For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 25, 2018

Worse yet – it is an accurate prediction.

horrible

I think the children move back with their parents, when they are not ready to have children. When they are ready to have children, that’s when they don’t want to live with their parents.

250K? Not quite an update. The house of their size sells for $400k or more. If they update or upgrade, that’s 500-600K. Their children might be lucky to buy a condo or small townhouse.

Not all areas have prices that high. Pensacola area—125 Thousand will get you a nice brick ranch style house with garage. West Coast & some East Coast areas have absurd, unreal prices.

Lynn certainly called it. Many adult “children” are still living with their parents – and for good reason, if you ask me. Between student loans and housing prices, free rent seems preferable to pride.

Don’t know when this one originally appeared but, as with the reprints of Wiz Classic and Back to B.C., some times their strips were chillingly prescient.

… Wow. This one was right on the money. Unbelievable that people recognized this even back in the ’80s, though of course, housing has always been one of the biggest issues… and expenditures of money… any person had.

Absolutely chilling- “We might be the last generation to be able to buy a house!”

My son served in the Marine Corp and bought a 40 year old house on the G.I. Bill.

Several houses came on the market in the neighborhood I live in and they’re priced in the 125K to 150K range, and we’re talking nice neighborhood, good school district, well-maintained homes.

Actually to go from $55k to $250k in 40 years is only 4%. If it had been invested in a mutual fund earning 7% (average stock market return over 40 years) they would have $850k.

We hear a lot about “housing bubble” or “social security bubble”, but why hardly ever does anyone suggest a “college bubble”?

Most places, this is an utter crock. If no one can buy a house, who is buying the tens of thousands they’re building as fast as the can? My entire rural county has been bought up and platted for multi-thousand unit housing subdivisions, just waiting for every inch of land in the adjoining counties to have houses on it. I cannot go to the next county without seeing a new subdivision going up and selling before the houses are finished.

And she’s saying 40 years ago, the 1970s, people bought $55,000 houses and now can sell them for five times that. But $5,000 here was a good salary. We bought a big house for $24,000, which was 2.5 times our combined income. But today, that salary for the same job is $50,000, ten times the 70s. If the house is only $250,000, it relatively cheaper. And $250,000 here does buy you a nice conventional house.

Al the grousing is either whining about living in a silly place or being unwilling to do what we did to afford a house. Or, of course, people who wanted bigger and bigger and ended up with mortgages they won’t every pay off. Else where are all these buyers coming from?

Not a housing comment but why does Georgia’s mole move from side to side on her face?

Your kids can buy a run down trailer in a trailer park, pretty cheap! Something to put in the old Christmas brag letter when the time comes.

My Mom and Dad bought the land and built a small 3brm, 1 bath Cape Code style home in Connecticut back in 1940. The total cost, inclusive of furnishings was $11,000.00. After my mother passed away, we sold the house in 2002 for $180,000 ( which was $15,000 below list ).

Conversely, a home I purchased in Florida in 2000, for $89,000 on a short sale, was valued at $240,000 in 2006 ( when I should have sold it ), then in 2008 when the housing bubble burst, the valued plummeted ! When I finally did get rid of it in 2010, is was valued at $42,000. !

Boomerangs

We found out at closing in 1986 that we were paying eleven times the original price of our modest house. Now it’s worth eleven times that. Location location location—we’re in northern California. We thought we were crazy to pay what we did. In hindsight, and given what rents around here are now, we’d have been crazy not to.

The way it should work is if people can’t afford to buy a house than the price of houses should come down. Someone is buying at the current price point.

Don’t be surprised that home prices will most likely double in 10-20 years from now!

It is something to consider when Phil and Georgia have kids. Right now they are a childless couple?

I found a bill of sale for my parents’ simple and small 1950s ranch style house for $11,000. I told my husband we could buy a nice car for that price and that was 25 years ago. We raised our boys in my parents’ house which I inherited. Due to sheer amount of renovations needed to pull the house back to looking good, we opted to sell and expected low dollars due to the dipilitated condition of the house – around maybe $75-95K. My agent put it at $245k! I said to her, “But, the house is in a terrible shape.” She said, “Yeah, that’s the low dollar. Good houses sell for over $300K. Location, location.” Well, my parents sure chose the right location. It sold for $229K – almost 30 times the amount my parents bought 65 years ago. Honestly, it is ridiculous – that for a small and simple one-car carport, no pool, shingled roof, brick exterior, and no roof on the porch. (9_9)

Soon enough there will be pressure on Phil and Georgia to have kids. It will go something like this:

Georgia’s parents: “Do your job like the other couples and have kids. We need to be grandparents.”

Phil’s parents: “Elly made us maternal grandparents. Now Phil, you need to make us paternal grandparents. People gossip about childless couples.”

Michael & Elizabeth{in unison}: “We want cousins!”

Off subject of today’s arc, but isn’t this around the time Elly gets pregnant again ???

What’s interesting is, if you watch any of the Holmes shows on home fixing, Canadian house price are 800,000 canadian or more.

Our latest house assessment (for property tax purposes) values our place at over a million (over $900,000 for the land value alone). In 2003, when we bought it, it cost $335,000. Of course, this is in the suburbs just outside of Vancouver, BC (Western Canada) where a 2 bedroom, 1 bath home will cost you TWO million, easy. House prices are totally nuts!

LOL! Too late.