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0 pointsmjevans7y ago0 comments

Maybe 30-50 years ago having 15K saved up was rich.

What can 15K get you today? An OK used car, maybe, and it's like 1/10th of the down-payment that's expected on a house that's still too far away from work, which you can't expect to stay at because no one has a stable career anymore.

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dahfizz7y ago

Where do you live? I bought a car that was <2 years old with <30k miles for just under 8 grand. You can easily find good cars for less than $15k. In fact, 15k is nearly enough for a brand new nissan sentra. And with a median home price of $200k, $15k is nearly half of a down payment if you want to avoid mortgage insurance, and is plenty if youre willing to take on mortgage insurance.

mjevansOP7y ago

Arguably the price of the car is still near enough to estimate; 15K being a median figure in the ballpark.

It's also not JUST the home price, it's the career, being able to expect to stay in the same area for a long time and generally do well.

I happen to live near Seattle, but I think the same could be said of a majority of the 25 most populated metro-areas in the US, if not a similar proportion of cities in most other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

I'm extrapolating that any place with >5% population growth over the ~10 year period is in a similar bind due to various policies.

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