• psvrh@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yes and no. Wealth can be used as a proxy, usually via debt, to acquire more wealth. If this wasn’t the case, Elon Musk would not have been able to buy Twitter.

      This is why renters are absolutely screwed: not only are they spending the same as someone with a mortgage in many cases, but they can’t leverage equity at all. Need a car repair done? Send a kid to school? Retire? Invest? If you rent, you’re screwed.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We’re not talking about Musk here. Most home owners can’t leverage their equity to buy some bread.

        • psvrh@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Yes, they can.

          Many (many!) have leveraged their equity into buying more houses to rent out for income, and/or into all sorts of HELOC-related silliness.

          I don’t think peolle realize how stark the divide is between people with homes and people without, especially for anyone who bought before 2020. We’ve created, almost overnight, a massive and likely permanent underclass, and we have no intention of putting the kinds of supports in place to deal with the problems that will create over the next few decades as renters are broken by retirement and AI.

          We’ve substituted paying fair wages and having real retirement plans with house value, and now we’re on the verge of slamming the door on a huge portion of our society by locking them out of home equity at the same time we’re diluting their earnings.

          Yes, Musk et al are an extreme example, but the equity gap is real.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      You can’t buy bread with stocks either but Elon is still rich.

      The difference is that you can’t earn a living by owning your primary residence, so you’re still working class.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s my point. Owning a home doesn’t make anyone rich. Owning multiple homes which generate income is a different thing, but people here assume is that if you bough a house in London 20 years ago for pennies, then today you are a fucking Bezos swimming in money. That’s not the case.

    • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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      1 year ago

      Sort of. You can do a one-time conversion to income if you want, and income can of course be diverted towards very slowly building up wealth, but yeah they’re not the same thing.

    • rab@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah you can, you can leverage your equity to buy basically anything. Another house for instance…