When someone is grotesquely underpaid the bar is pretty low. Take median salary for example. In some places merely buying a home and having it appreciate over the course of one singular year is enough to replace an entire median salary (in that same place)

> if you’re lucky

Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?

I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less, because everyone feels like whatever they're paying you, regardless of whether they felt like they got a deal or not, is in exchange for the work they expect from you. When I hire a bike mechanic that charges less, I'm happy I'm paying less, but I naively still want my bike to work properly, and if they didn't match my expectation, I'm going to be unhappy with the service. Charging less doesn't necessarily change someone's expectation, but having junior in your title might give you more leeway.

> Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?

Being lucky, in the context I used it, meant that you've been able to successfully find a path of gradual and measurable or desirable evident skill advancement, perhaps with a few standout projects that prove you have those skills, and that people willing to pay you as a business operator (independent contractor or w/e, someone who has complete latitude to apply their apparent skills for money) will be compelled by (i.e I want you to make me a website because you seem to know your shit for x reason). Those projects aren't an every day thing, and you should try very hard to identify them and succeed at them, holding yourself to a higher standard than normal for your own sake.

For famous programmers, that was Doom, or hacking the PS2 or Jailbreaking the iPhone, or inventing the Masonry layout, or maybe the Boston Globe website, all things they may or may not have done while being just an employee, but that they can obviously point to and be like "I worked at ___ for 5 years and one of the cool projects was this thing where we figured out how to do responsive images before it was feasible for a major newpaper", but otherwise a ton of smaller projects that nobody's heard of. Hire me for something as a contractor and I'll apply my skills in a way that I think will solve your problem well, not the agency I no longer work for.

> I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less

And then this

> I naively still want my bike to work properly

It reads like your conclusions are at odds with each other

Anyway I think we can wrap this one up just heading over to levels.fyi and comparing 2021/2022/2023 salaries for positions with 2024 salaries for the same positions.

Either way, I can see how those quotes seem at odds with each other, but the key word in the second is "naively". As in, I'm happy I got a good deal, but how well I expect the job to be done isn't tightly coupled to how much I'm paying for it, not often anyway. I as a software developer of an identical caliber to some other arbitrary person applying for the same job might ask for some amount less, but it doesn't mean I'll be expected to do any less than what they were hiring someone for.

If the person I got a deal on to fix my bike did a sufficiently terrible job, I might expand my budget, or I might attribute it to a careless person. I might expect similar results because I'm not hiring the dealership to do a repair, instead I'm hiring a smaller shop in a cheaper area, but ideally I still get an oil change.

None of this is categorically true of course, but it's just an attempt at articulating that everyone feels like whatever they're paying, it's enough to have the output be. I guess it's important that the work be categorically similar, like I'm not going to pay $40/hr for a junior boot camp dev and hope they'll design a data center for me.

That difference in perspective seems to be at the root of the disagreement, too.

This is a fallacy. You're born "short housing", because you need somewhere to live. Owning a house is just cancelling out your natural short position. If you sell the house, you're short again. You might make a "profit" on the house if the market went up, but that just means you'll be buying another house in the new more expensive market.

If you want to upsize, you're actually better off if the market goes down, because then to get a house that is X% more expensive requires less additional capital.

Only in a perfectly spherical house market. In my limited experience (non-US market), your assumptions are poor. Opinion:

1: You often can't get a mortgage on the same terms so you often can't find equality between selling a home and buying a home.

2: When the market is down, turnover can reduce drastically so your choices for a house can be severely restricted.

3: when the market is down, prices are sometimes driven by unwilling sellers and bargain hunters. A desirable home may sell at a reasonable price but an average home might not.

The market is often down when interest rates are up and you can't get a mortgage on terms that suit you.

> You're born "short housing"

You are short the "minimum" necessary which is a lot smaller than a whole house. You are not short 1.0 houses. Maybe short 1.0 rooms. And it really depends on who else you are tightly linked with (family or partner).

When interest rates fall the value of the asset goes up and the cost of borrowing the same amount of money has gone down

Firstly, people can afford to pay $x for mortgage interest. The "cost" of borrowing remains constant because incomes don't change. As mortgage interest rates decrease, $x doesn't change. Instead people can borrow more (for the same amount spent on interest) and they bid more. So house prices go up.

Okay, on rereading: one problem is that I have never heard of "buying down" because I think the concept doesn't exist in the New Zealand market. The US market for mortgages is extremely different from most countries. I wrote my comments generic enough to cover both (I hoped).

Buying down is not a neutral option: I presume it is making a bet on the future of interest rates. So I'm not sure your logic follows. If we want to make interest rate bets then there's lots of different worms we can eat.

The information gap remains!

As someone who doesn’t own a home and dreams of buying one, I really don’t believe this take. Anyone who bought a home in the late 2000s post-crash is now living in a much nicer place while spending the same.

I don’t think I’ll get an opportunity to see such a massive increase to quality of life by doing practically nothing. Housing prices won’t go down any time soon, so now I have to spend way more with much poorer ROI prospects.

Unless we aren’t short again. 10% is the median year over year growth. What if it was 20%? Is that more realistic than her doubling her income in the same time period? I think that we could only be short if rent increases at the same rate that the property appreciated? Maybe I’m completely cooked / fried - it’s pretty late - and I’d be happy to be wrong - as my version of reality I’m seeing feels pretty destitute as it is

> and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home

I think what the author was referring to was not the value of [a] home (i.e. equity in the house) but the concept of a home as it relates to family.

But yeah, capital income is rising way faster than salaries. At this point this really shouldn't be any kind of news to anyone, as it has been a trend for a long time now.

For the average Joe it doesn't really mean "you should buy a house" because homes can be really shitty investments, and it is not really one if you live in it. It is more about the fact that everyone should be focusing getting capital income as early as possible. Index funds being the most obvious choice.

You've got a roof over your head and your capabilities and health allow you to move freely across the globe and get work and roof anywhere else, too.

You could lose your house tomorrow, but you'll still have a home. After all, you do have a wife.

"Your real life is with us, your family."