I'm in a similar boat. -$800 in my checking and about ~$1000 left on my CC. Also from Canada. Morgage payment coming up in 5 days will put me in the negative, and another one in January as well. Should not have bought a house. I'm basically screwed, but I figure the wheels of the system or whatever will move slower than me finding work.
A little bit. It was a great idea at the time when I had work. It's been listed for sale for 2 months now which is to be expected with the rate frenzy.
similar boat 7 years ago. Luckily, I found a data science job that barely covered by rent and family expenses for 12hrs a day. In addition I had to freelance for a 2 to 3 hours everyday to make ends meet - basically sleep, work, repeat - rough patch - you will get through it. Hold tight, wishing you good luck!
Damn, brother. But if anyone can pull a rabbit out this hat, it’s you. Your main problem will be getting your giant brain through the door for a job interview.
If they have $1k left in available credit, and they were making tech wages, that means on just that one credit card they are probably $9k to $24k at least in the negative already. The $1k of remaining available credit is not yet debt, but the negative bank balance is.
It is also likely they have more than one credit card, and maybe also some student loans.
As a european, I also didn't realize what CC stood for and was tripped up by the math same as the person you're replying to. Not everyone lives in a world/country where living on credit is the norm (at least not yet).
I have credit cards in Eastern Europe for 25 years, so CC is not a rare term. I also never lived on credit, I used it just for transactions during the month fully covered at the end of month with zero interest. I did that because security and refunds used to be better for credit vs debit cards (with CC, it was the bank's money, so they were more interested to solve problems). When condition equalized, I closed all CC.
I don’t think living on credit is the norm even in countries that use a credit card regularly. The limit on my card is fairly high, but if I don’t pay it off every month my provider gets pissy.
The $1,000 available on the CC is not debt either, so the person does not currently have -$1,800. If the information we have is that the person has an $800 overdraft and a $1,000 line of credit that they’re not using, they’re $800 in debt, not $1,800.
I'm a contractor and last year my agency said there would be layoffs, which caused quite a scare, but in the end only contractors residing in Canada were affected.
Nobody I know who is good that I know works for Canadian companies if they can be avoided. I'm not sure what happened with your agency, probably costs involved hiring foreigners via services like remote.com or other?
I'm looking for frontend/fullstack. I have over 10y of experience. I did reach out, and the mortgage payment has been withdrawn, and they haven't gotten back to me in two weeks.
They probably spent all their savings on the down payment, as approximately everyone on the planet who wants a place to live but can't pay for it all out-of-pocket does?
Investment shenanigans excluded, if you have enough savings to pay off your mortgage in case you lose your job, there's no point in getting a mortgage in the first place.
You're poisoning the well there, as that is the major reason to get a mortgage even when you have enough cash to buy a house outright. It's not "shenanigans", it almost always makes financial sense to keep your cash invested elsewhere when mortgage rates are low.
And who knows what the crowd will do in 2025 given new cabinet etc.? Deductions don't really affect me much going forward. I care but not planning around specific policies going forward.
Yeah I'm not saying it is a determinant. But the new/old head of state is the only one in the admin who matters legislatively. I'm merely musing on the pressure to balance a budget and give away all of our money. I hear he isn't so good with that. Go big or go home tho.
Standard exemption in the US for a married couple is around $30k. If your mortgage is so massive that the mortgage tax deduction is better than the standard deduction then in most cases you bought a far too luxurious house or in a far too “prestigious” location(SF, NYC, etc.). If you’re not already a millionaire you shouldn’t buy such property.
Standard deduction for single people is 15k. SALT can get you to 10k, and anything past 5k in mortgage interest (at 5% rates and 100k balance, you're already at the point) is gain over the std deduction. 22.5% on those dollars for many people. More depednnding on state tax.
As someone else commented, things can of course always change, but as things stand today, it takes a very large mortgage and/or very significant other deductibles to get over the standard deductible at this point in the US.
Sometimes I wonder how people manage to browse the Web without encountering "common" pieces of wisdom. Maybe we should bundle up a bunch of useful YouTube/TikToks as a supplemental education package for students.
