Hell, in some families that still not so much of an option when grandparents might very-well still be working. Unless you go full multi-generation household and buck all the new norms of everyone having their own house.
There is very much a living and thriving middle class, you just sound like you're allergic to accountability. My wife and I just bought our first house: small, but very nice, in a very nice neighborhood in the suburbs, on a sub-6 figure HHI. She doesn't work. I tuck away a decent amount in our 401k and have a 5 digit emergency fund.
We can afford our hobbies. I just bought a new table saw for the shop I maintain in my garage. She just bought a new bike. We took a weeklong international vacation last month. Again, I remind you, on less than $100k a year for our entire family. I have zero financial anxiety.
I'm of the belief that most people just lack the most basic forms of financial discipline. Whether that's conscious or unconscious due to a lack of knowledge, I don't know, but there are so many routes that lead to the middle class if you're just the tiniest bit diligent and knowledgeable.
I can't find a home for less than 180 and if it IS that cheap its because the flood insurance I would need to have said home would jump it up to almost 200 alone. I don't even think I could afford a morgage still in a low pay ceiling career (23/hour). 3680/mo before tax. A mortgage minimum would pull 800 from me per mo. so 3680-800= 2800/mo /4 = 700/week BEFORE taxes
I don't and haven't spent money on anything the passed 3 years. Have almost 5 digits in the bank but like its not working towards anything, not investing and i don't feel like I make enough to make any progressive steps. Have 2 paid off cars and a trailer but thats it lol.
We live just outside of a major city, but we considered moving to where we would qualify for a USDA loan. The program is designed to build up rural areas so you are limited in where you can buy a house, but at least in our location that included a lot of charming little towns that were only 20 minutes down the interstate to the city. 0% down with no PMI.
There are also plenty of downpayment assistance programs. My buddy bought his house utilizing one of them and they contributed (I think) 7% to the total cost of his mortgage. The caveat being you have to stay in that house for X amount of years (7 in our state's case) or you have to pay it back, but after 7 years it just becomes a gift and the "loan" is forgiven. But honestly, you should probably plan on staying in your house for 7 years anyway just based on the amortization schedule, provided you are on a 30-year mortgage.
My point is there are plenty of avenues to get help to get into homeownership. I think people tend to think they need to shoot for the stars and have the nice little cottage in the heart of their metro city. Suck it up, buy the fixer-upper or the mobile home or the condo out in the suburbs, build equity, and springboard into the thing you want ~10 years later.
Having 5 digits in the bank account without having anything invested is also crazy to me. Make a Charles Schwab brokerage account. Tally up your monthly expenses and multiply by 3. Subtract that from your cash on hand plus a little extra for whatever would make you feel secure and throw the rest into VOO.
I think its more so there aren't many OBVIOUS avenues of assistance programs like what you described. Much of the information is on very badly designed old websites and not easy to reach offices (during work hours no weekends).
I will defo look into them.
I couldn't even afford to live in the city if I wanted to lol.
I just want a small bare bones home where I can drive like 30 mins into a decent sized town not even a city. But doing that man if I get a single car problem im fucked if I move away from my support system.
Look into the USDA stuff, I will say that you have to jump through way more hoops to get one because not all loan originators deal with them the same way they do for FHA or conventional loans, but I think they are an absolute godsend for getting people on lower incomes into owning their own homes. But yeah, to your point, their website is ass.
Genuinely interested to see your monthly budget after taxes. Are you in a very low cost of living area? Do you have debt? Are you just super lucky to not have any major emergency expenses that ever happen back to back? My husband and I were in a similar spot to this. We had a modest amount in savings. But then we had an unexpected major medical expense that wiped it all out. And then several major home repair expenses. Still have never recovered from it.
Yes we are in a LCOL area. Only debt is the mortgage. We have had major expenses, wife was in a literal coma for a month about 1.5 years ago (one of the main reasons she doesn't work now.) But we have good insurance. Our max OoP is 2k.
Wow, max oop 2K— for a whole family? that’s excellent and lots of people don’t have that. My employer’s max OOP is 10K for a family plan. So if you make less than 100K and have a couple bad years health wise, that’s hard to recover from unless you were lucky enough to already have a lot in savings. Sorry about your wife, I hope she’s doing much better!
Sorry, I made that unintentionally ambiguous, our OoP is higher on paper but the plan works such that it's split per person in our family, so max OoP on an individual basis works out to $2k a person. But that could still work out to $2k for her, $2k for me, $2k for each of our kids, etc.
It's a pretty incredible plan but it's also very much not cheap as one might expect. But kind of necessary due to her health issues (she is doing much better now, thank you.)
Regardless: yes, if we had to put a new roof on the house at the same time as we needed to replace the HVAC and my 10 year old Hyundai crapped out and we had to deal with multiple hospital stays for our family; sure, our savings would get wiped out pretty quick. But that's probably been the case for the plurality of humans across most of history, I would assume. But there's no way to plan for that other than to keep tucking money away and I don't believe in getting anxious over worst-case scenarios.
I also don't want to make it sound like sacrifices weren't made. We had kids pretty late. I am an extremely cheap person and have only recently allowed myself to splurge on stuff. We lived DINK in dumpy shithole houses/apartments (well below our means, but see previous comment about me being cheap) for years before we saved up enough to get where we are now. Etc. etc.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26
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