My 6-Year Journey from $60K College Debt to $115K Net Worth & 816 Credit Score [OC]

[u/WhiskeySauer]

Getting a good job, paying off your debts, living cheaply, and saving as much as you can is straightforward advice, but it has always been hard for to me follow it without having something to visualize. So I started doing all of my budgeting on my own in MS excel and I’m using it to help me visualize my financial decisions and plan out my strategy to retire early. Here’s the total breakdown of how I have spent every dollar I’ve earned over the last 6 years. By keeping my expenses super low I was able to pay off my debts pretty quickly and my credit score spiked to over 800.

http://imgur.com/WEPAfry

Another great thing about budgeting on my own is that I can plan out the future easier. Here’s my projected spending into year 2030.

http://imgur.com/HRhyANF

If you're interested, here’s how I gather the data to make these spreadsheets:

http://imgur.com/a/zbWa2

And here is a link to my spreadsheet template if you want to start your own budget for 2017:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0/view

Disclaimer: This is a cross-post from /r/financialindependence that I'm bringing here based off the attention the post received on my budget/chart layout.

edit: grammar

[u/Dont____Panic]

Rent control doesn't CAUSE high housing prices. It actually depresses real estate prices and has lots of other weird distorting effects, but it certainly doesn't CAUSE them.

Ultra-low interest causes high housing prices. Combine that with a concentration of high-end jobs and a scarcity of land...

You honestly think that an in-demand area like SF on a small pennensula could avoid high housing costs?

I mean Toronto has no height restrictions, so there are currently 65 major highrise buildings going up. That doesn't stop the median home price from being $1.45m and the cheapest pile of shit 3br in the ghetto being $759k.

It's where the jobs are, so people move here, even if it means getting 3 roommates and selling 3/4 of your stuff.

[u/flash__ → u/Dont____Panic]

There's a whole Bay Area that has refused to build new housing, refused to lift height restrictions, and refused to adapt to the influx of new workers. There is room, friend.

[u/Pulstastic → u/Dont____Panic]

Of course rent control causes high prices. It depresses the prices of the unit actually subject to the control, but in the long run it decreases larger incentives to build more housing, leading to too-small housing stocks.

Yes, SF is in demand. But you're focusing on only one part of the supply-demand equation. Supply should be reacting to demand (via tons of new apartment buildings) but in SF it isn't. Why? Because Bay-Area politics fucks everything up.

You say that the situation is partially caused by SF being on a small peninsula. Maybe that's partially true. But if so, why is the rest of the Bay Area still so expensive? And even if SF's land area is limited, that still doesn't explain it. I enjoyed visiting SF a couple months ago. Beautiful city. But why oh why is so much of this "small peninsula" covered in quaint 2-story Spanish-style rowhouses? It makes zero sense. Somebody should go in and bulldoze whole blocks of them and erect half of downtown Chicago (whose rent, incidentally, is in comparison cheap as fuck) in their place. The fact that they politically can't is the kind of mismanagement that makes SF housing so expensive.

I can't speculate as to Toronto without knowing more about the city. All I can say is that I believe in basic economics.

[u/pewpsprinkler → u/Pulstastic]

in the long run it decreases larger incentives to build more housing, leading to too-small housing stocks.

No it doesn't. It doesn't affect "housing" at all, only apartments. Homes, townhomes, and condos would simply be built instead.

Supply should be reacting to demand (via tons of new apartment buildings) but in SF it isn't. Why?

Uhhh, because it is on a peninsula and there is no significant room to add it.

You say that the situation is partially caused by SF being on a small peninsula. Maybe that's partially true. But if so, why is the rest of the Bay Area still so expensive? And even if SF's land area is limited, that still doesn't explain it.

You said 3 times in 2 sentences that the land scarcity doesn't explain it, almost like you are trying to convince yourself. You are wrong, the land scarcity is the lion's share of the problem.

Somebody should go in and bulldoze whole blocks of them and erect half of downtown Chicago (whose rent, incidentally, is in comparison cheap as fuck) in their place.

Are you serious? Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? The landowners would not consent. If you tried to seize their land with eminent domain for "redevelopment", they would fight you to the death in the courts. Fighting rich people doesn't work. That is why governments target poor people for redevelopment, and even then, it is a huge hassle.

The fact that they politically can't is the kind of mismanagement that makes SF housing so expensive.

You wouldn't feel that way if you owned one of the homes that some random internet guy wanted to bulldoze to jam pack in high density housing.

p.s. you can't just add a shit-ton of people into an area. You need the road infrastructure, utilities, and all that to be upgraded to match. THAT can be even more difficult. You can't just start dumping massive high rises on the same roads. The whole road network would clusterfuck.

[u/Scalded1 → u/pewpsprinkler]

Rent control is pretty complicated and a lot depends on how it is implemented but yes it can constrain the rental market supply. it tends to favor some renters with lower prices and raise the prices for the rest of the renters.

[u/pewpsprinkler → u/Scalded1]

It does suppress rental property values, but not overall housing supply. It just means you end up with more housing for sale instead of for rent. Prices can't be raised over what the market can support no matter what, so you can't shift the costs onto other renters. They will just live somewhere else.

[u/ohcrocsle → u/pewpsprinkler]

he's not saying to bulldoze without the owner's consent, he's saying that almost all of these places are rental properties and development companies should buy the properties and make high rise apartment buildings to capitalize better on the space.

the issue is that, like LA, there are restrictions on building development designed to prevent this because the people who own property in the cities don't want their property value to go down when housing supply increases.

[u/pewpsprinkler → u/ohcrocsle]

It isn't that simple. It isn't like a conspiracy to manipulate housing supply, it is more like (1) They don't want the traffic situation to be even worse than it already is, and (2) they don't want all the problems that come with high density housing, like crime, etc.

Increasing the resident population in an unplanned community means you have to upgrade a ton of other things, from roads to utility infrastructure.

[u/ohcrocsle → u/pewpsprinkler]

you're right, there are a myriad of reasons to keep property value and rent high. there's not really any stimulus in the direction of lower rent and property values.

[u/bmc2 → u/Dont____Panic]

Rent control removes a ton of inventory from the rental market, which results in significantly lower supply. This causes higher rental prices.

You honestly think that an in-demand area like SF on a small pennensula could avoid high housing costs?

Have you ever been to the Bay Area? It's all single family homes and small apartment buildings. We could have significantly lower housing prices if we built more.

[u/Dont____Panic → u/bmc2]

So, I can buy height restrictions being a catalyst for cost growth. There's no doubt about that.

That said, places with similar desirability (Vancouver, Toronto) that have NO rent control have very similar prices for single family homes (the only exception being increased availability of high-rise units- which themselves are crazy expensive averaging $680k)

Rent control distorts the markets, but there are equal upward (supply constraints) and downward (reduced desirability of investment property) pressures and overall it appears to be almost neutral, to me.

[u/WROL → u/Dont____Panic]

Had no idea it was that crazy in Toronto.

[u/0102030405 → u/WROL]

The median home price is just over 800k according to the listing service, and the lower end is definitely not in the 700s. A small detached house is a sketchy area is around 400k or less.

Source for the first stat, with info about condos, semi-detached, and others: http://creastats.crea.ca/treb/mls/mls05_median.htm

I'm not saying that isn't much more expensive than other areas, it totally is. But for what it's become and where it's moving towards, it's pretty much in line with other dense metropolitan areas. The only difference is that it's happening extremely quickly. This happened to London, New York, LA, etc, but over a much longer period of time and with fewer condos of course.

The Bay Area is very similar to Vancouver, with the NIMBYism and the super high costs. But the wages are much lower.