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Originally Posted by Joan.of.the.Arch
I also wonder about your husband saying that the sort of people that you are looking to live near have stretched themselves to live in an even more expensive area.
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I wondered about that too. I don't know for sure whether he is right or wrong. I just recounted what he said. I questioned him about it, thinking that it is impossible that so many people in this country would choose to live their lives in such "large", irresponsible ways. He basically said that MOST people in this country do exactly THAT because they do not see the need to save the percentage of income that I aim to save ( I shoot for 20%-30% of gross income). Whether we are talking about the more blue-collar/working class, the "professional" class or other groups of people, pretty much everyone - he says - goes for higher mortgage at given income than I am willing to go to.
I told him then that I consider all these "everyone" to be plain irresponsible and that I do not want to make the choices they make even if this represents a good part of America.
He then said...well, then this is the kind of neighborhood we will be able to afford at this mortgage level. I said "be it" - even though, like I said before and I will say it again - I did not feel I could relate to the kind of people living in that neighborhood. That was primarily based on countenance, eyes, gaze, demeanour, appearance and yes, even based on choice of cars or decorations. I know the latter are much more superficial criteria for drawing completely accurate conclusions but they still worked for me, historically. However, that "sparkle" (or lack thereof) in the eyes and the gaze...they never lied to me. NEVER.
And do not get me wrong: those houses did not look bad at all, many quite nice, and many of those gas-guzzling cars were anything but inexpensive. So I certainly did not get the feeling of "sweet, cozy, street-smart, Down-to-Earth working/middle class people" that some seem to idealize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joan.of.the.Arch
Does he know that for certain, or could it be that he is deceiving himself because he would prefer to stretch to live in a more expensive area, perhaps more like the one he is familiar with, as you say his family does have more money than the two of you at this point?
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I think he used to be much more open to debt than he is today because well...he always saw that everyone lives like this here: car loans, student loans, mortgage (and not small mortgages, obviously). He does not have these views anymore. We are very much on the same page financially maybe because I have been "beating my views into his head"
for a while now. He was able to see how we just slowly got rid of unnecessary debt if we just "keep it together" and live with dignity, below our means, which meant giving up some culturally-dictated notions of "large enough space", "good enough car"/ "safe enough car", etc. Now we only have the mortgage but I still resent even this one, particularly because low - it is not, as we are still in the city. It is hard to be psychologically OK with living in a bank's house basically, when most people in my homecountry think that we must be insane to get into such debt when for them it is perfectly preferable to live with mama-in-law and daddy-in-law FOR FREE AND with FREE childcare handy, at all times.
Yes, his family and most of our friends have more money than we do and I think there's a part of my husband, somewhere deep down in his American soul
, that would still fancy living in a big, showy house, driving a respectable, "succesful" type car (which I loathe) and so on. I can't entirely blame him since most people's self-esteem in this culture is organically tied to "how much they make" and what their "material lifestyles/achievements" say about them.
Books like "The Millionaire Next Door" aside - there is an undebatable tendency in this culture to weigh someone's value based on their financial potential, doings, achievements only...and people can only know that about you when you more or less ..."SHOW IT, baby". That's why most people behave the way they behave. I would be willing to bet that those "modest millionaires next door" are few and far between.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joan.of.the.Arch
It is too bad that the downtown area that might interest you is too expensive.
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Yes, it is - not only expensive but also far away from my future workplace. We could never justify it. I do, however, have a former colleague (professor) who went to He** and back to buy some delapidated, horrible, bug infested house in that historic neighborhood (that he could barely afford) - just TO BE THERE and not somewhere else...for schools, for this, for that. He wanted to be in that "professorial/intellectual" area at any cost and THERE he ended up. I would not (and could not) go that far even though I would certainly like to have intellectually-inclined or just plain interesting neighbors.
But no, you can't have everything just right - so it will be the ..."not-so-interesting" neighborhood for us.