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).

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.

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.

We typically spend between $800~1400 between two people on all food in a given month. Granted that’s high, but considering that includes everything from grocery trips, meaning paper products, cat food, alcohol… one thing that was interesting for me looking at the data is our ratio of spend on eating out doesn’t strongly correlate to the total we spend for the month. For instance:

July was a super high outlier overall, but it was driven by our grocery spending more than our eating out spending. Major contributing factors were meeting friends more often than usual (four weekends of providing alcohol) and a Costco run. Our eating out generally constitutes lots of runs to e.g. Subway, Chipotle. I get a $6 coffee ~once a month, my wife doesn’t drink coffee. We very rarely go down to sit-down restaurants and have a $50-100 meal, basically only for birthdays or anniversaries. That also hit in July (anniversary).

Part of what’s going on is I think rapidly fluctuating food prices and the fact that for the last ~year groceries had been so much more expensive than normal and a lot of “fast food” at least hadn’t appeared to update their prices at a comparable rate. So we might be spending $10 to make a meal for two at home or $20 to eat out together. So eating out ~twice a week vs. ~once a week barely registers on a typical monthly food spend.

Yup. My wife and I both own Subarus, we get “please let us buy your car!” letters from local dealerships on a monthly basis and have been since we bought hers in 2018.

This was exactly the calculus I was doing with my wife in 2017~2018. Her car was a fourth-hand 2003 Hyundai Elantra which had been run in to the ground before she ever even got it (but to be fair, it was both free and better than what she was driving before). I was looking at used car prices and thinking, is it really worth it to save less than $5k when I get a car that’s 5 years newer with 50,000 fewer miles and all of its warranty in-tact? The PF advice I was seeing at that time was maddening, and mirrored a lot of what you’re saying - “cars lose half their value off the lot, buy a used civic for $5k and drive the wheels off” - but that had already not existed for years. And then the pandemic supercharged used car prices and they just sort of never came back down. And then rates went up and they still won’t come down.

We ended up buying a brand new 2019 Impreza in an undesirable color for $19k, financed with nothing down and 0.9%. Now it’s paid off, I feel like in retrospect it was very much the right call.