Our mortgage is $2600 month. My wife has a much better paying job than me. I make $2200 a month after taxes/deductions. She is currently going through cancer treatments and although everything is looking positive it really got me thinking about what the hell does life look like for my family if something happens to my wife?
I’ve had the same bus driving job for 23 years. I’m undereducated. A 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment is $1600 month here. I don’t know how I’d ever be able to take care of myself and two kids.
They want us to have 80k+ in school debt so you can be allowed to have mortgage debt or rent and own nothing. I don’t know where I’m going with this but I’m just bummed out about life right now.
That’s what life insurance polices are for. Will be pretty hard to get one with her cancer diagnosis though.
Are you not required to have a joint life assurance policy as a condition of a mortgage in the US?
lol no, the bank doesn’t care, they’ll just take your house if you can’t pay
You literally beat me to this reply by like 4 minutes haha. Banks were giving variable mortgages to people who could barely afford current rates, they don’t give a shit.
I would never ever take an adjustable rate mortgage. That is just begging to get fucked. Like right now for example. My mortgage is like 4.2% but if it were an adjustable id be at like 6+% and be out of a house.
Not anywhere that I’ve seen, just home owners insurance and mortgage insurance if you pay less than 20% down.
Nope, at least not for my mortgage. The only thing that was required was a home owners insurance policy.
Lmao, what? You really think that?
I bought last year and there was nothing in the process that wanted either of us to have life insurance.
In the US they want you to default. They can flip the house for more than you owe them.
Love how everyone in this subthread are sure they all live in the same country with the same rules and same banking system.
Globalization and capitalism babyy
Not a fan of the latter but that’s life ☹️
You need to move to someplace you can afford.
The OP is another example… You can live alone in many places, but they chose to live in an expensive area. You can’t complain about that and be taken seriously. I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.
This is such a bullshit take. I’m not even going to address why because you already know. Yes, I’m sure the place they’re talking about with $1600/month rent is fucking Beverly Hills, you jackass. Lmfao
I was just thinking this. I spend $1300 a month on rent and it’s so fuckin run down and dumpy. If Beverly hills only cost me $300 more a month, I’d find a way to pay the difference and make it work. But Beverly hills isn’t that cheap. Because everything, even garbage apartments, are stupid expensive now.
Dude, $5000+/month - 5 figures / month mortgage payments, easy in Beverley Hills.
Here in southern california, $1300 a month would get you…a bus ticket out of town.
Right
This was 3 years ago and it’s only gotten worse
OP’s Mortgage: $2600/month
You: “I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.”
Out of touch with reality? Check.
What really blows is when I bought my house 8 years ago, it was affordable. I now make almost 40% more and there is no way I could afford the same house. Mortgage, taxes and insurance (including flood insurance because the NFIP sucks) is less than $1,400. Once PMI is removed, it will be closer to 1,300, and once we finally remove flood insurance (because we are inland and the maps are outdated) it will be less than $1,100 a month.
I just don’t see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.
My daughter is only 13 but we’re already expecting she’s going to spend her 20s with us because of this.
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Even back at the end of 2019, we managed to find a house in a decent area that we could afford on my $60K/yr job. The mortgage was only $100 more a month than we were paying for a TINY “2” bedroom apartment. We managed to use our state’s first time homebuyer program to get a grant to pay to remove the PMI up front, which was a big help. I now make more money but I really think we couldn’t afford our house now (at least at the price online website estimate). It’s crazy and we never want to move if we can avoid it!
I have a “starter house” but in a very desirable town, it’s possible it might make someone more money to tear down and build a mcmansion. We will probably want to move, which is fine because bigger houses aren’t that much more expensive. Once the mcmansions hit the market during the lull, they never went away. It’s just no one is willing to pay 650k+ for them. So now they are in the 450k range, it has driven down the price of reasonably large and or older big farm style homes down. So now my 170k property is worth like almost 250k and the house that would have been 400k, is around 325 to 350. Those two events basically closed the gap significantly.
I just don’t see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.
It’s a strange market to be sure, but one way or another I think it’ll end. Either mortgage rates go way, way down, or prices, or both in the medium to long term.
Easy. We don’t.
A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude
They should absolutely move if the wife has cancer.
A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude
Umm…try looking up what $400,000 worth of debt will cost you monthly today (and what your existing equity plus debt and on-hand cash will even buy you in today’s market).
I wouldn’t move in this market at all if you can make your mortgage payments.
$400,000 will buy you a mansion where I live. My house is worth about half that, and it’s quite nice.
