Exactly. $400 for mine. $100 would fill a shopping cart with groceries back then. Health insurance: $80-125/mo. Internet: $15/mo. Garage sales almost everything was less than $10, most of it was less than $5. Goodwill was a deal. DIY/homemade was a deal, a way to save money.

It was a different time. There’s no equivalent to that time today, today is pretty awful.

And now it’s all going to be so much worse thanks to MAGA, oligarchs, and Heritage.

I bought my house in 2014, $224k at 4% APR, my monthly payment including taxes is $1400/mo.

It's only been 11 years, inflation is up ~35% in that time, so buying the same house now should be ~$1900/mo. Actual price if I were to buy it now? ~$3500/mo. And wages have barely budged. No wonder young people entering the workforce can't buy houses anymore.

Saving money on food to buy a guillotine is personal finance.

Please, I'm begging you, please call Habitat for Humanity. Don't make assumptions based on what you think you know about the program or have heard, just fucking call.

Worst case scenario: You spend an hour at the initial meeting and discover it won't work for you. The other scenario: You end up owning a brand new home (or one refurbished to brand new) at cost.

Because my es-wife picked up the phone, I now own my own home at $600/mo., 19-year mortgage. Took us right at a year to complete the program and have keys in hand.

Be glad to answer questions, but there are variations according to the local outfit's way of doing things.

My parents, 35000 dollars for a two bedroom, 1 bath house 3 acres of land in the middle of BFE back in the 80's

Today, 3 bed, 1 bath house with less than .25 acres, 200k same BFE area.

With inflation something comparable to my parents house in BFE, because it's not changed all that much, should only be 100k.

And the recent minimum wage increase to 13.75 an hour passed by the people is in process of being revoked by Republicans.

And I do get tired of visiting home and taking to people that spout off the 'back in my day' bs.

"Have you tried simply having more money?"

"Greedy landlords" is an easy cope out. Instead we should realize the system that's built to continously inflate the economy whereas our wages stagnate at best.

My first apartment (without roommates) was $600/month I think. I just check the present day at it rents for $1400! The mortgage cost on my first house (small/low cost of living area) was only $1000/month.

I just don't know how young people are affording housing these days.

There's a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she'd be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I've seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month's rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month's salary of a factory worker.

That's the real problem with old people's sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn't possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.

But this flies in the face of the great American delusion that everyone can white knuckle their way through large crises arising from systemic failures or engineered on purpose by oligarchs.

We had to give up entirely on affording a house. There are ROOMS for rent at $1200 here. This used to be a low COL area until COVID. We had low infection rates so a ton of people moved here and we don't have the infrastructure to support them. We've been priced out of what living space we did have and since there's still the illusion it's cheap to live here, it's almost impossible to get a living wage.

I started at $1,400 in 2011. That went up to $3,200 by 2023 for the cheapest place in a worse part of town.

I had to move to an entirely different city. Fuck San Diego. Shitty ass city.