Wait, save, then buy if you still want to.
You can buy a house with no credit history. Look it up.
You can buy a house with no credit history. Look it up.
So, out of 3.5 billion adults in this world, only 0.7% have the ability to buy a home in a large city in cash.
What, then, should the other 99.3% of people do?
Mr. Money Mustache[1] has been blogging about this for years, and it's a great place to start for people who don't understand personal finance. Also check out the personal finance[2] and financial independence[3] subreddits.
[1]: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
Yes but it's actually very doable and we can do it while adding value. Be the example that you don't believe exists.
Whatever possible route there is to everyone being rich, it involves a fundamentally different economic system. Socialists would have you believe they have the answer to that, but there's good reasons to be highly skeptical. Capitalists don't pretend to have the answer, they (generally, there's lots of variations of "capitalism") openly accept that we need some people to be rich and others to be poor in order for the system to operate.
I used to try to live according to Kant's Categorical Imperative where I would aim to be the example for the world I want to see, the one where everyone would prosper if they all behaved as I do. Then, I realized that was just a delusional way to think. It's an interesting philosophical question to discuss, but people don't all act as I do in reality, so acting as though that fantasy were real is often totally counterproductive or self-sacrificing with nobody benefiting. Reality is complicated and complex.
> Be the example that you don't believe exists.
It's in response to you saying:
> of an inherently exploitive system. A trivially small number of them actually added true wealth to the world
And I agree, not everyone can be rich, but on an individual basis it's not that hard.
The good thing about capitalism is that the average quality of life gets elevated. The rich do get richer (which we shouldn't focus on) but poverty also gets eliminated at the same time.
And yes, as you say, people won't act like the utopia we'd like, so it's not perfect. But it's better than anything else by a long shot.
Well, yeah, that's the difference between micro and macro. In a free society without a nobility or class system, it's possible for any one individual to rise from poverty to privilege with luck and hard work. But if it's a zero-sum game where one success is another's loss, then "being the example" isn't an example of anything, it's just being the winner instead of the loser. Of course, most success isn't entirely zero-sum, but it has too many zero-sum elements far too often and is also too-often entirely zero-sum. And some people try to ignore the entire issue of when or whether or how-much some success is zero-sum.
> The good thing about capitalism is that the average quality of life gets elevated.
Crediting "capitalism" here is entirely dubious. The correct credit goes to technology and innovation. There's nowhere near adequate evidence to conclude that capitalism itself automatically increases average quality of life. Perhaps you are mistakenly lumping all of trade and markets with "capitalism"? Markets are often positive for everyone, and trade is generally positive for everyone, raising everyone's quality of life. In our society, probably because of propaganda to this effect, people consider markets and capitalism synonymous sometimes, the same semantic way people in some contexts might consider "moral" and "religious" (or even "Christian") to by synonymous.
In short, if you're just saying that markets and trade benefit everyone generally (but not necessarily), then we have no disagreement there.
I really don't think there is a way to shoe-horn this for everyone.
If there was an easy way for everyone to be able to afford a house, it probably would have happened by now??
There are only so many 100k per year jobs available, and there's only so much expense cutting you can do.
At some point, the asset is just priced too high, often for artificial reasons.
See also: en wiki . org / 2007 mortgage loan crisis
Which is to say that there are job opportunities in Dallas and Indianapolis and Atlanta and so on and so on, which are all cities with the housing equivalent of Honda Civics.
If you insist on a Bentley (i.e. the largest coastal cities), then I guess I just don't know what to tell you except that you should reconsider a visit to the Honda lot.
There are lenders who do not require a credit history. Look it up.
The "save, wait" comment was more general than house buying.
For me, the easiest solution has always been renting a room without a lease from a buddy at a rational price
I suppose the issue here is that the "wait and save" approach does not always have success, especially in the Bay Area.
The reason for that is because there is a finite number of houses, and an excessive number of bidders. These bidders use loans and leverage (other people's money) to pay a higher price than they normally would be able to afford.
Thus, waiting and saving is tougher.
Of course this begs the question, why not just avoid the Bay Area?
Unfortunately, most of the tech jobs are there. Other cities don't have the job capacity, despite having plenty of houses.
So, finally, there really only are 33m people on this Earth who can afford to pay cash for a home in the Bay Area.
The rest have to leverage, and thus, are affected by identity theft and credit scores.
Your comments imply Bay Area housing costs are the default, but they're not. They're the exception. Contrasting the number of global millionaires with Bay Area housing costs in response to a general statement about saving to buy a house is silly.
I'm not sure how realistic it is to save for instead of getting a loan for a house, but I started my career 30 minutes from a city in the US with an international airport. I got a mortgage, but the house was $117k, in a safe neighborhood, with a garage, three bedrooms, and 2.5 baths. There is a whole world outside the Bay Area.
I hope you don't expect to lose your job every few months, but in case you do, remember that new jobs pop into existence. It's not like a city with 100 jobs is on the verge of running out. (several years later: "oops, the last job got used up in 2018 and we can't ever make any more; this city is all used up")
I've had my tech job for a dozen years now. It pays well enough to get a 3500-square-foot house on half an acre and feed a huge family, even though the pay is perhaps only 2/3 of what I'd make in San Francisco or Mountain View. The 5x to 10x difference in housing cost more than makes up for the salary difference.