When I moved from San Diego to Rexburg, Idaho, the discrepancy in the cost & value of homes became apparent.

A friend in Idaho said, “Yeah, my dad’s building this REALLY nice home… it’s got everything, and it’s so expensive. Probably going to end up being about $150-200K.”

In San Diego, that’s the cost of a ghetto shared apartment in East County for 12.5 years. Or you could own a “REALLY nice…so expensive home…” in southeast Idaho. Go figure.

Location, location, location. Who wouldn’t want to live in Sunny San Diego?

I’m a resident physician in San Diego and currently live as white trash in a mobile home with my wife and barefoot and dirty faced 4 kids.
When I move to the private sector in the next few years it will be very difficult to buy a home in San Diego (even on a physician’s income) and I may have to consider the move to Rexburg!
For me to get a 4 bedroom home with 1-2 bathrooms in a slightly below average neighborhood will cost at least 600,000 bucks.

I rent a house in Palo Alto. To buy my own falling-apart 1800 sq-foot house would be at least $850K. Living in a fabulous place you can’t really afford is like being addicted to heroin. I know it’s wrong, but I don’t see myself making more rational living arrangements any time soon.

My girlfriend bought her house in 1997 for $350. It would now be $1.2 million, except she did some remodeling that brings it closer to 2 Mil. So her real estate investment has outperformed your parent’s.

I miss my friends who have moved from here to affordable San Diego.

I live in San Elijo Hills in San Diego. One family I know pays $5000 a month for there mortgage and $14000 a year in property taxes. Some houses out here are around $1,000,000. I throw up every morning thinking about it.

Rob and I both wish that he’d bought a house when he first came to Washington. The difference in price of just the few years (~5) that he was here before we got married would have made a huge difference in our family finances today.

House prices are so disheartening. Even in Utah, it’s getting crazy. When we were looking at that job down there, we did a bunch of house hunting, and we coudln’t come up with anything comparable to what we have now without SIGNIFICANTLY raising our monthly mortgage payment.

We paid ~243 for our current house, but have a great interest rate. Both of our cars (’99 Honda Civic & ’98 Cr-V) are paid off, and the only debt we have aside form the mortgage, we entered into voluntarily, knowing that we’d be able to pay it off before the end of the 2-year grace period (our motorcycle which in itself already saves us over $100/month in gas with Rob’s commute–not that I’ll ever finance one again). So, all together we have a low, low debt load, and because os it we are able to have a set amount direct deposited to savings every month. The thing is, though, that even with that, with the rate that housing prices are rising, there is NO WAY that we’ll really ever be able to move. We won’t really start building any substantial equity for several years yet, and our salary sure isn’t going up at the same rate as the housing prices. I just don’t see us being able to sell our house and buy either in WA or UT without taking a pretty serious drop in quality of life.

It’s ridiculous. I mean, who are these people who can pay these prices??? What jobs do they have? I hear people bvlame it on California’s real estate market. People sell their ‘shack’ down there for 600k, and then can outbid anyone up here and the prices go up, but man if that’s the cause for ALL these prices, isn’t California going to run out of people soon? Seriously, it doesn’t add up.

Are we, then some kind of relic, being a single-salary family? Has it really come to a point that choosing to give our children a proper upbringing with me here at home for them really means some kind of relative vow of poverty? I mean, my husband makes a GOOD salary, and yet, even we find ourselves eceonomically stimied?

Wow, this is all sounding really ranty. Seriously, though, I just don’t see how it can keep up. So prices have inflated to the point that it takes two salaries to meet them. Well, guess what, they’re still going up, and last time I checked, there were only two people in each marriage, so how are people going to keep up once real estate outpaces the double-income families?

I have no explanation for this, and no solution. I’ll say it’s messed up, though.