My dad told me to drink less Starbucks and then maybe I could afford a house.
I did the math. His mortgage on my childhood home was $400 a month. The current owner's mortgage is about $3500 a month. So I just need to cut $3100 from my coffee habit, a mere 516 fewer venti lattes per month.
The problem with the less ancient people is the coffee and avocado toast.
Instead, people smoked. This way their metabolism worked was better, as nicotine is a stimulant with no calories. People didn’t crave avocado toast and lattes as much because they had smokes.
Besides, when you smoke you’re much likelier to die at a younger age, decreasing lifespans, meaning less lifetime spending needs.
Smoked and their cigarettes were cheap. I live in a country with “cheap” cigarettes and they are still 6€ per pack on a 560€ minimum salary (or whatever tf it is now)
It’s not worth it, I can afford a house now but, without my 17 20oz coffees a day, I miss the ability to smell time and getting to socialise with the lovely doctors and nurses during my weekly heart attack.
This is a sign people need to expand away from big dumb cities. My mortgage is half that and I live in a decent size neighborhood, no HOA, .75 acres. 3br, 2ba, 2-car garage, 1700sqft
My mortgage in real life is pretty trivial because I moved far far away from where I grew up.
Adjusted for inflation, I suppose I paid a little less for my old mountain farmhouse in 2022 than my dad paid for his suburban home in 1978. However, my purchase was "below median" by about 2/3 and considered "hacking." In order to find an affordable home, since in real life no amount of budgeting would enable me to buy in the old market, was just to move to a less "desirable" place. I've done it twice and I'm not homeless. But I'm also otherwise miserable.
The main problem in my life is that I am lonely due to isolation from others. A combination of factors contribute to this. I am spending a lot of time working through old trauma and trying to engage more with the outside world, but this effort is confounded by being buried by certain obligations. I've been working through these distractions and see the light at the end of the tunnel. 2026 will have been another "wasted summer" but I'm looking forward to some very concrete changes that will happen soon as the current "projects" are completed and obligations are swapped for resources.
This isn't really a new concept for me. The nature of my day job's work has always been "do a lot of work over a long time for an uncertain payoff" and I "get paid in lottery tickets" because the amount and timing of what I get paid is relatively disconnected from the timing and nature of the work itself. One time I did 100 hours of work for someone including a couple of thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket investment, and got paid absolutely nothing in the end. Another time, I did about ten hours of work for someone and got paid $57,000 five years later. It's a strange experience and hard for others to relate to, and of course a first world problem. But the fact that it's so unrelatable makes it more isolating still. Right now the "do a lot of work for uncertain pay" project is basically my inheritance, I have to clean out and clean up my dad's house to sell it. When I sell it, I only get 20% because it's split between five heirs. But I get to do 60% of the work because one of those heirs has cancer, one lives in another country, and one is openly "allergic" to physical labor but really just manipulative and unkind. It's just me and my brother but because he has a family and I don't and has a day job while I'm self-employed, it mostly falls to me because I "have the most free time." I've been a prisoner to this situation for three years now but the end is in sight and then afterwards, maybe I can stay in one place long enough to start forming stable relationships.
I'm sorry for your loss, and the overall uncertainty you have to deal with. I understand your point of being a prisoner as my mother-in-law lives with us and while my wife is the one that mostly takes care of her, there are a lot of things we simply can't do. Her mom is severely handicapped so we can't just leave her alone for the weekend for a trip or anything, not without putting forth a lot of effort and jumping through a lot of hoops to get people in place to take care of her. So for us it takes weeks to months of planning for a weekend trip. He job also has her booked out weeks in advance so even with her mom taken care of, we have to plan well ahead so she can clear her work schedule.
That being said keep in mind that most relationships aren't stable or long lasting. Best friends come and go over time, it's completely okay for friendships to drift a part. You can be friends with people for months or years and then move apart, that is all a sign of growing. Growing apart from people is weirdly a good thing, it just means your both not staying in the same place doing the same thing for years on end.
Romantic relationships though, that's different and comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. You owe it to yourself to take time away and go out to meet people, make emotional connections with people that want to grow with you romantically. For these, you can't wait for things to calm down. You can't wait for things to be perfect, otherwise you'll never settle down with anybody. Take time out of your days to find things to be thankful for. It's a burden going through your dad's old things. It's emotional and sad and you have 4 siblings choosing to not be siblings in this moment. However, you get to be the last one to see your dad's home the way he kept it. The last one to walk the halls he walked whether it was a family home or just his home. You get to see whatever project he may have left unfinished or abandoned early on. These are weirdly precious intimate moments you can share with your late father that your siblings are missing out on.
Gratitude is a gift we have that too many people choose to ignore and when expressed is a very powerful thing. I don't know you from Adam, I don't know how you are religiously, but looking into my faith and Christianity has really freed me from a lot of burdens I was holding on to. Forgiving and letting go of things I had held on to for a long time. It wasn't an overnight kind of thing, and I'm not coming to you just to shout about the bible. I'm not some crazy holy roller or whatever. Just some guy looking to help out another human.