Nah, people know those "common" pieces of wisdom. What people bringing them up often miss is, they're also unachievable for most people. Life isn't a MMORPG where you can check out of progression at any moment and spend some time grinding to build up savings. Life has a clock to it that doesn't stop, and most can't afford falling behind it much.
Had this same type of idea cycle around recently quite a bit lately. Similar issue, if this experience actually had the "uninstall", "quit", "leave", "exit", or red X in the corner, it would have been hit a long time ago. Much rather drop and go bodily join some fantasy or sci-fi land than the perpetual grind of meaningless, mundane, superficial, banal America. There's a reason millions spend almost every waking moment staring at a screen, playing a game about a fantasy or sci-fi land where you can actually feel like you accomplish something than interacting with the human race.
Frankly, a lot of MMORPG economies almost look preferable these days, and nearly as believable. At least in quite a few you can personally manufacture something and at least have a possibility of making money that's relevant. On Earth, rather challenging. Etsy for example:
Only 26% of Etsy shops are successful and run as full-time businesses, or 74% of all Etsy businesses eventually fail.
Average Etsy seller makes $2,900 per year
Almost every part of the world economy seems designed to punish every member for not being born rich and a celebrity at birth. What's the best way to get followers online and be an "influencer"? Already be a rich celebrity who's influential. Most followed on Instagram - Christiano Ronaldo (635m), Leo Messi (504m), Selena Gomez (425m), Kylie Jenner (398m), Dwayne Johnson (396m), ect ... The top 50 is pretty much universally previously known athlete, actor/actress, musician names. "Normal" influencers are an order of magnitude or further away down in the 10m, 1m, 500k range. It's simply another way to make even more money, have even more fame, be even more self involved, and take even more of the same photos.
One part that's been really bothersome lately is how many games actually seem better implemented than the "real" world. Farming Simulator being one of the perennial cases. The equipment is implemented down to the individual bolts and seals on the engines, and you can probably print out the CAD models and manufacture your own tractor they're so detailed. Yet the game actually implements numerous technologies that the "real" farming consistently refuses. Quicker iterations, quicker development, quicker releases and responsiveness to customers. Intermediate cost farming equipment for the starting farmer, bicycle and human powered equipment with low yearly input costs. The "real" farming sector appear unable to do little other than offer the same $500,000 super-rigs they've been offering for years. There was a post a while back where the Farming Simulator people actually complained to the John Deere's of the world "common guys, how about some entry level stuff, we don't have anything to offer our players."
Anyways, TLDR, would have quit, uninstalled, and then burned the computer in the yard a long time ago.
Winning a lottery (and then winning a lottery of not mismanaging your good fortune) is great when it happens to you, but it's not an effective strategy you can plan for.
> One part that's been really bothersome lately is how many games actually seem better implemented than the "real" world. Farming Simulator being one of the perennial cases. (...) the game actually implements numerous technologies that the "real" farming consistently refuses. Quicker iterations, quicker development, quicker releases and responsiveness to customers.
Oh yes. Game designers - and same goes for any fiction authors, really - have two things going for them here. One, they can skip the grind; the boring and annoying distractions from the goal that are also necessary to achieve it in the real world. And two, as you noticed, fictional worlds can be designed to work.
Like, what's the difference between a tractor in Farming Simulator and in the real world? The simulated tractor is meant to work - to do the stuff the tractors do. The real tractor is first and foremost meant to make money for manufacturer; whether it works and can do the tractor stuff, that's incidental.
Or in short, games implement the child's view of the world, where things are what they seem to be. Bakers bake bread, firemen help people, singers sing so everyone has fun, etc. Everyone plays their role straight. The real life, unfortunately, has people doing whatever to survive in a more or less structured matter; it may manifest in bakers and firemen and singers, but their roles and value provided are incidental and they're not fulfilled and they'd all rather be somewhere else.
The child's worldview is a lie. It's honest, it's good, it makes sense, but it's a fucking lie. I'm still having difficulties processing that it's a lie. And it's all too easy to immerse yourself in sci-fi/fantasy videogames or shows or books, because they all assume the world makes sense, that things are what they seem, what they're supposed to. When things are not what they seem, that's a goddamn plot twist.
