We shouldn't have to go to college in order to afford a house by 30.
We shouldn't have to go to college in order to afford a house by 30.
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Op thinks we can afford a house by 30 if we go to college.
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36 and counting…
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42 and counting… I actually have some small hope of trying to buy a house next year though. Not in my home of America though, it’ll be as an expat, and contingent on a foreign bank extending me credit. Not a sure thing at all, but… I’m hoping? There might actually be a path forward? Maybe?
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I think the non-college route yielded better than college for my age cohort. First dude I knew who bought a house was like 19 and he’d been working at Costco for 4+ years. 2008 happened and suddenly this young man had a stable job and savings and looked great on paper 🥲
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People I know with most real estate are 2 kinds.
- inherited everything.
- stayed in hotel Mama for free for years while not studying, but working as plumber/contractors/mechanic etc starting age 18-19. By the time they moved out age 26-30 they were already loaded, renting out multiple apartments.
Both required parents, either they had to be wealthy and die early or decided to gift capital early; or to be super supportive, fun (tolerable) enough to keep living with after 18 and not asking you to pay rent.
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I went to college, I'm way over 30. Buying a house is a vague dream.
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I got lucky and bought a house in 2015 at 28, I barely pulled it off with roommates, barely pulling it off now with a fiancé. There's no way I could buy a house now. I'm not even sure we could upgrade if we needed to.
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something similar happened to my recently moved in neighbor, he thought it was because he had achild, no your PARENTS chipped for the house and renovations, you arnt paying for that almost 1.5-2mil hours on your own.
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I'm 43 and only now buying a house. And that's because I don't have loans (not american)
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What makes you think people with degrees can afford a house by 30?
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I think people with degrees are less likely to own a house by the age of 30, because they studied longer and have to pay off debt first. The only reason i own a house is because i found one for super cheap and renovated it myself.
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I usually hear people say US wages are great, and yet we managed to buy a house in our 20s when I was on near UK minimum wage. That was a couple of years ago as I am not in my 20s anymore. But I can still save up hundreds a month without even trying very hard.
No degree, no driving licence. The internet gave me the impression it wasn't this easy. I would acknowledge only having unstable work at best must suck a lot more though.
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And especially after goibg to an US college.
All I heard so far, you will be even further away from reaching the house goal.
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It took an MS for me, a BS for my partner, choosing to not adopt children, five years of saving, a minor inheritance from an unexpected death, and the housing market cratering due to the pandemic for us to be able to afford a house that we absolutely could not afford now without making 150% of our current income.
All it took was accruing nearly $100k in combined school loan debt, plus over three times that much in mortgage debt. That's freedom debt! Murica!
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or the job field is soo dismal , catch 22.
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You kidding me dude? I'm past 40 and not chance to own a house. Grad and masters degree, working in IT. Ah and uni was good and free. granted that was in the developing world, now living in 1st world, but still no house.
When I was 7 my parents owned a house AND bought a beach house.
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what happened to all the money your parents had from those houses?
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You don't need to. All you really need is to go for a walk in your desired neighbourhood, find a house you love, knock on the door and introduce yourself. Ask any questions you have about the property, then kill the occupants, flay them and wear their skin as your own as you lead your new charmed life, for as long as you can.
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Exactly! Learn a good profession like electrician, woodworker, furniture making… any kind of profession where you can create beautiful products and services customers love.
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When we're at school the teachers never actually take the time to talk about:
- what non-university educated careers
- what they involve
- how to pursue trades based jobs
And it's weird, because I'm sure everyone would love to at least dabble in woodworking or some other form of craftsmanship. But they don't get the chance to.
The school-university pipeline works for a lot of people, but I don't think uni straight after school is the ideal situation for most people. It means we lose sight of what education is actually for, outside of progression to further qualifications
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Home economics and shop class used to be pretty common, but most folks don't take them anymore either because they aren't offered or students aren't aware they exist.
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The trade-off is that finding a job that doesn't require the large debt that comes with college means the job might not pay enough for a house, or if it does, its the kind of job where you don't get much time to actually spend at said house.
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They didn't say "find a job", they said "learn a profession" it's a different thing. It's learning a skilled trade. You have to learn a trade first, then you can find the high paying job. Your early 20s will be relatively low paying, but by the time you are 30, you should have multiple years of being a journeyman under your belt and should be making good money.
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A good tradesman can make a very good living. I know a builder who paid his mortgage off in his early 30's.
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38 with a masters degree. No house in sight. Good luck. Remember, there is always [redacted].
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Squatters rights?
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I got an MS in a STEM field and wasn't able to buy a house until I was 36, supervising multiple employees, and married to someone who also contributed.
