Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

> I’d been granted a few thousand shares when I got hired, and after the company had its IPO in 2012, I sold all the shares that had vested. … We could finally rent a house for just our family, no roommate. In order to afford that, selling stock became necessary every quarter it vested. Obviously, this is not the path to financial security, but when the sum of money that lands in front of you isn’t life changing, you look to the short term and what it can do for you right now.

What‽ Selling capital in order to finance daily survival is terrible: the entire point of a working life is to accumulate capital in order to finance a retirement.

Not having a roommate was, literally, a luxury he and his family could not afford.

> But for a person with a family of four who has a certain lifestyle that they want to try to maintain (a niceish $40,000 car, the ability to go out once a month and leave the kids with a sitter, a house that wasn't last remodeled in ’70s, etc.) it can be difficult.

If you have a wife and two kids, then maybe buying $40,000 cars is a mistake. Maybe getting a fancy house is a mistake. True fact: children survived into adulthood just fine in the 1970s. Part of being an adult is knowing how to differentiate between essentials and luxuries.

Honestly, with his sort of (admitted) short-term financial mismanagement, I don't think he could survive on six figures in Dallas, Houston, Denver, Kansas City or anywhere else. He'd make the same sort of bad decisions, perhaps with a longer runway to ruin.

People want the nice things their parents had, but not on the same timeline. They don't realize that nice things take a while to accumulate.

Yes my parents drive a Prius. But growing up in a family with 5 other siblings, they pretty much drove beaters. And our house started with, as we so fondly called them, the seven ugly carpets of the world. And those were slowly replaced over time. The house we lived in until I was one had slanted kitchen floors - just throw a towel at the correct wall if you spilled.

The point is that our parents affluence isn't the result of a general rise in affluence - it's accumulated. But we often don't think about that when making our early financial decisions.

Your parents had 6 kids to care for. If not for that, wouldn't their standard of living greatly exceed that of a childless couple today?

> People want the nice things their parents had, but not on the same timeline

I don't think that's telling the whole tale.

Soon after my parents got married in '74 they bought their first home, brand new. It cost 5 years of my Dad's salary at the time (a new teacher). So with the two of them working, they paid it off in just over 3 years.

Go find me a house for sale now that's less than 10 or 15 years of an individuals salary.

The world is a much different place - so I think people want the nice things their parents had, and they'd be happy if it were even the same timeline, but it's much, much longer.

My home is 2-3 years of my annual salary. So is most of my co-workers. Yes, that is probably not true for a teachers salary (although my first home was definitely within 4 years of a teachers salary.)

Are you living in the Bay Area? Is that why medium home prices are so high?

> * you living in the Bay Area? Is that why medium home prices are so high?*

Canada/Australia.

Pretty much anywhere you want to live houses are insanely expensive. Upwards of $450k for a 2-3 bedroom built in the 60s.

> Go find me a house for sale now that's less than 10 or 15 years of an individuals salary.

My condo is worth 1-1½ times my salary.

'The Census ACS 1-year survey reports that the median household income for the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Texas metro area was $59,530 in 2014, the latest figures available.'[1]

'The median home value in Dallas is $147,400.'[2]

$147,400 is 2.47 years. Double that, if you think the median household has two incomes.

U.S. median household income is $56,500. There are plenty of houses to be had for less than $565,000–$847,500.

[1] http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/texas/dallas/

[2] http://www.zillow.com/dallas-tx/home-values/

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/business/economy/us-census...

> Go find me a house for sale now that's less than 10 or 15 years of an individuals salary.

There seem to be a few houses in San Francisco for sale now that are under $600k: https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/so...

Raising the limit to $1 million, which is less than 10 to 15 years of many tech people's salary, greatly increases the number available.

Note I've set the filter to only include houses. It excludes condos, townhouses, and multi-family dwellings.

Median American household income 2015: $56,500 [0]

Median American home sale price July 2016: $244,100 [1]

[0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-poverty-idUSKC... [1]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/sales_price_of_existing_homes

It's very easy to say all of this from an armchair. Not doing those things is harder when your friends are doing them. Some people are better at averting that social pressure than others.

That being said, I'm making $115k in Dallas and have zero intention of having kids on this salary. One kid is expensive; I can't imagine having two or more. The sacrifice would be too much for me to handle. Even when I made $160k in New York I wouldn't have considered it.

>What‽ Selling capital in order to finance daily survival is terrible: the entire point of a working life is to accumulate capital in order to finance a retirement.

And yet people do it all the time. Not to mention the billions living hand to mouth.

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