Rates are crashing and fuel to the moon!

I’ve had my best week in two years. Maybe things are picking up

 

It's all an illusion. Pretty soon your going to be doing pull tabs and drinking hams at the Moose club.

 

That’s the life

 

Won't really help, those jobs are in foreign sweat shops hands, or H1-B visas. They stopped hiring a lot of local talent when the kids figured out they could jump companies to get better pay...so the rates kept going up. The Tech geniuses figured, let's get cheap labor in here to replace them and we can fix the bad code at lower than having it written by knowledgabe local help, so they had the competent teach their jobs to the incompetent in order to get their severance package and when the incompetent took over, all they know how to do was what they were told. Programs started getting buggy and the companies now had to hire higher priced consultants to fix what the cheap labor screwed up. Those consultants were likely the ones that got let go.

And the circus just continues to go round and round.

 

And now AI is writing better code than 80% of the programmers…….

 

I disagree. We did it in 1995-1996. House cost $76k payment was $750 mo. @ 7.875% interest rate. One paycheck covered the Mortgage. 1 newer vehicle. Nothing fancy. Safe transportation. Did all the cheap things. Go to the park, No cell phone or Internet bills. Basic cable. We weren’t rich. Couldn’t do it today. House is $280k now.

 

A large portion of the country has realized they can work part time and get their health (and other benefits) paid for by social services. It's very easy to raise a large family in the USSA when the feds are subsidizing the expenses.

 

Depends on where you live and what kind of lifestyle you want. If people decide what is important to them they can move anywhere and create the life they want. I absolutely loved the 13 years I lived in western Montana but I refuse to pay that much to live somewhere. The house I have now is paid for in small town NE. I’m 40 minutes from Lincoln and about 90 minutes from Omaha.

My nephew and his wife paid cash for a fixer upper in South Dakota while his wife was working. They cash flowed the remodel and by the time kid #3 came along they were at the point she could stay home and raise the kids. They also don’t have $150k of vehicles in their driveway.

The flip side of that would be my niece. Always has to have new everything. A fixer upper isn’t in her vocabulary so their house had to be exactly what she wanted. And her husband needs his new pickup and she needs her new suburban to haul their 2 kids around. And they complain about how tight money is and everything is just impossible these days. And they live about 18 miles away from my nephew who is having a completely different life experience right now.

I guess that’s a lot of rambling to say that people can build whatever life they want. They just have to decide what’s important. For me being able to not have debt was way higher on my list than living in a place that I loved. Or being closer to Lincoln. I’m 6 hours from my brother in Kansas, I’m 6 hours from my family in South Dakota, and I’ve made a pretty good life where I’ve been since 2020. But this isn’t a good place if someone feels they need to be close to everything that’s going on in a larger town. But don’t pay $1500-2000 a month to live somewhere and complain about being broke when a 40 minute drive could change your bank account quite a bit.

 

Maybe in the Midwest. 1k net a week in the cities out here on the west coast. Be living in the projects, probably cant even afford that.. my childhood home in a suburb of phoenix is pushing 700k nowadays... 1200 Sq ft 1 story , 3 bedroom 2 bath.. basic cookie cutter suburban house.. this is a typical place that a young couple would buy to start to raise a family in a nice neighborhood away from riff raff. Parents bought it in the 90s for less than 100k..

I don't understand how someone my age is supposed to afford that and it ain't like rentals are any cheaper, lot of cases more expensive... I had an apartment in north Phoenix when I was working for 6 dollars an hour... even at minimum wage now at 14 an hour that same rent is over 2k a month now. And it's really not a great neighborhood. I was paying 700 plus utility.. that was only 10-12 years ago... I'd still be living with my parents. If I was in that situation now working my first job. The prices have gone absolutely bat #### in the last 10years...
hell I'd rather go live in a semi full time than pay that kind of money just to survive..

 

We had a long discussion about different places to live, but I don't remember if I asked, would you be able to live there if you were not doing trucking? Are there any jobs there to support a family?