👏 👏
Just simply be like this random dude on the Internet…live in his neighborhood and emulate his daily commute…he’s the finest, most shining example.
Feeling down? Wife got cancer? Relocated from your entire friends, family, and your job? No worries, you’ll have SCB from the Internet to keep you company.
Or just move literally anywhere in the Midwest with the equity from your half-million dollar home, and buy one for 150k, and get your wife treatment.
You can’t possibly be this dumb, so I’m going to assume you had a bad day at work today. Hope it gets better.
Uselessly being a dick isn’t going to make it better. Call a friend.
Grow up bud. You’re not contributing anything meaningful to the conversation
Maybe in the boonies but my point is Beverly Hills is not a $2600/month zone and what OP is paying is not unusual.
Where should they move to that houses are less than half a million dollars these days, inner city Detroit?
Or, God forbid, outside of a major city.
My house is worth mid-200s (now, purchased for 140 about 8 years ago), in a very nice neighborhood. I have a pool, a literal white picket fence, and half an acre of property. My house is among the more expensive areas where I live.
There’s an entire fucking country away from the coast buddy. Check it out. Or don’t, and only move here when the breadwinner of your family has a potentially-fatal illness and you need to live somewhere less expensive that also has top-tier medical care nearby, which is what I suggested to OP.
There’s an entire fucking country away from the coast buddy. Check it out.
I drove across the entirety of it multiple times, most people fly over it for a reason.
most people fly over it for a reason
And thus property is cheaper.
I live in Indiana. Nice try though.
Cool. Here’s a 3 bed 4 bath, extremely nice house for 350, inside Indianapolis. It was literally the first listing on Zillow. Let me know if you want me to pull up something cheaper.
I live in Ohio. Our markets aren’t that different . Now imagine you didn’t live in the largest city in Indiana.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8024-Milender-Blvd-Indianapolis-IN-46237/308925348_zpid/
Last i checked my house is worth $176
Saw a video the other day, guy pointed at a complex and said rents were $900.
Oh, well… if he pointed at it…
A 2000 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath in a good neighborhood goes for about that where I live, which is known to be in the lower CoL part of the country. The reason shit is so fucked up is that our overlords at huge mutual funds like Blackrock have bought up all the houses so that they can rent them to serfs and collect perpetual income for almost no risk.
known to be in the lower CoL part of the country
Lol no it is not. I’m not sure why you’d want to pretend it is.
I actually live in a moderate CoL area and am a homeowner. I could sell my house right now and buy a house not 20 miles away for about half what my current house is worth, which is also not half a million fucking dollars.
Do you know how insane this sounds to someone from “flyover country?”
There’s an entire neighborhood going up near me in the 200s. Amazing school system, right outside the city, easy access to parks/lakes/what have you.
the reason is Blackrock
Lol no it is not. It is because we restrict what housing can be built where and thus have insufficient housing.
You are a shit human.
Says the shitbag
Everyone’s saying it!
Fuck You, and fuck that entire concept
No. No you can’t. There’s only a few bajillion articles since COVID about the unaffordability of housing in all 50 states.
It’s weird that I see houses for sale all over the US in literally every possible price bracket and you don’t.
I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.
I want to live in Atlantis, but I don’t own a submarine, it’s fictional, and the Atlantis council simply does not prioritize affordable housing,
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Lmao, my PITI is 3300/month and I live in a 1000sqft rambler that’s in ok shape in the first city that’s considered affordable outside of the Seattle region. All my job prospects are here or in similar markets, and rent for something comparable isn’t far behind what I’m paying (was paying $3k/month for a 2 bed apartment before buying last year) for my house.
Are there cheaper markets? Yea. Are there jobs for me in those markets? Lmao, no.
There’s a reason high paying jobs have to be high paying. It’s really tied to the local rent.
The only issue is a lot of those careers still put people through some underpaid grunt or trainee role before they can earn a living wage…
Not sure why everyone is downvoting you. Rural areas are significantly cheaper, assuming you can find a job there. I say this as someone who just built a house in rural Oregon 45 mins outside of PDX
Plus you can help do your part by turning their shitty little red county purple.
This is good option if you can work online. If everyone moves out from cities to countryside the market would stabilize or collapse, meanwhile the countryside would improve and have more amenities, that require more jobs there and other people can move in. It would be hard in the beginning…
PS: I imagine there are no such problems in the countryside yet
I personally just drive 25 minutes to work because I don’t have any skills that allow me to work from home.
