I know who’ve given up on housing affordability unfortunately are not shifting in to retirement. They’re so hopeless they blow their money on hobbies because they don’t foresee any possible path to homeownership or retirement and value a few bucks here and there on discretionary spending more.

I am surprised the age would be so young. My dad retired at 67 but went right back to work a year later, still working now (71). Health insurance do be expensive. I wonder how this statistic would capture someone like him. My mother was working until she died at 60, but would have likely been in a similar situation, trying to keep working as long as possible, certainly was not looking at retirement within a year or two.

My wife’s parents are younger (late 50s) but in the same boat, there is no path to retirement for them and they plan to just keep working. The only people I know who managed to retire by any conventional definition are or were Silent Generation.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

If prices were coming down commensurate with rates increasing you could make a lateral change and buy the same amount of house for the same amount of money, but raising rates has only slightly reduced the rate house prices are increasing, rather than bring them down. It’s insane. Every month is the new worst time in modern US history to buy a house. It sucks for property owners too because taxes based on fair market value are rising crazy fast as well.

I don’t make enough to max 401k + Roth but if I ever get there I’ll have to remember the foreign vs. domestic note. From reading this thread I think I definitely need to phase out contributing to bonds for a while.

I think your math is assuming FFLDX is 100% domestic stock, but according to the Fidelity research page it’s ~55% domestic stock, ~35% foreign stock, ~10% bonds so it actually very closely mirrors my Roth distribution (totally accidentally however… I actually hadn’t looked at it before today, I just knew the returns were only about half of the S&P500 over any given period of time).

https://imgur.com/a/Rfl38fF

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Would absolutely have been impossible for us without money from my mother’s trust (deceased) and my father. Even living cheaply, with a very good deal on an apartment that we luckily locked in as COVID started and rent increases were put on moratorium, the appreciation of properties was so aggressive that saving $1300 a month meant we were actually losing ground on hitting a 20% down-payment on half decent starter homes. We desperately need the housing bubble to burst, but it’s not even “”“really”“” a bubble.

Might be silly but I honestly just use Excel. I could do with some more features or automatic calculations for certain things but I like to just be able to tinker with data.

We are effectively single income so I will ignore my wife’s accounts.

I have:

• CU checking
• CU savings
• HYSA (SoFi) emergency fund
• Fidelity brokerage
• Fidelity Roth IRA
• Fidelity 401k
  Credit cards:
• USAA (general purpose)
• Chase Amazon Prime (Amazon)
• Apple Card (devices and occasionally tap to pay)

CU checking is where mortgage and bills are paid from. It is also where the money goes out of to pay credit cards down. Correspondingly CU checking gets the lion’s share of direct deposit. HYSA gets a fraction, but I will top it off at the end of the month to get on target with our savings goal ($1000/mo towards HYSA as long as nothing is being spent). CU Savings are pretty much empty these days, APY is so low it is irrelevant. For whatever reason that’s where the connection to Fidelity lives so I can contribute to the Roth IRA, but that is the only use anymore now that our cars are paid off.

I don’t make enough to max my 401k so the brokerage is just used for when RSUs and ESPP shares deposit. Then I sell them, put some in retirement and transfer some to CU for cash.

Roth contribution is manual each month. Bill pays are manual (except for a couple on autopay on CCs, if they don’t charge card fees). Mortgage is automatic from checking. I track the target emergency savings separately in a spreadsheet which also includes budget & other info.

What makes the Fidelity cash management account & its associated debit card so good?

The problem is allowing there to be old vs. new contracts, not the control itself. There wouldn’t be a black market for contracts if the price of rent for a unit was permanent, public information, and tied to the property. Even if it’s sold, renovated, whatever - if the rent can literally never go up, sooner or later it’s going to make financial sense to sell it. It might not be today, it might not be next week, but someday, the goal is to force as much of the property ownership in to the hands of people who want to be property owners and live in the properties.

It would have no effect on people who own and live in their home (except on the value of the property, if it causes a mass flood of properties on the market… which I doubt. The properties are still valuable just by virtue of being a place to live, they don’t need the rent generating component to be valuable).

The reason houses are not affordable is not because the mortgage is more expensive than the rent for an equivalent unit. In fact the opposite is almost universally true. The problem is you can’t rent cheaply enough, to set aside enough of your income, to accumulate a down-payment for a reasonable property at a pace that is faster than the appreciation of those properties.

