The 'old American Dream died,' Realtor details salary needed to buy a home, afford a middle class life in 2024

Jo Miran@lemmy.ml to News@lemmy.world – 675 points –
The 'old American Dream died,' Realtor details salary needed to buy a home, afford a middle class life in 2024
finance.yahoo.com

TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.

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https://www.rd.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fact-sheet/508_RD_FS_RHS_SFH502Direct.pdf

the federal government will loan you the money for the house at below market rates, and if their rate is still too expensive, they can give you a deferment.

my effective interest rate today is 1%.

please take money from the federal government.

fuck the banks.

Lots of sellers will prefer cash or regular loans so your application is very likely to be last in line. Plus the applications are much, much more complicated and mortgage applications are already a bitch. But then it's usually a once in a lifetime experience and may be the only option for a lot of people do this is more of a heads up than an attempt to discourage anyone from applying.

we lost 4 bids and saw almost 2 dozen houses before finding a winner

Cash I understand, but what's the reasoning behind sellers preferring regular loans instead?

USDA isn't gonna buy a fixer upper. they want people to have safe housing. this might mean the seller is going to need to fix the problems

for us, we liked that, but it did mean we lost our on a couple bids. which was good: we found a real jewel.

In a hot market/location this will never happen. Even with a regular loan there's a bidding war on houses with obvious issues.

i live in a hot market. i got one. it was a slog, but it happened.

edit: we were approved in november. we put in multiple offers and had to periodically get re-approved by the usda, but we had an offer accepted mid march and closed in april.

for a brief period, we kept the "apartment in the city" for a month and moved one sub-compact car worth of belongings across town every night. not really relevant, but i'm going to remember fondly the brief time that we kept an apartment in the city, because that shit is never gonna happen again for poor schlubs like us.

Yeah, sellers (flippers really) are asking 70-80k over the value of the house, and they want no-inspection, as is, and you need to bring cash to the closing to cover appraisal gap, which is usually in the 60-100k range.

We need to start taxing unoccupied single-family home at their list price. There is no incentive to sell at a reasonable price.

Yeah, sellers (flippers really) are asking 70-80k over the value of the house, and they want no-inspection, as is, and you need to bring cash to the closing to cover appraisal gap, which is usually in the 60-100k range.

I haven't been in the market for nearly a decade. This seems pants-on-head crazy to me.

All I can hope for is that when the market inevitably collapses again (let's face it, this is not sustainable) all these assholes hit rock bottom and the government FINES them instead of bailing them out.

Isn't what's been happening that corporations buy them for cash they have on hand and now they're all rentals? It'd have to crash pretty hard to push those guys out I think. [pure speculation by me]

This. The inspection and repair criteria are higher than for private lending. We sold our house to someone using this program and had to fix stuff that we didn't need fixed when we bought the house. It wasn't a huge deal but it did add a week to the process to get it fixed and reinspected.

"applicants must be without decent, safe, and sanitary housing" is that a hard stop or is there some flexibility on that condition? im not trying to pry into your previous situation, but that makes it sound a bit more dire than the average renter.

i had a lease on an apartment when the process started.

edit: honestly if the requirement were that you were homeless or next to it,i don't think anyone would ever apply for this program. the first application is daunting, and then there is the matter of actually shopping for a house.