I’m in exactly the same boat as you. Undereducated, lower paying job than my wife, mortgage, etc. I’ve frequently had panicked thoughts about what I would do if she died. And we have a kid, which makes it even worse.
I was never really scared of much until I had a kid.
Part of the reason my partner and I don’t want kids. It’s almost impossible to raise them alone and she has a preexisting condition that she wouldn’t want to pass on to them. If she passes away I could always just go live in my car by the beach and be fine. Wouldn’t be able to do that very well with a kid.
And then you get bankrupted by the excorbitant creative cloud license costs.
Do what you want cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate! 🎶🎵🎶
I remember the first time I ever saw that video was when I tried playing Enter the Gungeon. I didn’t even pirate it. I just screwed up when I was installing some mods lol
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Yar, har, fiddle-dee-dee
Being a pirate is all right with me
Unless you’re in Lemmy.world, then you won’t see
You are a pirate!
Yes
And this is why I switched away from .world
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you dont even need adobe, if the statements are in a web page just use inspect element. Then technically the screenshot would be real until you reloaded the page
Exact same.
Yup. Adobe may not be the ones causing the housing crisis, but all this nickel and diming from other sources is part of the problem too.
Hey Adobe, if you want people to stop pirating your shit go back to a pay-once model or lower your subscription costs. Then maybe use some of that money you’ve got to help us out over here so we can afford to pay you.
I get Adobe free through work! Ha-ha! *cries because the job is soul-crushing*
it is FUCKING INSANE that apartments get to ask for all sorts of invasive shit like this and that’s just fine. yeah god forbid you take on any risk, we’re only committing to fucking thousands a month, fuck you.
Nowadays too they often require renter’s insurance so they can get money from the insurance company if you leave too many peasant droppings on the floor during your stay.
Naw, tenants insurance is entirely reasonable in my book. That’s not meant for small things. That’s meant for huge disasters like if you cause a fire that burns down the entire building. The liability insurance is the only part they usually care about. Fortunately, it’s usually relatively cheap, too.
If you didn’t have insurance, they’d just need more insurance themselves and they’ll pass that buck on to you. At least with renters insurance, you can get some coverage for your personal belongings, too.
If you didn’t have insurance, they’d just need more insurance themselves and they’ll pass that buck on to you.
I honestly think they should be prevented from just transparently passing every single cost of ownership (as well as most of their responsibilities) onto renters, but I’m also American so I understand what you’re saying here.
I’ve got a friend who’s apartment got burned out due to a fire beneath them. She didn’t have renters insurance which has made the whole debacle an even bigger pain in the ass than it needed to be. If she’d had insurance her insurance company would have handled everything, instead she had to fight with the person who caused the fire’s insurance herself. She’s picked it up since then and is paying about $30/month.
Renters insurance is so damn cheap every renter should have it. And for a few extra dollars add on a personal articles policy so if shot gets stolen it’s covered. I had two $2k bikes stolen from an old apartment and insurance paid out full replacement value on them with no issue and I got a nice upgrade.
I don’t think so, when the water line broke in my apartment, my renters only covered my stuff. That’s what they have insurance for
Or burn your apartment down (Christmas lights, for example), which you would be on the hook for without insurance. It also covers your stuff if you get robbed. I personally think that it is indespensible.
Another thing they’ll do is say “oh no, you don’t need renters insurance, we provide you with renters insurance and build it into the price of rent.” And then you read through the lease to see what exactly their “insurance” covers and it’s basically nothing, so you have to get your own anyways, essentially paying for it twice.
Or if you flush a bag of concrete down the loo. People do that. People might be justified.
Truly insane. What’s next, your healthcare records?
Mandatory “use GIMP: is free and open source” comment
Just pirate Adobe and get the best of both worlds.
I justify the use of Adobe for professional use cases, like “I have to print a label with a specific set of colors and GIMP has bad CYMK support”.
If you have to put a signature where there isn’t one or stuff like that, GIMP is more than good for the job and in the meanwhile you’re helping a community project to grow.I’ll always choose the FOSS option first, but if you want something that does most of what the Adobe products do, has decent CMYK support, and doesn’t charge a subscription, the Affinity software suite (Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher) is pretty good value.
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The only problem with GIMP is that is comes with every sensible keyboard shortcut mapped to some random function you use once in a lifetime.
The other problem is that if it’s on your resume, I’m not hiring you.
Yeah it really sounds like i wouldn’t want to work for you.
BRB, putting GIMP my resume.
It’s not going to be on my resume. Because I know GIMP.
Can you give an example? The defaults seem perfectly sensible to me.