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you're lucky, what major was it, i had a friend who got the MS version of BS degree, no job, but she had a partner so shes pretty much fine, since she already gave up searching for a job like less than 6 months.
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You don't. None of my highly educated friends own a house while the ones working in trades do.
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Where they give you houses for going to college? Did I missed a promotion?
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if you a rich person yea, you can guaranteed to have a house because your parents are paying.
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if you go to college you can't even afford to pay for it by 30.
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You shouldn't have to work to be able to live, period.
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The right to live with dignity should not be dependent on productivity.
Anyone working full time should always be able to easily provide for themselves and a "reasonable size" family.
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four people disagreeing because they think if people's self-worth is not tied to their productivity, then all the lazy foreigners are gonna come in and take our spot. only our heroic (self-sacrificing) eternal push to increase our bosses' pockets are enough of an excuse to consume oxygen and continue to eat (massive /s)
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I mean, someone has to work. How do you choose who the unlucky bastards are that get sent to the field to grow food for the people who don't have to work?
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How do you choose who the unlucky bastards are that get sent to the field to grow food for the people who don’t have to work?
Preferably, they'd be people without disabilities that prevent them from doing that kind of work. OP didn't say, "Nobody should work," just that being able to live shouldn't be dependent on working.
For millions of people with disabilities, the difference between those two ideas is life-changing. It's important not to conflate them.
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Since you said "house" I'm going to push back a little bit. Housing is unaffordable and we should address it but single-family homes are not a feasible solution for a lot of places and situations.
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The only people I know with houses are the ones with rich parents and it doesn’t matter if they went to college or not.
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you used to be able to afford a house on a single minimum wage job
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maybe 60 years ago.
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What people often glance over is that housing was heavily subsidized after WWII
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What people often glance over is that housing was heavily subsidized after WWII
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Im glad i bought my home 20 years ago..... no way i could afford a 3-2 at todays going rate.
I blame all the house flipping shows. Made everyone think they could buy a house, paint it, then resell for 100k more.
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Shit, I'd agree if companies like Blackrock didn't exist.
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You touched on a core part of the issue, which is seeing housing/real estate as an investment which has driven up costs significantly while encouraging owners to be against new construction.
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i think new buyers get low interest loans or something, they use it to flip the house.
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I think this post should be home that you own. I'm going to say something controversial in that, in the US, I actually think houses should be expensive. I think a single family dwelling >1500sqft on a half acre or more of land is a luxury, and most people don't need to have that much land and space all to themselves. The problem is that that's ALL that's available for most regions in the US. The US is suffering from foolish post-war suburban centric zoning codes that prohibit building medium density housing ("the missing middle"). We need to change zoning codes across the country to encourage building up "gentle density" and mixed use areas, even in rural regions, because they use land and infrastructure much more effectively and efficiently. They raise more revenue for towns while bringing down home prices. If everyone had the option to buy a place of their own <1000sqft with a small land footprint, I don't think there would be as much dissatisfaction with not being able to afford a "house".
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I totally would love a tiny house. Hell, land is still affordable where I live and it’s still feasible to put a trailer on it and chill.
I wouldn’t mind permanent apartment living either if they built the buildings better. I don’t want to fall victim to a neighbor who doesn’t take care of their home; basically if they have rats or make noise, I don’t want the rats nor do I want to hear the neighbor. It’s just too much to deal with the older I get.
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There was once a time when people educated themselves not because they wanted a particular job in the economy, but because they saw value in education and wanted to participate in the human tradition of advancing the specie’s ability to understand and use nature. You didn’t need school to be a blacksmith, for example, but perhaps just an apprenticeship (experience).
There’s a point to be made here, about how this degrades the value of education. It’s great for capitalism, making survival—or “living well”—contingent on qualifications derived from paid education. But what have we lost in this process? It feels, to me at least, like we’ve created a culture where education is a mere lineitem on a checklist. How might that change what education is, what it’s expected to be, and what sort of innovation comes from it?
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I'm over 40 and could only buy a house somewhere in nowhere land with massive commute needs.
It's not feasible and I earn way over average salary.
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What is "way over average"?
i know people in their late 20s that are buying houses on salties of like 80k-120k. I make like 45ish on average, but people my age are buying houses
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I make 150K and to buy an affordable home that isn't a teardown, say under 600K, you need a two hour commute from the downtown area. Anything inside an hour of the downtown is more like 800K+ and being bought up by people with family money or 300-400K yearly incomes. someone making 45K in my city needs to live multiple people to a bedroom to afford rent.
But it's all about where you live and the incomes. Where I live 150K income puts you only in the top 20% of households. And I don't have family money backing me like most of my peers in the housing market. Most of my friends got 100-200K gifts from family to buy their homes.
