Good point, but there are ways to avoid it. Just live in a nice middle class non-posh area and tell anyone in the family who has grand ideas of a lifestyle to go stuff it. I do wonder, what on holy earth is driving up prices.
1. Interest rates that remain at historically low levels.
2. A government -- and an entire financial system -- that recognizes the need to keep the housing bubble inflated because it's basically become a Ponzi scheme that's likely to collapse after the last cohort of people can sell their homes with enough equity to retire.
“Just live in a nice middle class non-posh area and tell anyone in the family who has grand ideas of a lifestyle to go stuff it.”
I spent some time living in a non-posh trailer park. We had nice neighbors but we sure didn’t live in a fancy home. But it set us up well for the future. THAT is the problem - people spend for today and don’t think about tomorrow.
I was volunteering at a high school last year. The class was working on interest and how compound interest works. One of the students asked me what was the most important thing to know about interest. I told her the most important thing was this:
Get the bank to pay YOU interest instead of you paying the bank interest.
We then talked a little about it using a car loan as an example. I hope it sunk through...she did the calculations and was shocked at how much a car really costs if purchased on a 5 year loan vs cash, so maybe it got through. If so, it will have been one of the most important things she’ll have learned in high school.