This is how much you have to make a year to afford a home in 2024, realtor claims: ‘The old American dream died’

Published

10 months ago

January 19, 2024

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Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home, one expert discusses.

“I think most of us in America would define the middle class as somebody who can work a 40-hour-a-week career and can have the income to purchase the average home in America,” Freddie Smith, an Orlando realtor and TikTok creator, told Fox News Digital.

The TikToker, whose videos explore millennial and Gen Z struggles to afford a home and the general cost of living in today’s economic climate, dissected the common factors of living a middle-class existence.

“A lot of us grew up middle class, and we watched what middle class was in the 80s and 90s as millennials. And nowadays, what has moved the goalpost more than anything is the housing market,” the relator said.

Smith explained how, just a few years ago, $60-$70K a year would have been sufficient to qualify for a home.

With the average cost of a house being around $400K-$420K in 2024, people’s salaries would need to be around $120K a year for people to even qualify, Smith explained.

The realtor highlights how this wage-to-housing gap has forced many people to rent for a longer period.

“Rent prices are taking up 30-40% of people’s income, making it harder for them to save for a house. So it’s this perpetual cycle that is keeping people out of the middle class,” he explains, noting this trend has been continuing at a rapid pace over the last few years.

Smith also explained how a $120K salary, even without children, becomes a far lower number when confronted with the crippling debt most Americans are facing today.

Is 100k salary the new middle class? ??

“Most people are carrying student loan debt, which is at an all-time high, and the average payment in the country is $500 a month for your college degree. [There are] some people I’m seeing in my comment section saying $500, I wish, it was $1,200 a month for me,” said Smith.

Credit card debt is also at a record high in America, and while Smith acknowledges that reckless spending could be a factor, he has learned from many Americans commenting on his posts that many are forced to use their cards for groceries because they ran out of money.

According to DQYDJ, the average American income in 2023 was roughly $69K a year, with only 18.8% percent of Americans reaching $100K or more a year. According to the same source, the top 10 percent of individual earnings started at $135,605 a year.

The middle class is in a segmented state, Smith argues, largely determined by how much debt one finds themselves in.

“If you are someone who bought a house before 2020 and you have it paid off or you have a 3% interest rate, you are not burdened by the housing costs like the 2024 adults are now,” the relator said, explaining how debt, especially college debt, housing costs and childcare are burdening millennials and Gen Zers starting their lives.

“People are spending about $1,200 to $1,500 a month on daycare, and I’ve even heard it as much as $3,000-$4,000. So when you add in somebody who’s renting for $2,500, $2,000 for daycare, $1,000 for two college loans, just that alone, you need $100,000 as an income just for that,” said Smith.

For slightly older individuals who had a chance to pay off their debt and have grown-up children, $70K remains a comfortable middle-class wage to them.

“‘These millennials are whining. These Gen Zers just work harder.’ If you bought your house before and don’t have those other payments, that’s really the three-layered cake. Housing, college [debt] and daycare” explained Smith, highlighting these three factors greatly determine your middle-class placement.

As a result of high housing costs, many young people are choosing to stay at home with their families to save funds.

Smith explains how he is seeing communal living go even further in Florida, where separate families are choosing to live under one roof.

“Many families [with] 3 or 4 adults and [say] five children, they all split a big house, and they all take care of each other. You can see that they have a lot of toys and they’re pooling their money,” Smith detailed.

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The TikToker enumerates how millennials and older Gen Zers had a “difficult” hand dealt to them. Younger Gen Zers, however, have a lot of “opportunity” to “crush in today’s economy” if they plan carefully to avoid debt and make smart financial choices.

“The millennials, they’re the pinched generation where college essentially stopped working for most. The debt piled up, and the old American dream died, and we got left holding the bag,” he said.

The creator said that through posting on TikTok, he has learned a tremendous amount about the everyday struggles real Americans are facing through his comment section.

“People in America, real society, are sharing all this with me. And I’m learning at a rapid pace from all different individuals. It’s not just googling it, or asking 100 college students what they think. It’s thousands and thousands of people sharing what’s going on,” said Smith.

The realtor discussed how there is a “bigger conversation” around an evolving American Dream that we’re likely to see take place over the next few years.

“We’re basically redefining the American dream from top to bottom, like the way that we see work and work-life balance,” said the creator, explaining how the idea of owning a home might grow old alongside past generations.

“I don’t even know if millennials and Gen Zers want to follow that path of buying a house and living in it for 40 years and staying at the same job for 40 years. I don’t think creatively, work-life balance wise, is also what our long-term play is,” he said.

World

At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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At least 10 dead after fire rips through retirement home in Spain

At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.

A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.

They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.

Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.

The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.

The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.

All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.

Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.

It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.

The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.

UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

1 hour ago

November 15, 2024

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Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.