Lack of trade up homes for sale (New York, Great Neck: to rent, school)
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^ even with little savings after 3 years (age 24) you can surely come up with 20k down between 2 people? How's $1500/mo. per person (includes $10k taxes) sound to you? Is that so impossible? You pull in ~$3k net a month if you make $50k. How is this "very very hard"? I'm not saying everyone is making 50k, but many do and this is a feasible scenario that's not "very very hard".
Wow...Your type of math is why so many people are in foreclosure today.
If you saved 70K+ for a down payment in 2 years, just out of school then great. How did you pay your student loans and car payments, insurance, etc? Maybe I did it wrong, b/c it took me about 7-8 years. But yet again I had no family support.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twingles
Decades? I don't think so. We saved a down payment in 2 years of renting. We lived off one salary, and we were making an average salary for Long Island.
The problem always comes back to the taxes. Even if you can get a house in the $300Ks, your taxes are going to be high and you know they will always be going higher...every single year. There's no relief from that and people have to take that into consideration.
50k isn't set in stone and neither are: "cars, computers, cable, internet, professional obligations (suits, meetings, classes, expenses), vacation, or any sort of going out." Nobody said it was desirable to live like this but if you want to, many make worse sacrifices (my classmate buying a Plainview house right out of college for instance). All I said at the beginning was high 300s isn't out of reach. The numbers show that.
Maybe the high 300s isn't out of reach but even at my present earnings I consider it a hulluva lot of money. Don't buy what you can reach but buy what you can realistically afford. We never sacrificed our life to buy as much house that was in reach.
Being in the work force several years from college, I bought a nice 4bed side split in Holtsville / Sachem schools with a nice yard for 140k in 1995... I was making enough money commuting into the city to afford the nut pretty easily. I don't honestly remember what the taxes were back then and not certain what they are today... But the same exact house according to Trulia sold for 440k in 2008. My mistake was issues forced me to sell in 1998 for 169k. Considering I accepted asking price the day it went on the market, I knew A) I could have gotten more and B) things seemed way too easy to sell.
I know what I made back then and I know what I was making in 2008 (still living on LI)... If I wasn't forced to sell in 1998 and gone through a rough patch in life where I didn't buy again until many years later (and paid super sucker prices), I'd be singing a much different tune right now. I still feel the burn all these years later.
Keep in mind this is middle of the road Suffolk county I'm talking about... 10+ years of wear and tear later on these homes and I feel 300s is still way out of whack for that neighborhood. Yet they're still asking and getting it in some cases. I struggle to find the logic where it makes sense for a young couple (like I was in 1995) to ploy down 70k and carry 300k or so of paper AND the taxes. It defies all levels of common sense to me.
Check out this great house in Stony Brook that was just listed today!
2312227
I think we should have a CD pool on this one to see how long it languishes for and how low they sellers go.
They are totally tripping!
For $889K & 14.7K taxes, one could have a completely redone 5BR 4 BA house in Old Field not far from the point. mls 2312293
I looked at this house as a fixer-upper and considered the flip, but the owners were asking 799K then and weren't budging. Whoever did the flip has sat on this house for over a year and at this point has probably lost money.
In terms of location it's great. The yard is an odd narrow pie shaped 1.45 acres, and the house sits back enough on the lot as not to be on the road. The master bedroom/walk out deck is all new -- that did not exist when I looked at the house.
I still think for every person that realizes that LI property is overpriced, overtaxed, and to the point of not worth it there is some uneducated schlub who'll totally buy into the hype. They probably also own an iPhone and a Prius.
Hey, we own a Prius, 2 non-Ipod smartphones, and we're not buying the hype. We are however both pretty good with math, and it's pretty obvious when you compare median household income to median house prices, something does not add up.
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