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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

But they still suffer the same core problem: housing is out of reach, jobs don't pay enough to live, everything is getting more expensive, wages remain stagnant. Just striking out on your own as a young person is getting more or more unrealistic, and if you're still living with your parents, rightly or wrongly, that amounts to a huge amount of stigma and makes you feel like a failure.

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while the Anglo world seem to have some quite severe issues re. housing, that is not the case in the Scandinavian world. housing and jobs are roughly as easy/difficult getting your hands on as for the past generations.

We still suffer from the aforementioned issues...

Dunno, at least in Sweden the housing market is a real pain to enter. Rentals are available, at least in smaller citities, but there's a real divider between renting and owning. Unless you've got a family to sponsor you, you're basically SOL until you're in your early 30s and you can finally afford the priviledge to be in over your ears in debt.

Not trying to take away from you, that it is difficult.

Just saying that it hasn't changed too much over the past 50 years – it was also difficult for the previous generations.

At least in Denmark, the situation is better now than it has been earlier, despite the market being heated. You can comfortably buy a house at around 4x annual salary with reasonable savings (~10% down payment).

Swedish housing prices have increased something like 300% the last 20 years. Salaries have not. In fact, nothing has.

This is in part due to interest payments being tax deductible, a measure to help the Swedish housing market bounce back from the housing crash in the mid '90s.

The government "forgot" to remove that insane policy even once the market had recovered, since it would be unpopular for everything to be more expensive, even throughout the negative interest rate years they didn't do anything about this. Which means everyone and their grandmother has loans up to their ears, taken back when interests were basically free. ... so now interests have gone up by like 5 percentage points and everyone with a loan is in struggling, that interest subsidy policy is going nowhere in a hurry, meanwhile it still drives up prices and creates an ever-widening gap between those who own and those who can't afford the down payment because the market has seized up entirely since nobody wants to realize the loss of selling their house for less than their mortgage.

also the interest rate has gone down from 20% to close to 0%.the rate is going up again, and we should see the housing market correct itself, but it usually takes a couple of years - in particular, my take is that the interest rate does not go down as long as we expect it to (ie. we don't change the behaviors that are required for the banks to lower the rate).

regardless, in Copenhagen you can get a 2 room apartment for 2.5m DKK. if you have a down payment of 200k you can buy this with a salary of roughly 550k a year, which indeed is reasonable as you live in Copenhagen. if you are a couple, then you are at 5m kr where you can start to get houses in the suburb or quite nice apartments.

personally I prefer a market with higher interest rates such that the price is not just set as multiples of a median salary.

The housing markets in Germany and Spain are awful, at least in the cities where the jobs are. And in Spain there's the youth unemployment crisis as well.

I find it hard to believe the Scandinavian world only suffered mildly concerning the housing market and costs of living during this economy. Especially when closer regions like Switzerland (Zurich) are considered one of the most expensive places to live in. Then again, nordic countries are quite secluded, geographically speaking, and they still protect their own very well...

https://www.eiu.com/n/singapore-and-zurich-top-the-list-as-t...

I think your linked EIU article uncovers a bit of the secret:

> Singapore and Zurich top the ranking as the world’s most expensive cities

Especially the emphasis on cities. At least in Denmark, living in a city is a lifestyle choice. It is fair to want to live in a city, but one can't cry the added costs of your lifestyle decision as a general trend.

For Singapore (and other city states) one is obviously not afforded the choice.

In Denmark you can live in what's considered a rural area with 30-45 minutes commute to most places in central Copenhagen.

Also, we need to be a bit precise: cost of living and housing prices, while related, is not the same thing.

the challenges of achieving financial independence are unbearable sometimes

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