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genericdude999 t1_j48zhqq wrote

I've stopped feeling sorry for people who get in debt over their heads, except student loans and medical debt.

The reason houses and cars are so expensive is because people are willing to borrow immense amounts beyond their means to have huge/luxurious instead of basic. Covenants ensure nobody builds a small house they can afford in that neighborhood. So a lot of people get locked into renting forever, and cars get more complicated and expensive every year.

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anonkitty2 t1_j49gexn wrote

Can you feel sorry for people who want to buy houses and cars they can afford but can't find any?

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ledow t1_j49pd43 wrote

>The reason houses and cars are so expensive is because people are willing to borrow immense amounts beyond their means to have huge/luxurious instead of basic

I think you haven't seen the basic housing costs of something very, very, very far from luxurious.

People want to enjoy their lives, not spend them in a cardboard box, a tiny single room, a single town, or even in a roomshare with others.

If you want to own a home, you need to get into debt. The biggest debt that you'll ever have, and a debt that virtually everyone in any developed country has had. It's that simple.

Cars... it's nothing to do with that. A cheap car is a cheap car and that's great if you're prepared to maintain it yourself, pay for continued maintenance, risk not being able to get to work, etc. etc. I spent my life with £200 cars. It's okay, you can get along, but it's a life full of shock expenses, having to cancel work occasionally (fortunately I had very understanding clients/employers), hassle, stress and trying to rapidly buy a replacement once something goes wrong.

I bought myself my first ever brand-new basic model car in my 40's. Yes, it was damn expensive. It was a pure luxury, that I expected not to ever have it pay back in value. But I haven't had to worry about tests, safety, extraneous costs, etc. for the last 7 years of owning it. It starts first time, every time, guaranteed. I don't have to worry about bits falling off or whether it's going to fail each year. I have had precisely ONE BULB blow on it, in terms of potential test failures. In those 7 years, I've spent less on my car than I have on cars previously. Hell, one car I owned ended up costing me more in oil than it had cost to buy!

And that's the most expensive way I could have bought a car, but it still ended up working out. When you're paying several thousand for a small second-hand hatchback, just enough to get to work, yes, some people are going to need a loan, finance, etc. to do that. That's MONTHS of earnings just to operate the basics and in many parts of the world, even in many parts of highly developed countries, that cost would be far more trying to arrange public transport etc.

I couldn't afford a season ticket into London each year on public transport, for example. It would cost more than my car has cost me over the last 7 years to do so. Employers in London often have to give employees a season ticket loan where they pay the bulk price of the annual ticket, and the employees pays it off each month from their salary. And, no, it's not always the case that just working in London (which is a HUGE CITY, not just a tiny high-earnings area) will earn you enough to compensate for that. If anything, I'm moving and working further and further away from London as my salary increases... because I can and because it's better value to do so!

The reason houses are so expensive is because in many countries government isn't building enough of them, and there will always be a constraint on how many you can build in a given area. There will even come a crunch point where you CAN'T BUILD ANY MORE to accommodate those who might want them safely.

The reason cars are so expensive is that cars are literally allowing you to do an incredibly dangerous activity safely and they allow you to greatly increase the range of everything from your shopping to your employment to your leisure activities. I know of families who couldn't operate without a car - they wouldn't be able to get their kids to school, they certainly wouldn't be able to take them swimming or to the theatre, they wouldn't even be able to get anything more than the most basic of groceries (nope... not even delivered!), and they would be unemployed or on pathetic wages working locally.

Almost every single person I know is in "debt over their heads"... because almost all of them have a huge multi-hundred-thousand £ mortgage that literally relies on them having to go to work every single month in order for them to sustain that. And that work, more often than not, requires a working vehicle for them to get to it, or huge expense on public transport.

The two things you cite as examples are the two unavoidable expenses in almost every working person's life.

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genericdude999 t1_j4am0r6 wrote

In the US house size has been growing for decades and houses are priced by the square foot. That's what I was referring to on growing house cost. If average people couldn't borrow enough to buy 2500+ sq ft houses they wouldn't sell, and post WWII size houses like my grandparents' would still be built today. For comparison I grew up in a 1400 sq ft house built in the 1960s and it was plenty for four people.

With cars, the gap between my parents' early sixties VW Beetle which they bought new when my father was a blue collar mill worker, is surprisingly small. Only about $2000 in 2023 dollars between that and a modern base level Kia or Hyundai. If you can believe the old ads, mileage is only about 4 mpg better today.

Before you say "yeah, but a 2023 compact is so much better!", it is, but imagine if you built a vintage car today with modern longer lasting materials and better tires and brakes and crash safety and a catalytic converter for emissions, how cheap it would be and little it would cost? As little electronics and power accessories as possible so you would get better reliability and cheaper repairs, and the mileage would still be about the same.

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