Hacker News Reader

Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.

>plant to do a Skip gen trip?

I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there. Thats how you can tell what social class you were born into.

I had a school friend whom's grandparents were one of these in the list it seems. The bought him a 3bed/bath house in the suburbs. He proceeded to do coke for the next 10 years and be a burnout,.but all good because he still has a nice house to live in while being a detriment to society. Yeah I'm bitter so what?

View on HN

> >plant to do a Skip gen trip?

> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there

It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:

> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.

I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.

One reason is older homes need repairs. Furnaces, roofs, windows, etc. What to do when faced with $20k in repairs? Borrow it.

My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.

A lot of households have done something similar.

Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.

> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere

And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338105/volcker-shock-in...

Maybe they all got houses when the monthly payments were affordable.

My in-laws never had the money to save for retirement, so they got suckered into a reverse mortgage in Florida. They saw it as a way to have some spending money in their old age, but now that they've spent it and they're upside down it's a prison. They want to move to another area, closer to family, but they have no equity, and so no means to get a new place.

I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.

> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?

If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.

Yes as long as you actually invest the money you would otherwise be using to pay down the mortgage into something that has a higher return than the mortgage is costing you. This isn't difficult to do, but a lot of people don't do that, they just spend the money.

You said it most live the life of Riley and that’s fine if you have wealthy parents to cover for you most do not. Another area where people squander their money is dipping into their 401(k) over the years.

>What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.

These are the same people who sold the industrial economy to east asia because pollution, as if we don't all share the same space rock. Inability to think long term or several steps ahead is kind of their thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com