I know this is publicly available info, but this feels a bit dox-y to me. The pricing doesn’t bother me, but the address does. The same effect of the info can be expressed without the address. Would you mind removing the address part? TIA.
I bought my first house by myself at age 23 for 56K. Zero down, it was a VA loan. Lovely home in Omaha, but I really got suckered by the realtor when I sold it. Release of liability? No, you don’t need that, the buyer is totally reliable. Couple of years later, was contacted by the VA, letting me know that the buyer hadn’t made payments for a year, and I was responsible. What a nightmare.
I don’t know how my kids can ever buy a house, even if we helped them. They have decent salaries, good savings, but they live in NYC and SF. Impossible. Fortunately they don’t seem to want to purchase anyways.
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Good point! That said there is a huge difference between someone who had to take out loans to even go to college at all and someone who could’ve avoided debt, but wanted to go somewhere more expensive. My nephew’s wife, had to pay for college herself, but she chose the cheap instate option. She was one of the top students in the state, so she got a good scholarship to the instate university and she also got other scholarships. She worked the whole time she was in college too. She did have to take out some loans, but it wasn’t much. She turned down private and out of state publics, because she would’ve had to take on more debt and she wouldn’t have gotten the good scholarship for instate students.
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Really it is all about making a responsible purchase. I blame plenty of the parents out there that pushed their kids into situations that would require huge loans or at least didn’t hold their kids back from taking on loans. For parents college is usually the second largest purchase they will make behind a home. It should be a sound purchase.
Both my kids could have gone to ‘better’ or higher ranked schools but we balanced cost with the other attributes of college. Both will graduate without loans and we definitely didn’t have $100K+ saved up for them.
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Wow - either I’m really old or we were really poor but first houses in 1975 were more like $65k and they were built in the 1950s. But I loved it because the previous owners put a new Sears kitchen in with dark wooden cabinets and professional drapery! I’m actually aged out of my current neighborhood where we didn’t buy until our mid-40’s and now early 30’s are buying in here as their first homes. Amazing - I often wonder how much money they are putting into their retirement accounts when I see two brand new MB or Lexus in their driveways.
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In 1985 our starter home near Binghamton NY cost about $65K. However a similar age/style home…. though larger (with more than our 1 bathroom) and nicer and on a bigger lot owned by a relative cost 3x. I remember being stunned.
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We bought our home in the late 1980s. Today, prices in our neighborhood are 3-4x that price, even with few or no improvements to the homes built in 1959s and lot sizes about 7000 square feet.
$10,000 in 1985 dollars is equivalent to about $29,000 today do those figures make sense.
We were looking for a house for some years. When we started looking, prices were $200,000+. as we kept looking, they more than doubled in a very short period of time, all in the space of a few years and were $500,000+. Our housing prices are very high.
This was back in 1980s. Prices in my area of the island are 3-4x that now or higher.
Most of these homes were built in 1950s and often they have had little to no updating. Most are pretty simple 3 bedroom 2 bath homes with carports.
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Back in the early '80s, H was offered a job in HI. I was delighted. Then we checked out housing costs and were stunned. Our little 2 bd/1ba house had cost <$35K and I recall that it seemed a similar house there would be about 5X as much. The increased salary offered did not come close to making up the substantial increase in the cost of living. There went my daydreams.
Yes, our neighbor and friend was offered a job in silicone valley. They figured it sounded attractive until they went and looked at schools and prices of housing and everything. It was not worth it to them with the really high costs of private school and housing so they stayed here and the guy got an even better offer for a job in Honolulu!
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Exactly what happened to my husband when we were first married (2nd marriage for me) in 1985 and we flew out there from Dallas - a quick 3 days to find out double the price and half the size of our home in Dallas - and it was like a 20 year old bungalow! Turned that offer down and stayed in Dallas until Atlanta position came available.
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Same thing happened to us. Husband got a job offer in SV… housing prices here weren’t as crazy as they are now, plus we were in the process of landscaping our giant yard which was a DIY labor of love. For the price we paid here, we could barely afford a dilapidated shack with a postage stamp-sized yard in SV. We stayed put.
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