Take our situation just a couple years ago - we had a good deal on an old 2br apartment, paying a little under half our income to rent+utilities. I was saving about $1200~1300 a month towards just the house down-payment. Very respectable, I thought. But house prices were going up nearly 20% YoY. On a $400k house, which was very much on the cheaper end of what was available, that means the down-payment required is increasing at around $1500 a month. Literally every month I’m losing buying power. For perspective, when I looked recently the absolute minimum price I saw on Zillow for a unit in our area that wasn’t just an empty plot of land was $285k.

Raising taxes doesn’t work because the landlords will literally always just pass it on, plus profit margin, to the tenants. As long as there’s another tenant looking in the area, they will always fill the unit. People will just get in to a lease that’s 40, 50, 60% of their income because it’s all there is.

This is the only path I see - real estate needs to not be a guaranteed profit generator. It’s been viewed this way for decades. Rents are allowed to increase indefinitely, which inflates property values, which raises taxes, which raises mortgages, which raises rents, because real estate is said to be zero risk maximum reward investment. So it’s better to hold an empty unit until someone comes along willing to pay the price you’re asking than let it go for less.

The only way I see around this is a really aggressive cap on rent. Like, once a rent is established, it can never be raised, for any reason, ever again (unless the property were radically transformed, like a large single family plot in to a townhouse development, condos, etc.). The home value can still do whatever, but it no longer has the catalyzing agent of perpetually exploding rents to drive it up.

I spent a few weeks reading as much about rent control as I could, where it had been tried and analyzing how they failed. The legislation has never been remotely extensive enough - only touching a handful of (usually very old) structures in a single neighborhood, county, or city. Of course if there is a cluster of rent controlled units you will depress building where the properties might not generate as much profit vs. guaranteed to generate profit forever. But if it applies everywhere at once, you don’t have this problem. Landlords evicted tenants to get around the caps, because the only mechanism to increase rent beyond the cap was to cycle tenants out. So the real problem here is landlords taking it out on their tenants, rather than let the properties simply not be a guaranteed infinite profit generator. Finally people in rent controlled units tend to stay in rent controlled units, limiting mobility. This seems to be cited as a weakness but I never came across an adequate explanation as to why. You have to make landlording simply not worth it to bring the number of people who want to own homes in to balance.

New developments would be able to charge whatever rent they wanted, if they wanted to rent them. So if you are absolutely determined to own and rent out properties, you have to keep building them if you want to keep setting new market rates.

An interesting note though is once rents are largely stagnant (except for some special exceptions I would make where owning single units is unusual, like apartment complexes own by single property management firms who handle communal landscaping, clubhouse, etc.), those properties will actually remain competitive for longer… in an environment where average rents go up 10% a year, of course not increasing rent will make it unprofitable very quickly and you might as well sell… but when average rents go up 1% a year, it will actually stay profitable for a lot longer even if you can’t increase rent. So I don’t foresee an instant flood of the housing market.

I also see benefit to pairing this kind of legislation with one that bars or otherwise limits corporations, especially foreign corporations, from owning and renting single family properties, but that’s a separate issue I haven’t studied as extensively.

I’d be happy to, but unfortunately there really aren’t any tools to moderate across instances on kbin… I already tried it with lemmy.world/c/rct.

One thing to note is on Reddit you’re used to looking at lots of disparate granular communities e.g. /r/finance, /r/FIRE, /r/personalfinance, /r/povertyfinance, /r/wallstreetbets, /r/stocks, meme subs like /r/pfjerk… While this community is small, we can be all of those things. You start general and then as the niche groups find the content they want to see or is most relevant to them is getting drowned out, they can splinter off. This is why most of what I’ve been posting is more in line with the historical content on /r/stocks rather than /r/personalfinance. There is some cross-talk, but /r/personalfinance is mostly questions about individual financial situations as well as a repository of FAQs. We don’t have a wiki, so the latter is essentially impossible unless we just make huge posts and pin them (which is still worth considering), and with only a couple hundred members the former is not a viable content model.

One thing I haven’t seen anyone discuss in the context of the current economic climate is that while we had near-0% effective rates from 2008 to 2022, we had sub-1% APRs on auto loans, sub-3% APRs on mortgages, and 0% APR payment plans through manufacturers and POS systems became common. Google, Apple, Amazon, Shopify, more, all implemented 0% APR payment options for devices and even general purchases for 6~12 month terms. I was looking at laptops just last week and notice Apple is still allowing 1 year 0% APR plans for them. The iPhone upgrade program doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. It seems to me this is probably still a pretty big driver of inflated consumer spending - it’s objectively a better deal to not spend the money up front when the fed rate is 5.5%, money market funds are paying 5.4%, HYSAs are paying 5.1%, and inflation is 4%. Of course you should spend the money a year from now when it’s grown more and worth less.