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They wanted to DNA test my dog and keep his biometric data on file as part of the terms of the last lease I was looking at.
I uhh, didn’t fucking sign. The neofeudalist movement is for real.
This so they can fine you when you leave your dog’s shit on the ground for other people to step in. I’m here for it. I lived in a place that did not enforce picking up after your animals and it was absolutely disgusting.
They don’t do that at all anyway, but hey at least the professional landlord class gets to inflict upon you one more indignity for some imagined benefit.
The park adjacent to those buildings has so much dog turd in it you’d think they were purposely producing low quality fertilizer over there.
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For the record I’m not actually pro “leave your dog shit everywhere” I just question both the imposition of the indignity of subjecting your tenants to pet DNA screening, and the effectiveness of it as a mechanism for preventing that.
I actually am pro throw unbagged dog shit in a bag-containing garbage can though, and don’t really understand why anyone would care about that.
I tend to see more of the leaving it on the ground, not even the throwing it in a can.
Edit: Alright, you guys are right, you need at least 2 layers of bags for dog shit. But then I guess triples might be safer, or even quads. Fuck it, every piece of dog shit must be wrapped in at least twenty layers of plastic before it hits the landfill! We need to preserve the remains of this dog shit forever!! It’ll be our mummies!!! Inject it with formaldehyde!!!
Guess your tenants don’t have a working dishwasher and a window that’s been broken since before they moved in that is totally gonna be fixed before they move in?
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Hate to break it to you dude
"We are the DNA dog waste management company offering a solution to pet pollution in 7,000+ communities across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. It isn’t just a problem in your community—it’s everywhere. "
And here I thought it was pretty common to have your children and pets DNA tested by your apartment manager. Hasn’t this always been the case?
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Yeah, they do that these days to identify who lets their dogs poop around the property and don’t pick it up.
Nobody’s DNA testing dog stool. They can’t be bothered to even do routine move out cleanings in those apartments. The whole thing is a giant farcical pretendy power game played out by managers far away designing a system for the benefit of their rentier owners to simultaneously rob renters of their last scraps of dignity and every remaining dime they have in the form of bullshit fees.
We are now servicing over 6,000 communities in six countries. We are currently receiving an average of 300+ pieces of poop a day.
I’m aware that the apartment people aren’t running the DNA database themselves. They have some weirdo company that does it. I’m also aware that that weirdo company (or companies) is capable of putting together a website.
I’m saying I live in the same neighborhood (I bought a place). Nobody is going through that park and picking up the dozens of available dog stool and sending it off to some lab to be tested. They just aren’t. The whole fucking thing is a wet dream had by some awful corporate bureaucrat that only succeeds in making renters lives a little more miserable and pads the pockets of some other random, doggy DNA database building weirdo somewhere else.
I’m going to briefly go on a related rant here that you can feel free to ignore.
rant
People in America have this perspective that if somehow you devise a theoretical solution to a problem (especially if it’s fancy and requires “tech” and “DNA” and labcoats) that you will magically have solved the problem. This isn’t actually the case, and it’s shown to not be the case over and over and over again in this country and everyone still seems purposely ignorant to that simple concept.
Things have unintended effects. Systems can have effectiveness issues. System costs (of all types, not just monetary) on all parties involved in the administration of those systems are often left unconsidered because it’s not part of the problem solver’s business model. Convoluted systems will not be fully understood by the agents who are supposed to implement them. Modern, technical solutions to problems are not magically better or more effective than the alternatives that are very often never even considered, simply because it wouldn’t give you a reason to strap on a lab coat, or start up a new SaSS company.
Why do you think that’s unique to AMERICA?
I dunno maybe it isn’t entirely but it’s a very pervasive attitude here.
Look at the COVID death numbers in the US versus some places that had the common sense to just use masks.
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You think they have a lab in the apartment complex and they’re doing the testing themselves? 😆
You’re saying the business that the other commenter provided a link to is a “conspiracy theory”?
Well I don’t know what to tell you. We had a guy two months ago who was arrested because his dog was pooping on the premises and he did not clean it up.
This is a half a billion dollar a year industry.
Arrested? Lol
In my area you can’t even get anyone to care at all.
Maybe if someone’s dog pooped directly in the property manager’s mouth… Otherwise, forget it.
That sounds a lot like no one.
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You caught me, I’m complaining about DNA testing of dogs because it’s actually me sneaking out at night and pooping (not even the dog, but me). I shit out there just for you, bud.
You don’t understand, PooPrints has got your number. They ship dog poop around SIX countries, didn’t you read the site!?
