Speaking of innumeracy, how would a person afford to save for a homeloan deposit, while also paying for health insurance, rent, food, and vehicle maintenance. With kids? Might as well hang yourself, before the kids hang themselves.
I'm in Australia, so the numbers are approximately similar, our minimum wage is $20.33 an hour, our public health care system had been eroded by successive governments, and never included non-emergency dental so you probably want to spend around $40 to $60 or more a week on health insurance.
No one on $19 an hour is buying houses.
If your minimum wage is $7 an hour, but the lowest paying job currently advertised is $19 an hour, let's just call the effective minimum wage $19 an hour, and base or assumptions off that.
Many people are living that way, sure, but, man, both the USA and Australia have turned to shit. Fuck being a young person today without the good fortune of being born with good genes in to a good family. People can't find places to rent even in the small city I live in, families are living out of their cars, or in tents under bridges.
In Australian! It's not like we're short on land, or wealth.
Half the issue is that people have been indoctrinated to expect home ownership and long for some golden age seen on TV that never existed.
Home ownership was never universal in the US. It has been within a few percent of 65% since the 1960s[1]. It was always out of reach for the lowest earners, like those that make minimum wage.
What you're saying surely has elements of truth, in average the struggle is real and it's hard.
But it's also a matter of perspective. Here's a few additional perspectives, none of them the whole answer. But possibly provide insights and even hope for those who are most motivated.
Creating a house is a huge achievement, if you had to build it, and it's components, yourself, you would spend decades building a modern style house. It's unrealistic to expect that everyone can get this easily and early in life. Our mortgage system allows people to own earlier while paying it off to make that possible, but otherwise this is something that only a skilled person after decades of work would achieve.
Minimum wage isn't expected to be the maximum income achievement for someone who works hard, the idea is to find a niche where you can make more than minimum wage. This takes time of hard work, but it's patently still very possible in Australia, and much harder in many other countries overseas.
People who bought houses in the past had it easier in some ways, but lived a much much more basic standard of life. If you talk to average (ie not wealthy) people who bought houses from 50 to 20 years ago, it was incredibly hard for them, and involved sacrifice of pretty much everything to the mortgage for a decade of their life, while working hard and supporting a family. No overseas holidays, computers phones and entertainment, paying for kids sports programs, home delivery of meals etc etc. The standard of entitlement has raised incredibly decade on decade - in the past it was Expected to sacrifice to afford a home.
Some people still, despite the challenges were buying homes on minimum wage jobs in the last decade, before the current waves of price rises, and some probably are still buying now. But those people who did structured their life in a way to reduce every expense and save then buy modest places, away from conveniences and lifestyle areas. Similar sorts of sacrifices that people of the past would have done, just they are living in an era of inflated lifestyle expectations so they socially making more sacrifices even if the actual physical sacrifices are less in that they e.g. still have a phone and more entertainment than the past.
>Creating a house is a huge achievement, if you had to build it, and it's components, yourself, you would spend decades building a modern style house.
In my country the houses in the villages used to be built with local materials by the owners themselves, with some help from family and neighbors. The vast majority were very small even if the families were large but it didn't take decades or even many years to build them. Now houses are larger and built by dedicated teams or companies, families smaller and many moved into towns where they live in an apartment building. Most people I know, younger or older, either live in apartment buildings or they live in house in a village near the town, because owning a house in the town is terribly expensive. Either way, they are paying for the place with credit or they are renting.
For many people, owning a home means paying rates 20 to 30 years.
So if you are 20 and feel entitled to a 5 bedroom house in one of the best areas the people who educated you did a poor job. B
I'm in Australia, so the numbers are approximately similar, our minimum wage is $20.33 an hour, our public health care system had been eroded by successive governments, and never included non-emergency dental so you probably want to spend around $40 to $60 or more a week on health insurance.
No one on $19 an hour is buying houses.
If your minimum wage is $7 an hour, but the lowest paying job currently advertised is $19 an hour, let's just call the effective minimum wage $19 an hour, and base or assumptions off that.
Many people are living that way, sure, but, man, both the USA and Australia have turned to shit. Fuck being a young person today without the good fortune of being born with good genes in to a good family. People can't find places to rent even in the small city I live in, families are living out of their cars, or in tents under bridges.
In Australian! It's not like we're short on land, or wealth.