Whether that is possible depends a lot on where you live - from what I can tell, outside of a few major cities there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for <$200k in the US, good luck with that anywhere in Canada.
Given that it takes money to move, no, you do not always have a choice in where to live.
I lived in Chicago on a $800/mo salary for a year and a half. Yes eight hundred dollars a month, in the city of Chicago. I had no money, but I made it work, then I moved back home to small town Iowa and make a lot more now, and live a better life. Nobody made me do either of those things.
It takes money move, to or from any city. It's nice that you were able to make it work, and yes, it means others could as well but you wold look like a little less of an asshole if you would consider not everyone is in the same situation as you were.
Were you single
Did you have kids
Did you have any medical conditions that needed care
Did you use to have a better job before
That's just a few things that are part of everyday, normal life that can make the cost of moving and living on very little somewhat difficult.
> Nobody makes you buy a million dollar house
I don't remember saying anything close to that.
No.
> Did you have kids
Yes.
> Did you have any medical conditions that needed care
Not that I know of.
> Did you use to have a better job before
I moved to the city with a $100 loan from my step-father so I could afford gas to do the 4 hour drive taking nothing with me but what I could fit in my car, which took a 3rd of that $800/mo just to pay.
You know how I moved? I asked a friend, he came and helped me and packed his truck with what I couldn't fit in my car.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
> Did you have any medical conditions that needed care > Not that I know of.
Others do, it's often sort of important to handle them. It can also limit the cities you can live in.
> Were you single > No.
Right here I start thinking your now being disingenuous, second income?
> car, which took a 3rd of that $800/mo
So you lived in Chicago on 528 a month and saved enough to move. You are leaving things out. This was either 40 years ago, you were getting significant social assistance or something.
Lets go ahead and throw out another perfectly, though unfortunate, normal situation. You had parents to even move back in with.
Now then, I don't live in a particularly expensive city. The 'million dollar house' you want to keep throwing around as if everyone has is almost 10 times the cost of where I live. Yet I can still see that not every one is in the exact same situation I am in. Moving to another city would not be something I could do on a whim, though I've had to cover medical expenses this year that are more than what your supposed monthly income was.
I mentioned it once. You're the one who keeps bringing it back up.
> Right here I start thinking your now being disingenuous, second income?
No second income. My fiance has never, and will never pay anything for me.
> So you lived in Chicago on 528 a month and saved enough to move. You are leaving things out. This was either 40 years ago, you were getting significant social assistance or something.
Oh sorry, I left out the $600/mo the startup I worked for paid the owner of the spare bedroom I lived in. My bad. $1400/mo. And 40 years ago? I'm 30, I moved from Chicago in March of this year.
Were your SO and kids not living with you? I cant imagine putting 3+ people into a spare bedroom. If you guys did do that, its impressive but its certainly not within the realm of normal in the US. If you didn't have them with you, than saying you had 1400 a month to support yourself, your SO, and your kid/s is not an accurate accounting of your living expenses for Chicago
It's dumb to devolve this argument down to "But what if you have cancer and 7 dogs and 3 kids, how would you move?"
Because the average person reading hacker news with a tech job in the valley does not have 7 dogs and 3 kids and cancer. We can feel sorry for that person, but I am pretty sure we can blame all 200k software developers living in SF as having 7 dogs 3 kids and cancer.
Hard to imagine that housing prices have gone up 10x in that time.
http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Rabidoux_h...
In their index, housing prices were about 100 in 2000 and about 180 in 2013, so houses were about 80% more expensive in 2013 versus 2000. That is in real terms. You'd expect it to be more like 103% more expensive in nominal terms (assuming 2%/year inflation).
Here's a good source for recent housing prices in Canada:
http://crea.ca/content/national-average-price-map
It shows that the average sale price in Canada was $433k in August 2015. But there's tremendous variation within Canada. Vancouver was around $900k; PEI was $158k. It looks like Saskatchewan was around $253k, so a bit over half the national average, with Regina and Saskatoon being more expensive in the $310-320k range.
About 15 years ago you would have expected prices to be about half that in Saskatchewan, or maybe $125k. So no, house prices have not gone up 10x in the last 15 years and $20-30k were not typical house prices in Saskatchewan at the time.