Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Aldeer General Forum First time home buyers

Care to elaborate?

Nope

They do not understand that their prescribed formula for success wont work for younger people anymore. It worked great for them because it was an easy system to understand and follow. The fundamentals of that time have changed and they are not being followed anymore. It makes it unbelievably difficult for younger folks to learn how to do things from older folks whose only point of reference are things that dont apply anymore. I understand, I'm doing my best to help my adult children navigate and figure out the irritations of the quickly changing landscape.

Im over it

Everything is less affordable nowadays. For everyone. Not just the young. Teens no longer work part time jobs. Those job got filled by low educated adults and retired elderly who couldn't survive otherwise.

People in a house are sitting either because they had a great interest rate from a few years back or because the cost of housing has skyrocketed far behind anything reasonable.

We are inspecting over 1000 homes a year. I don't know the true statistics and I do know Alabama is an outlier from the rest of the country. But my guess would be 30% of my clients are 1st time. Another 30% are older people either upsizing or downsizing. The remainder are a mix of previous owners who are relocating, upsizing, or investors. I guess I could start collecting that data, but I don't want that much extra work to keep up with.

My son is 28 and on his 2nd home. He's saving to pay cash for his next and never plans to own another payment on anything for the rest of his life. The entire system is designed to suck the money out of you at every turn. Couple that will poor decision making and it's a recipe for disaster.

As for the home sales market in my region, it's booming. We are at around 400 inspections so far this year and turning away more work than we take on. It's been this way for us for a couple of years now. Meanwhile, it appears there are fewer and fewer decent inspectors still in business. The industry will chew up and spit out the ones who don't know their profession or don't know how to perform customer service the right way.

That's pretty well said...Dave Ramsey is a great example. Yes, his advice to reduce spending and debt is generally good. I don't think anyone would argue that. But a lot of his specific suggestions to people are much easier said than done. His age and his financial status (he's estimated to be worth close to $200M) mean he's largely out of touch with the struggles of the average person...particularly the average middle class and lower. Great advice in principle but he struggles to give practical specifics in a lot of cases because most of his personal struggles, from which he learned and now teaches, took place in the late 80's and early 90's.

The median household income in Alabama was approximately $66,700 in 2024, according to USAFacts. This represents a significant increase, often reported around $65,560–$66,700, marking a 4.1% rise from 2023. While income is rising, Alabama's median household income generally trails the national median.

Key income statistics for Alabama:
Top Counties: Shelby County leads with a median income of over $100,000, followed by Madison County (Huntsville) at roughly $89,000.
Income Distribution: Around 16% of households make less than $50,000, while a notable portion of households fall in the $100,000–$149,999 range.
Recent Trends: The 2024 figures represent the largest single-year increase in inflation-adjusted income in the last decade.
Data based on US Census Bureau surveys, Federal Reserve data.

My take: The poor counties in Alabama are exceptionally poor, due to demographics, lack of mobility, lack of initiative, and lack of education. Affordability is extremely localized. I'm sure that Wilcox and Dallas counties alone, probably pull the overall median Alabama household income down by at least $10,000. LOL Throw in Choctaw, Clarke, Sumpter, and Washington and now your probably knocking $15,000 off the median. Outside of the larger metropolitan and surrounding areas, Bham, Huntsville, Mobile, etc, the state as a whole, lacks opportunity due to companies not wanting to locate to and invest in these areas due to once again demographics, population, and lack of qualified/educated/quality potential employees. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is not really getting any better due to Meemaw and her cronies. Typical rich get rich and poor get poorer.

Old school financial principals still work. They are just inconvenient. They require delayed satisfaction, self control, commitment and discipline. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

^^^doesn't understand the difference between "median" and "mean"^^^

"median" household income is used specifically so that the exceptionally poor and exceptionally wealthy areas don't skew the data. Now, if you used "mean" (Average) household income, then your point would be valid.

Choctaw and Wilcox are definitely impoverished areas; but they only have about 23k residents.

I'm not arguing with that...the problem is "the system" is heavily "rigged" against "old school financial principles". Use "credit" as an example.....In a perfect world, you'd pay cash for everything and never incur any debt. That's great, in theory. But living in 2026 with a low (or non-existent) credit score is nearly impossible.

Earlier in this same thread, some were bashing folks for living at home after finishing college. The alternative is to rent or buy a home. You have to have credit to rent, and you have to have credit to buy a home unless you're paying cash. Explain to me how a young adult can make and save enough money by the time they get out of school to buy a home in cash. They cannot. So their options are 1) live it home for several years while saving every penny and then buying a home in cash, or 2) build credit and rent or take out a mortgage.

I 100% agree that "old school financial principles (spend less than you make, save, invest, etc) are great and everyone should strive to follow them.....but you can't deny that "the system" is [intentionally] rigged against them because there is an enormous industry built on profiting from other peoples' debt.

Its heavily rigged against young people these days. Thats why they cant just get a job and get started like I could. I went to college and delivered pizza , paid for my own decent apartment and two vehicles, and even had a cat and a dog, and was able to save money, smoke cigarettes, drink beer, and have a lot of girlfriends.
No help from the family either.
My college was free from academic scholarships but I could have paid for it out of pocket cause it was affordable back then.
Doing that is impossible for young people these days.