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53% above average of my country.
Buying a house without signing up for a lifetime crippling dept is plain impossible in large cities.
To get into a cost range where my wife (same salary) and I feel comfortable to take on a loan requires us to move roughly one or two hours train travel out into the countryside.
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Depending on the field, going to college might not significantly improve your chances.
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Who pays off a house by the time they are 30?
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People who have inherited wealth, won the lottery, or made a tremendously good stock investments.
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Should go to trade school instead.
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And build your own shelter with the results.
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We should go to college for free if we choose to and also be able to afford a house regardless of our employment type I agree.
Reasons for going to college....
Our president sucks balls in every way possible and you would like to be president and do good via the knowledge gained.
You would like to design spacecraft.
You would like to give others brain surgeries with successful outcomes.
Your bus in never on time and you would like to fix that or have a say in the reasons why a bus might be late.
You like cheese and would like to discover new types of cheese via biology and chemistry. Oh shit, you accidentally invented antigravity, there goes your cheese.
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You dont have to go to college to afford a house by 30.
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Land owning isn't meant to be for serfs lol.
I had a friend from Germany who mentioned once that owning property there is very rare for most people unless they're from very old conservative generational wealth. He said that houses and property often end up passed down in the same families over and over. He was well educated and happy with his career, but he never had any kind of expectation he would get to own property at some point in his life.
Not sure where you're from, but it kind of feels like the U.S. is becoming more and more like that. Except, we also don't get healthcare, and to even get the privilege of an education people are increasingly having to take on a level of debt that one would expect to take on as an investment in property even though there is no guarantee your investment will pay off. It's concerning though, that when this is pointed out to people, it's often cited as a reason you just shouldn't bother with college.
Owning private property is becoming more and more a privilege reserved for only the elite, not an expectation or "entitlement." Ok, well that kind of sucks, but I guess you don't have to own property to have a decent life.
But, then it's clear we're supposed to accept that healthcare is somehow also becoming a privilege reserved for the elite and not an expectation or "entitlement?"
And, we're hearing conservatives, often from backgrounds of generational wealth, talk more and more about abolishing the department of education. So, that means that soon we could be expected to view education of any kind (not just college) as something we're not "entitled" to.
It's also clear that many of the people creating these policies, and encouraging other people not to waste their time on worthless college degrees, were born into lives where our "entitlements" are simply their default expectations.
However, when they address their voters, it's always the "entitled" and the "educated elites," who are somehow responsible for their hardships, the overall decline in their quality of life, and the lack of opportunities and resources that have gradually become the default expectation for most Americans.
The "entitled" takers who want to be handed what can only be obtained through hard work and sacrifice that will pay off as long as you really try. And if it doesn't, you shouldn't start asking questions of "why," like those educated elites, you should just accept that you must have done something, that those who have what you don't, would have done differently, in order to rise to the top.
I'm smart enough to know that the reason I don't own property and probably never will, isn't because I haven't tightened my belt enough, or pulled myself up by my bootstraps, or because of my worthless college degree that has brainwashed me into believing I'm entitled to something I'm not.
Neither of my parents went to college, yet they were always told the same bullshit when they asked too many questions about why the game always felt so rigged no matter how hard you tried.
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I didn't go to college and I bought a house at 30
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Yeah.
Honestly, I'm just avoiding having kids and hope we don't start killing each other for food and water by the time I die.
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This is why we need tiny houses, trailer homes, etc! We also need to get rid of these real estate corporations that are manipulating the prices of everything we need to live with, especially housing!!! :-(
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trailer homes and tiny houses?? just build aparments. It is not that hard wtf
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going to college isnt a guaranteed anymore, at least not in the last 10years. unless your in tech,starting at 22yo yea you would be able to, but only if you did in the last 10years. maybe engineering, other stems not so much, let alone a job in that field entry level. most universities have very little resources devoted to lab work which are usually exclusively limited to specific PI of those schools, and they have thier own requirements. gatekeeped jobs for many stem fields, higher degree requirement despite what the job listing says, and the same goes for experience, honestly its mostly nepo hiring for half of the jobs anyways. Maybe NURSING, especially if you are going as a travllening nursing. MS/PHD puts you into too much financial hole. MD/LAWYer, well off people can afford it , because thier parents are usally well off to do it. hence why alot of mds and lawyers are often coming from wealthy families.
as most lower tier schools either dont spend resources or dont have any dedicated to developing peoples career track in the form lab/volunteer work.
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we shouldnt have to afford a house
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Let's all spend time learning about construction and planning and build our own housing!
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you guys are getting houses?
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Nah, I'm getting mad.
