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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

> You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage.

A landlord will happily swallow 50% of your income but a bank will start to feel bad about a ~30% debt to income ratio, so no you can't really.

Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end, so you're fucked either way, at best your kids might benefit from your investment.

Housing got way more expensive since the 2000s, most people are priced out of buying a house, most can't even qualify for a mortgage to afford an average house.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/34534.jpeg

The average Joe, well, median Joe in that case, living alone in say France/Germany/UK can barely qualify for a 200k mortgage over 30 years, and that won't get you much unless you plan on living like a student your whole life

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> A landlord will happily swallow 50% of your income but a bank will start to feel bad about a ~30% debt to income ratio, so no you can't really.

It's almost as if the banks know they're very likely to lose money by approving loans people are statistically unlikely to be able to make 360 on-time payments for.

> Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end

100% true and stated this way makes it sound like it's the evil bankers, but really it's just the way math works.

> most people are priced out of buying a house

I don't think "most" is accurate here, especially if you include areas don't have insane NIMBY restrictions on building like SF and NYC.

This[0] shows there are absolutely places more affordable than others. My one complaint is that if everything gets more expensive the map doesn't really change so it could be better.

And I've heard the rebuttal before about "that's where the jobs are" (false) or "that's where I grew up." I get it, but living in high-demand places is not a constitutional right. Not having your own home in a major downtown metro is not a violation of your rights. If you can't afford to live somewhere, you should move. I'm in the 4th state I've lived in in my life right now. I might be here until I die, I might live in 4 more. Lots of things play into that but a major part of the calculus is whether or not I can afford to live the life I want here.

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-housing-affordab...

And with a few years of 10% inflation on the value of money etc... that 600 at x=30 was a bad deal

Compared to what?

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