In 1991 I bought a F150 XLT 4x4 with a 5.0 for 18,100. I remember because one with a 351 in it was 18,900. That was sticker.This was before platinum and KR so the XLT was considered the upper trim.I also remember thinking truck prices were crazy.This was a single cab. This was before extended cabs and 4dr trucks took off. A Corvette was around 40-45k because a buddy bought one and was thinking that was insane. Just saying because I think that 37,500 was probably more around early 2000s.

The government’s attempt to “help” by paying full price tuition has caused a massive net harm in increased tuition. Seems to be a recurring theme when government gets involved in most anything.

Based on the young people I interact with, there is a lot more room for improvement if the true goal is acquiring a home.

Here are a few examples of people I am very close to. Like a broken record really:

28 year old renting talking about it is impossible to buy a house. Makes 100-110k a year. Meanwhile lives a bougie apartment. purchased a new car, and buys more expensive clothes than just about anybody you or I know. I literally make fun of him for it every chance I get.

28 year old making 100k a year feels like he can’t get ahead, bad luck always find him. I asked him how much money have you made since you started working full time. He says 750k probably. I asked what do you have to show for it…he says a paid for $12k truck, no savings, and a few thousand of debt. He can’t stay out of the bar buying everybody drinks and out of the restaurants eating every meal. I have been trying to tell him for 7 years + that trouble has a way of finding people that aren’t prepared for it, yet he goes check to check and one near crisis to the next.

23 year old recent graduate recently started work after college making about 45k a year. Had a nice reliable vehicle paid for. Rather than stick with it a stack up money, trades it in on a brand new car, hence falls into the same trap most young folks fall into.

I have talked with many young people. I always ask them, Do you want to be rich and retire early? All of them say yes. They mostly lose interest when I tell them it is a slow process that you commit to for a long period of time and you can’t have everything you want along the way.

These stories are the norm not the exception. It’s hard to be sympathetic really.

I understand perfectly how to calculate median income. There are 2.5million households in Alabama. You take the income for every single household in Alabama and you plot them on a line from the lowest to the highest and then you pick the exact middle of the line and see what that income level is and that’s your median for that data set. Here’s the problem with Alabama. The “takers” and cheaters are equal in number to the “makers”. If you drop out just the 400,000 households living on welfare alone, where nobody works, with zero reported income, then drop out the 250,000 or so households of baby mommas claiming they are single don’t make anything, while they collect welfare and baby daddy lives with them but lists a P.O. Box as his address, you’ve now shifted the middle point of that line 25% further toward the higher income side. Both groups should be eliminated from the calculation because they are not contributing anything to society. Not because they can’t, but because they are enabled to not participate. They aren’t buying houses or working jobs. They are simply leaches. They are convenient pawns in the calculation to make things appear, and people think things are actually worse than they are. Digruntled populaces, believing they can never get ahead, are the ones that start thinking that price control, universal income, universal healthcare, collectivism and cradle to grave govt assistance are all great ideas. It makes Carl Marx smile and laugh. Welfare was designed to disrupt the nuclear family, capture the black vote in perpetuity and instead it has now captured almost 50% of the US population. If you calculate the median income using only the actual “working” families in Alabama, the number is much much higher.

Right
We can talk about work ethic all day but at the end of the day it boils down to the American dream is ruined and that's why a lot of people aren't willing to work anymore. Why go work a chump change job and get nothing. One bedroom apartment in the hood in Huntsville is about $1k month..these kids don't stand a chance on moving out without getting knee deep into debt. Houses are a rip off, vehicles are a rip off. The politics have ruined the American dream. It was hard enough to get a piece of the pie in my day but it was achievable, now not so much. I don't want my son buying a house that costs twice as much as it is worth. My coworkers are buying a couple houses and they will never get them paid off.

We just visited our granddaughter and grandson in law at their new house yesterday. We took them two old rockers and an old outdoor side table from the beach house to use on their porch.

He just got out 82nd Airborne this past year and they have been living with his mom and saving their money. They are both 24. She is a big thrifter and takes things that other people throw away, repurposes or refurbishes and uses them to decorate, use, wear or sell on Instagram or Facebook marketplace. Our grandson in law is very frugal. They save just about everything they make. He saved something like $30k while he was in the military for 6 years. They both drive older used cars and are furnishing their entire house with free and used stuff.

They just told us yesterday they are going to try to have a baby now that they are settled into their home. Which means I'm going to be a great grandfather here soon, God willing. I'm pretty stoked about that.

Young people like that give me hope for the future.

This is the best time in history to be alive. Go start a business. Work hard for 10-20 years to build it up. You'll eventually be busier than you have time or energy for. Very few folks want to work long hours and sacrifice *decades* of their life to a career/work....so there are now less people to elbow out of the way to find your own success. But you can't have it both ways. You either work harder and more hours to get there, or you have more time to contemplate statistical ratios of different historical times. Get after it. Working a W2 job with paid holidays and vacation is easier with less stress, but can keep folks in the middle of the pack. It's all in what you want though. Life balance and career/financial success don't usually go hand in hand unless you're inheriting money.

And not everyone wants to own a house or stay in one spot long term. Things are different than the past.