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Comment by phone8675309 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't ever expect to be able to retire. I've followed financial the advice of my financial planners, targeting retirement at 67 in another quarter decade, and I expect housing costs and inflation to eat up all of my savings to the point where I will still need to work.

I haven't been able to purchase a home due to medical debt and the market conditions when I entered industry and the subsequent surges in home prices, so that's a large part of it, and I'm far too old where a bank will be comfortable giving me a thirty year mortgage, so my options are to rent or be homeless. That's a large part of it.

I implore you, if you're under the age of 30, buy a home now. Eat ramen for several years if you have to. Otherwise you will never retire.

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>targeting retirement at 67 in another quarter decade ... I'm far too old where a bank will be comfortable giving me a thirty year mortgage

If you're 42 now, you're in no sense too old to get a 30 year mortgage - who told you that? In any case, it's literally illegal under Federal law to use age as a factor when making a credit decision.

I was a consultant at a FinTech startup who had a full-time loan specialist who told me she wrote a 30 year loan to someone in their 70's.

Wouldn't a "quarter decade" be 2.5 years, making OP 64.5 years?

>I expect housing costs and inflation to eat up all of my savings to the point where I will still need to work.

You keep cash in your mattress or what? You worked and lived through one of the greatest bull runs in history, did you really not put a penny into a 401k or IRA??

I had a significant amount of medical debt that ate up the majority of my income for several years - from about the age of twenty until my mid-thirties. I'm righting the ship now, but those years and markets never come back. I put what I could afford into savings, and I am on-track, according to my financial advisors, to retire at 67, but I'm very skeptical about that and am planning to have to work for the rest of my life.

Do you live in Aspen or something? Making minimum wage in nyc? Assuming you are a "normal software person" like OP is asking, that seems a little bit dramatic for the average software career in 99.99% of cities on earth.

> I'm far too old where a bank will be comfortable giving me a thirty year mortgage

I wouldn't assume this, you can always try. The criteria will be based on your income and savings and the cost of the home at the time of the mortgage. You may need to move to a lower cost of living area than wherever you are now, though.

Retiring is a death sentence anyway.

I wish someone gave me that advice when I was 30. Well, probably I wouldn't have listened.

If you don't mind me asking how old are you (I presume somewhere in 40s?)? This is scary as hell, to hear banks refuse loans due to age.

They don't. It's about finances, not age. If you die before you can finish paying off the mortgage they don't care, they'll either get the property or a payout from your estate.

Yes, the mortgage term just determines the amortization of the loan payments. 30-year loans hardly ever reach maturity. In the US, people move on average every 7 years.

A bank would be delighted for a mortgage holder to die, causing the property to be sold and the loan to be repaid, if prevailing interest rates had risen since the loan was created.

It's very sad that OP has been under the impression that age has anything to do with a loan term.

> This is scary as hell, to hear banks refuse loans due to age.

They don't, it is illegal on the federal level to use age as a factor when determining eligibility for most loans (including mortgages) in the US. Check the "must not discourage you from applying or reject your application [...] based on these factors" section of this page[0] on the FTC website.

That concern about age is just how the parent comment imagines it works, without checking how it actually is first.

0. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/mortgage-discrimination

It's illegal, but of course the banks won't tell you "you're too old" - they'll just deny you.

They can't do that either - they're legally required to give you an adverse action notice indicating why they are unable to extend credit. For conforming loans, they don't even care as they're just going to sell them anyway, rather than holding them on their books.

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