Adam L

Preface: This is a long read. I am not a financial advisor. I’m providing this anecdotal experience of mine for informational and educational purposes only. What you choose to do with this info is entirely up to you. This is not some kind of scam post, I'm not asking for money or support or for you to click any links. I'm merely communicating my thoughts on a devolving economy and hopefully alerting some people to what I think is going to happen. I truly believe that the window for getting out of debt is closing fast. There are a lot of factors which pushed me towards this realization, primarily having to deal with artificial intelligence coupled with the extremely obvious goals of corporate America to generate profits for shareholders at any cost with zero empathy for any of their employees who are impacted by their decisions. We’re in the first stage of an AI revolution that I believe will put tens of millions of people in the US alone out of work. You don’t need to look far to see the evidence of this. YouTube is saturated with videos of people who are panicking post-layoff trying to find a new position, and utterly failing. Many of them are fighting for job openings that have literally THOUSANDS of applicants. To compound the issue, they’re forced into pitting themselves against H-1B visa holders, who will work for slave wages out of desperation to stay in our country. There are many examples which demonstrate how truly chaotic the job market is becoming. As AI continues its exponential improvements, and becomes a PhD-level expert on every subject known to mankind, corporate America is seizing on the opportunity to embrace it in order to drive costs down and profits up by getting rid of their employees. If you’re in a white collar job, your days are numbered and few. To you blue collar workers out there: you're only safe for a little while longer. Robots are becoming more capable than ever. As soon as AI is merged with robots capable of doing labor, you better believe almost every blue collar job will disappear also. To compound the problem of a dwindling pool of career opportunities, a not-so-small number of job listings aren’t even real! Companies recently started posting “ghost jobs” in order to make it appear that their businesses are growing, and they’re also using the listings as a (not so) subtle threat to their employees that they are replaceable. I lost my job in October of 2024 and made a plan for myself to retire, which I’ll explain soon. I’m a former corporate software engineer who worked at two massive juggernaut companies, Amazon and Microsoft. I have over 25 years of industry experience. After the job loss, I did what most people do: I applied for unemployment and fulfilled the weekly requirement of submitting job applications. Week after week I filed 5 or more applications, and all for positions that I was highly qualified for. Every one of the job postings had anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of applicants. I received exactly zero callbacks from all the applications I submitted over those months. Bear in mind, I had pretty much already made up my mind to retire, but after experiencing abysmal results when applying, the decision was made for me, whether I wanted it or not. Now let me segue to the real estate market. Part of the retirement plan was to get out of debt, and do it fast. With no employment opportunities and sizable debt (mortgage, HELOC and a loan for a monstrous solar panel/battery system) there was no way to keep our very large, very nice home. Before you criticize me on accruing debt, you have to understand that things looked very different for me just a year prior to me losing my job. I was making over a quarter of a million dollars a year, and losing my job was the furthest thing in my mind. I had also just been promoted a year and a half before losing my position. Paying bills was never a struggle and the debt was never a threat, so there was never any concern about what I owed... until my job evaporated. If I could go back and do it all over I certainly wouldn’t have taken on any debt, but we all know about hindsight. I digress. We put our very nice, very large 4 bed/3 bath home with an office, an entertainment room as well as a pool surrounded by an expansive patio, on a parcel with over an acre of land up for sale in March of 2025. I priced it high as we’d made a lot of very nice improvements to the property because, as mentioned, job loss never crossed my mind and we had planned on making this one our “forever home.” I also felt that we might still be able to capitalize on the tail end of the seller’s market which had persisted for over half a decade. It was a race to sell as I knew that this was all about to change because of the threat AI posed as well as high interest rates. The AI threat mostly flew under most people’s radar since companies weren’t blurting out that they were laying people off and replacing them with AI, but I knew it was fast approaching. After a month without a single offer, and if memory serves we only had a single showing that first month, I started to incrementally drop the price by $10K at a time every two weeks. Month after month, zero offers. Once the price dropped below a certain threshold we started to get showings here and there, but it was very obvious that the seller’s market had already ebbed and we were now in a buyer’s market. We got some ridiculous lowball offers (to be expected) but not a single decent offer was submitted. Once my severance was used up, I was forced into periodically pulling money out of my 401k to cover loans and other bills, which put even more pressure on us to sell. It took us almost 5 months of aggressive price drops until we hit the “sweet spot” where we got a real offer which we accepted. It came with a LOT of contingencies from the buyers, including removal of the solar panels and batteries and repairing the roof and mounting locations where the equipment was installed, because the buyers were not willing to pay the extra money for any of the solar panel system. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but over those 5 months I’d kept an eye on many other home listings, as eventually we’d need a new home once we sold ours, and almost every single one of those listings stayed on the market. That was a big red flag that the real estate market was stagnant and had drifted well into a buyer’s market. While not getting anywhere near the amount we’d hoped to get, I am relieved we were even able to sell AT ALL, given current interest rates as of Q3 2025 and the incredibly competitive market. Thankfully, we had a ton of equity in our home, so we still walked away with a decent amount. My wife and I are now 100% debt free, and with everything that is happening right now in the job and real-estate market, the sense of relief I feel is beyond words. I don’t want to sound parasitical, but I’m not the one creating the conditions which is enabling our new goal of waiting a year or two before seriously looking for a replacement home. Why the wait? Because of everything I just wrote about. AI is going to put people out of work. The real estate market might temporarily be driven back into a seller’s market if and when interest rates are cut, but that isn’t going to last as the number of unemployed people is about to go through the roof thanks to the AI revolution. I firmly believe that the real estate market will soon be flooded with way more homes than it already is as people look to get out from under mortgages they can no longer pay due to being put out of work thanks to AI. When the market is inundated with tens of thousands of homes in every major marketplace across the nation, supply and demand dictates that prices MUST drop by a very significant amount, else homes will simply not sell. The pool of buyers will eventually be tiny, because as AI takes over jobs, a very large number of people will no longer have any income to buy a new home. That’s the unfortunate reality as I see it, and I’m waiting until this all starts to materialize. From all appearances, many sellers right now are living in a fantasy world where it’s still a buyer’s market. They haven’t woken up to the fact that the seller’s market flipped mid-year in 2024, in spite of their listing being up for six months or more, and many have stubbornly not dropped prices at all. Eventually they will have to face reality and adjust prices accordingly. I’ll be there when those prices hit near the bottom to get another nice home. Probably not as nice as what we had, but I believe that if we're patient enough we’ll get something dang near as nice. I’ll wrap this up by stating I am not happy about any of this. I wish AI was complementary to our jobs, instead of a replacement for us. I wish the real estate market wasn’t overflowing with homes not being sold. I wish people wouldn’t be facing layoffs and thrust into battling for a dwindling pool of jobs. Unfortunately reality seems to have other plans. So again, do with this info as you wish. I’m retired now and I feel that I’ve positioned my wife and I for long-term success. If you are in debt, you should really contemplate whether or not you can weather the storm of sudden job loss, because you might find yourself unemployed in the near future and unable to find a new position. If you have a home with equity in it, at least you might have an opportunity to sell, downsize and buy with cash to get out of debt before you find yourself in a market where there’s next to no buyers at all. If you made it this far, thank you very much for reading all this. I’m curious what people think! Do you see AI as a looming threat to your careers? Are you struggling to sell your home if you have it listed? What are your long-term plans for economic security? 🤔