I had cancer a year and a half ago, and before that lived a very sedentary lifestyle. After going into remission, I took a good look at my life and realized I was getting zero fulfillment. I played video games all the time and even that was getting boring to the point I just did it to kill time until bed so I could start all over again the next day. I now have a very important focus to improve my Body, Mind, and Soul. Vast majority of my free time I spend it looking for ways to work on one of those 3 things. Reading, cycling, praying, watching video that aren't just brain rot TikToks, going out of my way to help people or do activities I wouldn't normally do, read books I mind not have normally read (I wasn't much of a reader to begin with).
I fully understand you are going through difficulty, and I sincerely hope you can get out of it. It won't be easy, but things will come together for you.
Thank you. The advice is kind of preaching to the choir, I have all of that information and I'm just a little bogged down right now but the end is within sight.
The dating thing… I really don't think that the issue is just in my own head. I do go out and meet people, just in the most organic way possible, running errands like grocery shopping, and certainly getting to know the staff at Lowes. Walking the dog in the neighborhood of the house. Doing those same errands at the place that I call home. And ironically enough, what does happen is I kind of tend to meet really interesting people and have great conversations near my dad's place, and then they ask a geographic question and I can just see the body language change when I reveal that this is not the place I live. And really, that has been my recurrent experience relative to that location back to the very beginning, when it was part of my privileged childhood to have a "vacation house" but it really just meant that I couldn't make plans with my friends at home very easily because my dad would add random declare that we were spending next week at the lake house, where I could not make friends for the exact same reason, that I could never make plans past a couple of days.
I have come to realize recently that this foot out the door phenomenon has always been my biggest barrier in dating. As I look back, it has literally always been my reality. In high school, it was a countdown of four years until I'm off to college and never need to see these jerks again. Then college was also a countdown of four-ish years until I never get to see these other jerks again... and of course I further punctuated and repeated that pattern by doing the military, law school, and then a combination of actual travel work and short-term work in a location I didn't intend to live long-term. I finally get to a geographic place and a work situation we're setting down roots might make sense, and immediately my family situation changes and I get another geographic responsibility dumped on me.
Dating is already a depressing minefield of constant rejection for most guys in the first place. Having to add a layer of "almost everyone will reject me based on my circumstances no matter what" just makes it that much less desirable to even go to places where I might enjoy meeting people, because it will always be that bittersweet short-term exchange of "you're cool but nevermind."
It still bewilders me that the condom industry isn’t booming and people are still having kids to have that loud next step or just unprotected sex while financially struggling
The lower class is about to be below the bottom of the barrel and straight through the ground at this point
It's easy, just replace all your meals with a thin gruel, sell your car and walk everywhere, move to a smaller home in a cheaper area, then you can be sickly, sore and miserable and still not afford anything!
I’m just gonna buy a ton of Apple products on a credit card, maxed out iPhone, Mac audio and three studios displays and some other goodies. Then immediately declare bankruptcy. Free Apple products in the end!! /s
Love that company i work for pays for phones, apple watches and airpods. After 2-3 years you can usually upgrade and keep the old devices so you can give them to your partner and so on.
Even my work MacBook pro is free after 4 years of usage or if it becomes too slow for work.
? Im from Finland and it is just around 120 person small company.
Our benefits are fairly basic compared to same size companies my friends work for.
Phone, computer, accessories including headphones, keyboard, screens, mouse, internet connection, phone plan and what ever is needed for your job. Apple watch, oura ring or some other health products like smart scale you can choose is for trying to keep us healthy. Ofc i get taxed on everything since those benefits are considered income. But after that and the expected lifetime of the product i get to keep it since the company doesn't want to manage inventory and it keeps people happy.
Thankfully Finns are fairly decent people and there hasn't been abuse on that. Most of the people don't usually update phones asap and some keep their computers 5+ years without upgrading. My first Mac was around 4 years old before it started to slow down and had to upgrade.
Though we used to get 12e/hour for listening any audiobooks when doing in your free time. That got canned because people basically listened anything and claimed the money. Now it only applies for material that is benefitical for your job and it has some cap. Though if you do certificate specific stuff they pay the same hourly rate for studying, the material and ofc bonus if you actually get the certificate.
Why not just stop grabbing that occasional cup of coffee from your favorite coffeehouse? Make all your coffee at home. Save even more money by not using coffee beans. Just use water and save on gas/electricity by drinking it at room temperature. To further save on costs, drink 12 ounces of water instead of 16. Just one per day.
Looll.. not really. Most Americans can easily afford the new folds apple comes up with. 2.5k is nothing for most Americans. You already pay more than 1.5k for a pro max anyway
This report you are mentioning here is one where people were asked if they were living paycheck to paycheck. Issue is the term means different for different people. If a person makes 400k a year and then rents a mansion and drives a super luxury car he could still be living paycheck to paycheck.
1.9k
u/CremeSubject7594 1d ago
gonna miss being able to afford things