So yeah, I can't help but daydream about how the world could look like if we could just do stuff directly, instead of incidentally as a way to make money to survive (and eventually, enough money to tell the world to GTFO, so we can live out our own fantasies of a world that works).
You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you save up an emergency fund instead of paying a downpayment then you're spending money on rent that you could have in retirement, and it's not like rent is consistently cheaper than mortgage payments anyway so if you can save up when renting you can save up when owning.
So the gamble is, do you spend 2 years saving up for 6 months of income as a buffer and send tens of thousands of dollars down the drain in the meantime, or do you roll the dice and hope nothing bad happens in the next 5 or so years? The people who end up in the best position will be those who take the second option, and most of the time it will work out.
The problem is that many people view home ownership as a cultural / political statement beyond all else. They desperately need to stop being a rentoid and become a landchad. The reality is that renting is often a better financial decision than buying, especially short term. Plus, in this economy there is no guarantee that you're going to be employed in one city your whole life.
Sure. but what isn't cultural? Being cultural does not mean it is irrational. It would probably be a better financial decision if people lived cells and ate nutrient paste.
The goal is to maximize your happiness. Putting yourself into a precarious and stressful financial situation because of memes is irrational. Buying a sleeping pod might be rational for some, not for others. Those aren't cultural though, they're personal.
Your personal preferences are influenced by culture, but they include your material realities. If you're making decisions about your finances/housing without considering your material reality, you've been meme'd into a decision. A lot of people have been influenced into believing that being an owner is always better than being a renter, so they make stupid decisions.
Im not going to argue against the idea that stupid decisions are stupid or that some people make them.
My point is rather that preferences, including the material reality that you seek, are almost entirely cultural. There is no culture vs reality, but rather some cultural values vs other cultural values
Maybe. It's very situational. Beyond the spreadsheets for a given location, there are times in your life when you want to be able to pickup and move fairly easily and there are times when you want to be able to put down roots and be in a pretty stable situation that lets you tailor things.
"Putting down roots" is the wrong way to look at it. You have to ask yourself if you're certain that you will be in one area for a long time. Everyone wants roots in LA or NYC, many of them wash out.
The short answer is probably everything in moderation if you're reasonably young. Maybe don't put every penny you can get your hands on into a down payment on a house, especially if you're also a bit uncertain about future income streams and life situation. But maybe you also don't really need a year or two comfortable emergency fund.
At some point, it probably makes sense to buy a place if you can if only for the stability as you get older.
Emergency fund is useless when expenses are 5k/mo, and that's just sitting in my room working in 15C with my food costs and expenses as low as can be. Burned through 40k already.
I'm gonna predict that in a 10-year trend, the house price inflation will have continued. Unless you could save faster than the bubble, you still wouldn't be getting/keeping a house in 10 years.
I'd have been WAY better off if I stayed at my parents and invested it all into the S&P or something similar, or even bitcoin (inb4 it's going to crash). Then kept building/working/saving, and in 10y I'll have been in a much better position.
Hindsight is 20/20 and you can't extract value from the economy without changing it. The values of certain things go up or down because certain people are or aren't investing in them. If everyone who wished they'd behaved differently had behaved differently, they often wouldn't even be any better off.
Somehow the little guy always ends up taking most of the system's losses, though.
If that's the case, the savings are not 'spent' but are simply invested in the house. They should be able to sell the house for the net value (market value minus mortgage outstanding) which should be roughly equal to the down payment.
High transaction fees on sales. Typically at least 5% in US, not sure about Canada.
Also don't forget taxes, insurance, mortgage interest needs to get paid while house is in your hands. Most mortgages have lots of interest during the first few years.
Can you imagine if buyers and sellers only had to pay, say 1% each? The whole market would become a lot more liquid. But nah, brokers are essential and have your interests at heart.
This issue is frequently raised on HN. If estate agents only got 1% of sales, then could not even cover the cost of an office and (usually) a car and pay them self a middle class wage. Most people buy one or two houses in their entire life. It makes sense to have an expert to guide them through the process.
Im not sure about Canada, but Private individuals can list on redfin and Zillow in the US. MLS posting must be from a broker, but you can hire one flat rate upload your listing