It’s frustrating out there, but keep up the critical thinking fight. The ones you reach usually won’t be ones replying.
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Or…They threaten to do this and just keep your $600
It’s really the threat that motivates people, and it’s the free $600 non-refundable deposit that motivates the landlords.
You don’t even need photoshop. Just use the inspect function in your browser and edit the values directly in the HTML. Free and much easier to not fuck up the formatting.
Works if your statements are in a web format. But most of this stuff is a PDF you download.
Surprisingly enough PDF is a (mostly) plain-text format, so you can probably still change the values in Notepad, unless they just did the whole thing as an embedded image or whatever
Edit the contents with the embedded font
krita or gimp are also free
Shoutout to krita
You don’t need adobe.
F12, and modify the html.
Slap a few extra zeroes and take a screenshot.
Didn’t work. It made my bank balance 00000 instead of 0.
Try 9s instead
Done. Now I can show them $-99917000
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But if I had a gimp, I wouldn’t be alone. 🤔
Nonono, you have to get adobe. You want a home, you have to build it yourself! With your bare hands!
Or Abode.
Nah, no need for Adobe. Just use https://photopea.com
For whatever reason the nested comments aren’t loading but I’d think twice about uploading my bank statements or anything personal to an online photo editor.
GIMP is a good free offline alternative
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People downvoted you because your sarcasm is too subtle
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Photoshop is an Adobe product. They never said anything about Acrobat.
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Updoot for FOSS (and high seas)
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I “forged” documents with gimp once — needed to print out and sign something for a wire transfer when I was abroad. I pasted in my signature and sent it back, but they said it needed to be print out, scanned, and sent back. So I opened it in gimp, added noise and rotated it by a degree or so to look like it was scanned — and they accepted it, no questions asked. So…I forged my own documents.
Banking in the US is sometimes a bit humorous. (Meanwhile, in the country I was staying, at the end of the night someone picked up the tab, wrote down their bank account number, and said “transfer me $XYZ thanks” — was pretty great.)
Ok I woke up the gimp, now what?
krita
Renting is fucked. Some people probably know about this site but just fyi https://ratethelandlord.org/
Lol that place is something else
“Written Review WORST FUCKER AND PROPERTY MANAGER IN NW CALGARY. SHE IS A WHORE AND ASSHOLE LADY WHO FUCKS TANANT’S SOUL”
… 4 stars.
Nah that’s just your average landlord
I am willing to take her word over the landlord’s.
It’s land ownership laws that’re fucked. Here’s the original game of Monopoly before it was stolen by a capitalist- The Landlord Game, a teaching aid for workers to understand why land owners are the problem. It’s a pretty old problem.
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/lg-1903_arden-board.jpg
The absolute necessity squares are too real. Land ownership is evil.
Lol @ “goat alley”
No one going to bring up the fact that adobe is an anagram of abode?
They got their abode with adobe! This is no coincidence! I’m inclined to say this goes all the way to the top!
I recently read about an Adobe alternative called abode
correction, and steal Adobe.
Some armchair rental lawyers in this thread.
You do have to be a lawyer to afford a chair with arms these days.
Hang on there scrooge mcduck we don’t even have chairs now
- Sent from my Orange Crate
Orange crate?! Luxury! I’ve just got a hole in the dirt to sit in!
fraud is pretty rad 😎
It’s a rental from a landlord who wants your private info. Fuck em.
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My finances are my problem. All a landlord needs to know is that I am willing to pay what they are asking. It is my problem to actually pay the money. There are lifestyles in which you don’t have the ability to show someone a pay stub, and can still pay rent on time every month.
That is why things like credit checks exist. It’s a way to verify that a person has kept their finances in order and are responsible enough to pay their bills on time.
That info isn’t private if you’re trying to rent somewhere. Proving your ability to pay is pretty fuckin baseline man
And yes this is a fraudulent claim, and if caught can have severe consequences, as it’s perjury and can also result in immediate eviction.
This is not a viable option that should be taken seriously. This is a joke on Twitter.
Many places have laws to protect tenants from shit like that. Where I am, it’s illegal for a landlord to ask for your salary, for example.
You know what place doesn’t? A place where your landlord requests your salary documentation.
If that doesn’t happen where you live, then this warning is meaningless to you. If it does, it’s an appropriate thing to warn people about given the enthusiasm surrounding this post.
Everyone’s doing it. Our ex president apparently regularly inflated his net worth by up to 2.2 billion.
What’s good enough for the aristocracy is good enough for the proletariat.
I hear cake is good.
The uber rich are frauding our entire nation so it evens out