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At least 3 years of only saving my pay to afford a shack. Still better than what Americans get.
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Only good way to get a house by age 30 is to become a plumber, electrician or other type of job that pays well with minimal study and save up while living at parents or sharing a flat with 3 mates.
Then you need to save heavily and invest in stocks and/or bonds with the saved money so you can beat inflation. With around 30k saved per year it's possible to get pretty early onto the property ladder.
Going to college and living somewhere in NYC for example will get you nowhere close to 30k a year with student debt and if you have a kid you're screwed.
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I had a house before 30. It was okay I guess. Sold due to divorce, now I rent again. I'd love to own another house but not the glorified trailer I had before
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This is a needless concern. You don't have to worry about affording a house by 30 by going to college.
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26 Down votes? Who downvotes something like this?
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Well the good news is banks really don't give a shit and they make it pretty trivial to get yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt whether you have a degree or not.
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The necessity of college more indicates that our public education system doesn’t go far enough. High school should go up to the bachelor level and masters/Phd programs should be extended. There just isn’t enough time to catch up to the latest science. Our knowledge is expanding after all.
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High school should go up to the bachelor level
The reason college/university exist is to allow people to chose what to learn specifically. There is no way to extend highschool to a bachelor level, since there are so god damn many different bachelors. It is not realistic to extend highschool so much, that you can teach people a bachelor degree in, as example, physics or engineering.
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It's pretty much only a problem in the US.
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No…. It’s substantially worse in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, umm I’m sure more but I read about theirs most.
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No it's not. In France it's just as much of a problem if you live in one of the big cities.
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Everyone should have to go to college. We have an epidemic of stupidity.
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Going to college can inform, but doesn't cure innate stupidity. And if the student is particularly willful, they can hold onto their ignorance as well.
Case in point: Trump.
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Everyone should have access to a free college education, but not everyone benefits from it and it certainly does not guarantee intelligence.
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it would be better to add elementary logic as a requirement to graduate high school. I would also add a class where you have to read and present a paper in stem and political science and philosophy.
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why do you think that would do anything?
i litereally taught those subjects for 3-4 years. Trust me. for most students its just another stupid class they don't want to take, they won't learn anything. maybe 10% of those enrolled will actually learn anything.
I mean, how many people do you know as adults that remember how to do do an integral even those they took Calculus?
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You are right, all the comments replying to you are making vacuous individualist arguments like 'it won't work every single time', when what's important is that 'on average, it will raise intelligence and the ability to critically evaluate situations'.
The internet loves to just regurgitate what they heard before and only deal in absolutes, so right now it's that they would have made more money in the trades, so suddenly college and higher education is meaningless and provided no value to them. It's honestly embarassing how much they're just buying into right wing propaganda.
A more educated population is a more empowered population, and there's absolutely no reason that everyone shouldn't do some form of post secondary education, whether it's university, college, or a trades program that includes college level courses. You're not going to be able to understand how the world actually works or get a sense of the depth of knowledge in each field by just dropping out of high school and stopping thinking hard.
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the easiest way to make big money in any area.... is have family/connections in that area.
most very successful people I've ever met... were simply riding the coattails of their family/parents. no matter what it is. if you want to be an engineer and your dad is already an engineer you have a huge leg up in engineering.
but nobody wants acknowledge this, esp in USA because we have this stupid myth of meritocracy. where you magially can do whatever you want and be really good at it. truth is very few people have that privileged. Most follow in the footsteps of their families.
because just like generational wealth, generational jobs skills/knowledge... compounds. your dad's 30 years of experience in engineering if you want to be an engineer, is basically gives you a huge experience boost.
Everyone should have access to a free college education, but not everyone benefits from it and it certainly does not guarantee intelligence.
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Going to college doesnt allow you to buy a house at 30 either lol
I majored in buying houses
thats usually called flipping houses, or you are well off enough to buy and rent out houses or apartments.
NOT IF YOU DRINK THE STARBUCKS EVERY DAY.
I found a blurb that Americans spend an average of $22/week at coffee shops. That's nearly $1200 per year!
With a median US home price of $410,000 and a minimum FHA loan down payment of 3.5%, all you need to do it save that for twelve years and never have anything go seriously wrong in the meantime. Then you too can pay about $3300 per month for 30 years, ultimately spending nearly $900,000 for your $410,000 loan.
I CAN LIVE WITH THAT AS LONG AS YOU I CAN STILL HAVE MY AVOCADO TOAST.
Rather, it puts you in debt. And now you have even less power. We should normalize everyone being able to live and not force college on everyone. But also make it free/super cheap so people can attend if they want without having to suffer financially
It did the opposite for me!