One thing I have noticed is how prevalent the hustle culture has become among Millennials. LinkedIn is a hotbed of narcissism, and Twitter has a ton of self-proclaimed business superstars who have made money by having companies entirely dependent on using foreign labor and providing shitty service for customers. It's quite appalling how often you hear fellow Millennials go on and on boasting about their own "successes" or try to sell themselves without an ounce of honesty.
The hustle of creating "passive income" means that we are going to see a lot of sociopaths becoming landlords and doing the bare-minimum for those who rent from them, and the quality of services will continue to decline across all companies as there is no value in providing a good service, merely making money. The decline of quality we have seen from the boomer generation onward (yes, that includes you, Generation X, you aren't exempt from being self-destructive narcissists like your parents and your children) is going to ramp up significantly.
Some people will say, "blame the system, not the person," but for god's sake, eventually someone has to stand up and refuse to operate as basically a scam artist. For as many supposed "leftists" there are among Millennials, they sure have no qualms about taking the worst aspects of human greed and using that as their core business model.
Am I over-exaggerating here?
I have rental property--really don't understand the slumlord mentality. I guess it's like you say make a quick buck now or whatever. In my opinion it's a very short term mindset. I have a property manager to deal with tenants, but our arrangement is to not skimp on maintenance. Earlier this year I told them to totally replace the HVAC unit, because honestly that old one was a lemon and I was sick of throwing parts at it. Yeah, it wasn't cheap, but in the long run it's way cheaper than repairing it every 3 months.
If I had to guess, a lot of these people actually can't afford to upkeep their property though. They stretched way too thin to buy it thinking it would be passive income and if you have a nasty mortgage on the property there's not necessarily a ton to be made. I own mine outright, but if I still had the mortgage that was originally on it (at much better terms than you'd possibly get today), looking forward to next year I'm probably only breaking even. Costs have gone up. I'm considering raising rent and may discuss with property manager to see their thoughts, very well may leave it alone though for another year. Cheaper to keep a tenant who pays on time every month than risk it for $50 or $100 more they might not want to pay. It will have to go up eventually though.
Thought about buying another next year, but it would be on a mortgage and with the atrocious terms of those right now, I'll probably look for some land I can build on in the future that I can buy with cash instead.
Yeah hopefully so, or whenever I sell it I won't have the value of a beaten down shithole. There's not many rent houses where I live and of course I get one right by me that gets neglected. It was never even a bad house, but whoever owns it does the absolute bare minimum to maintain it. It had a decent size tree branch fall near my fence. A tree service comes out to fix it, only does the bare minimum. They could have paid the service who was already an extra $100-200 and pruned the entire obviously neglected tree. They didn't and a big branch fell on their roof and damaged it, which is still not fixed. No way is that cheaper than just fixing it the first time. It's so dumb.