[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=bearishgurl]When young adult residents of TX/OK/AR decide to get married, their main goal in the first years of marriage is to pay off their home and their new truck (if they have a loan on it). Especially if parents helped them build or buy the home.
A LOT of young couples in this region have their homes paid off PRIOR to having kids or at the very latest, by the time their youngest kid reaches school age.
A paid-off first home is a very important goal to this demographic and they’ll work several jobs to do it, if necessary.
Having excessive debt is shunned and this value is hammered into them by both sets of parents from the get go (during their engagement).
And no, they don’t all buy/build mcmansions for their first homes straight out of college![/quote]
I don’t agree with this. If people were this fiscally conservative, we wouldn’t have the dire stats about people not being prepared for retirement.
I think the data show that smaller rural cities are being economically left behind.[/quote]
I’m just not seeing the inability of (boomers?) to “retire” in my world. I know of maybe 2-3 females pushing 60 years old who may end up having a hardscrabble retirement but this was all due to the bad financial decisions they made while younger (reasons: past gambling addiction; squandered settlements they rec’d; and lost their longtime home due to over-borrowing on it). All are reasonably intelligent and still working FT and may yet be okay by the time they are 66 and eligible to collect a full SS benefit. Almost 100% of my relatives (mostly cousins but aunts and uncles as well, some of who are of the WWII generation) paid off their final home in their forties or early fifties or purchased their final home with all cash. Almost ALL have defined benefit pensions for life and several still run (or partially run, with other family members) their long-established family businesses. I’m not even seeing this phenomenon in my neighborhood, which is full of boomers and beyond. Quite the contrary. A good portion of them (some younger than me) are living in paid-off homes they “inherited” and in some cases have been living there for decades (and of course, have a minuscule property tax bill, as well). They’re not going anywhere and I can assure you that they will never be homeless or “destitute” (as long as they refrain from borrowing off their homes).
Pigg flyer has brought this subject up here many, many times but I don’t know what his frame of reference is. I’m just not seeing it in the real world …. at all.
It doesn’t matter to a “retiree” if the “small rural cities (they live in) have been economically left behind” as they are only working PT or not at all. This only matters to the Gen Y growing up in those towns who is (hopefully) headed off to college. After college graduation, this group typically does NOT move back to their (rural) home turf. They take the best FT job they are offered, wherever that may be. That is, unless they have been “pampered” by well-off helicopter parents in a CA coastal community. With this group, determining their actual “motivation to succeed” is a crapshoot. This group could easily end up back home after college graduation, moving into their old (well-appointed) bedrooms and play video games while pretending to “search” for a (local) minimum wage job and invite all their old (local) friends over every other weekend to swim, drink their parent(s) booze and hang out at their backyard built-in BBQ and/or jacuzzi. I mean, why move to “Gritty City” to pay exorbitant rent to accept a “real” job when they can continue to live the “cushy life” on their parents dime (and time)?? :=0
