Who even builds 70-80 sq. meters single room appartments and why?
This is propaganda.
Woman got paralyzed due to surgery, guy got laid off, they have to sleep in their living room because they are living in a tiny place with their sole source of income as fucking landlords.
What a feel good story. Great spin, Business Insider! Bunch of loons.
Don’t forget about their income as TikTokers… which is still something I can’t understand. Collecting money for posting inane, self-fellating horse shit to social media? That’s a job? Ok whatever
Well, “family accounts” with young daughters/children are a magnet for creeps. I’d wager it’s something like 70/30, creeps to genuinely interested watchers. And the grossest part is a lot of families lean into this, whether intentionally or just responding to the analytics when they post a family “beach trip” or “kids having fun playing in the hose like the good old days!” Yeah. It’s fucking disgusting.
They donated and sold much of their furniture and kids’ toys, preparing themselves to live in the 830-square-foot apartment.
Real classy. I guess they come from the Donald Trump school of “maybe they’ll have one or two dolls instead of fifty.”
I agree this is a dystopian nightmare of a story. But… if we had to downsize, one of the first things to go would be all the toys my kids have accumulated over the years. My daughter has a doll house she got from grandma 6 years ago that she hasn’t played with in 3 years. My son has a collection of Hess trucks that he never really asked for but grandpa gets him one every Christmas (he loves them, but he’s 12 now).
If we had to, we would donate a lot of toys and the kids would be OK with it. We keep them for sentimental reasons, but only because there’s a corner of a spare bedroom/playroom/office that has the space. We have gone through their toys several times for donations, and the kids feel better letting things go when they go to a good cause.
Trump is a douche canoe, and saying people can buy fewer dolls is ghoulishly out of touch. Donating your kids’ toys, though, isn’t at all the same.
I wish I could get my son to this point! He is so rough on literally everything he owns, I do a sweep through his room yearly to get rid of the broken stuff. The only toy that has survived through the years is legos. Thank goodness he’s getting older now, and toys aren’t really what he wants anymore. I always wished to donate old toys clothes, but my boy is the destroyer of all things lol
Gotta love that many of these supposed “feel good stories” written to goad the masses into living like serfs live to conveniently gloss over the fact that the story subjects just so happen to have a house to rent out. Cheap attempts at population programming.
This seems quite similar to what we call I’m the UK inverse snobbery. It was quite a big thing (apparently) during ww2.
In the US during the Great Depression, rich people would have “hard times parties” where they were all expected to dress like hobos (the common name for rail-riders and other migrant workers, not used as a derogatory insult to the homeless) and served intentionally cheap (but still often fresher than what the actual homeless were eating) stew.
Their mortgage is $1,400 a month, and they rent out the home for $2,300. Their apartment costs $1,600,
They just kind of glazed by the root of the issue…
Rent shouldn’t be more than mortgages.
They can do this shell game, because they’re still making $700/month and building equity. Someone without a house to rent is absolutely fucked.
Where did you get the extra $200?
Also it will be definitely less than $700 unless they have a rental agreement that the renter does all repairs and improvements. What happens if the roof starts leaking? Whose footing the bill on that one? What about insurance? Landlord insurance isn’t cheap.
They seem to be really living on thin margins and probably building a ton of credit card debt.
Where did you get the extra $200?
They get 2,300 and spend 1600 by living in the apartment and renting.
$700/month and equity.
But obviously it’s more of an issue when it scales up
They still pay the mortgage of 1400 a month as well.
Yeah they’re still technically $700/mo in the negative.
$1400 mortgage + $1600 apartment is $3000 in expenses. $2300 income from the rent gives them an outlay of $700 they still have to come up with for the apartment.
So for strictly housing costs, they pay $700/mo. That likely doesn’t include all of the other things they need: food, transportation, medical, utilities, etc.
Sort of. Rent actually should some times be more than mortgages, but only for comparable property types. I agree that renting a 1BR apartment should not be more than renting a 3 BR house. But, renting a 3BR house should be more than having a mortgage on a 3BR house.
And it’s because of that old axiom, “Rent is the most you’ll spend on housing, a mortgage is the least you’ll spend on housing.”
Yeah, mortgage involves risks that renting does not. Rent includes compensation for the risk spread out over time.
Not just risk but amortized maintenance. Water heater only lasts 12 years, furnace 18. Roof is about 20, siding 15-50 depending.
edit: Kitchen appliances now about 5? according to my recent experience. Probably the same for laundry machines. Toilet innards, like 10? Sink leaks, actual plumbing leaks, windows are gonna need it eventually and then fuck what about the garage door opener?
The part about the women having surgery and the guy getting laid off is pretty bad but the concept of downsizing doesn’t seem dystopian to me. If anything its a good thing to move to a more dense living situation with shared amenities like parks and pools then living out in suburbia with a big house with a bunch of rooms and amenities that need to be maintained by you while they are rarely used.
Plenty of people live very happy lives in smaller situations. Studies have shown that satisfaction with your living situation is more closely related to your house size relative to your neighbors then the absolute house size. Ie if you have 1000 sqft but that’s above average for the neighborhood then you’ll be more satisfied then the person with a 2000 sqft house in a neighborhood of 3000 sqft houses.
It bugs me that people seem to think that dense living has to mean smaller homes. If you build up double-digit stories, you can have massive condominiums and still be far more dense than even the half-baked two- or three-story apartment buildings in my part of the US. Plus, when you don’t have a quarter acre to store your stuff, the extra space comes in handy pretty frequently.
I lived in a one bedroom apartment as a single mom of one. Perfectly fine, and I agree with what you are saying, but a one bedroom with three kids and both parents? Seems a bit much…
Remember at the bottom of the story they said they bought some property in the country are a building a 2 bedroom house…
Please keep in mind that we all don’t want to live in a 3/2 ranch in the burbs with a HOA just to say we own a 3/2 ranch
