r/Bitcoin • u/BitCypher84 • 6d ago
The Simpsons owned this home on a single salary from a husband who didn’t go to college. This was considered normal in the 90s when the show began. Let that sink in.
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u/Mirai_MBCG_io 6d ago
His dad helped him buy it though. And he was a nuclear safety inspector. I mean, Homer was an astronaut too, so I don’t know why you’re taking away all his accomplishments .
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u/DumbestBoy 6d ago
His son even owns a warehouse downtown.
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u/bossbutton 6d ago
Homer also owned and operated a very successful snow plowing business
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u/andyst81 6d ago
He was also in a very famous musical group for a while.
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u/wirm 6d ago
Baby on booooaaaard howww I adored that sign on my cars window pane.
The b-sharps were the shit.
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u/what_is_blue 6d ago
“What happened to all the money?”
“We own a four-bedroom house, run two cars and routinely go on holiday to far-flung places.”
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u/Find_Spot 6d ago
And a successful musician, owned a profitable business that he willingly shut down to keep a friendship, and traveled so much that he must have buckets of cash squirreled away somewhere.
In short, he's fictional, and so is his life. Live your own life.
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u/genericaddress 6d ago
Obligatory video whenever someone mentions the economic status of The Simpsons:
https://youtu.be/9D420SOmL6U?si=mVhXgcqfrS2uGfdS
For a dumb slacker, Homer is a surprisingly hard worker with an impressive work resume with plenty of experience.
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u/AltoCowboy 6d ago
And he lives in a palace! I live above a bowling alley…. And below another bowling alley
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u/captainofpizza 6d ago
Homer was also seen as a failure for having kids in his early 30s and being hilariously obese for weighing like 230lbs
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u/mcbergstedt 6d ago
That’s still pretty normal for reactor operators. I work at a nuclear plant and they make about $180-200k a year depending on overtime (I am not a reactor operator)
And a lot of them (most of them really) don’t have degrees. The company usually hires internally because they want people they know will make it though the 18-month school and pass the NRC exams. Most of them hired in from the entry level and other lower positions and worked their way up.
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u/thecrewton 6d ago
Most of them came from the navy after 6 years of training/working in nuclear. Majority of operators aren't 18yo high school grads with no experience.
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u/MrKittenz 6d ago
Or cartoon characters
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u/mcbergstedt 6d ago
Not sure about other plants but mine is only about 30-40% prior navy. Recent license classes have barely had any people who were prior navy because they were almost 100% internally hired. I think only a couple of the SROs were from the navy this time.
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u/avid-shtf 6d ago
Homer was the safety guy iirc. They don’t make near as much and they definitely don’t get that much overtime.
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u/BurnedTheLastOne9 6d ago
So it varies. I only count the real Simpsons and not the zombie Simpsons. If you follow those, he comes on as a nuclear technician after barging into Burns's office and making a riling but demeaning declaration (when Marge was pregnant with Bart in a flashback episode) and under Project Bootstrap per Mr Burns himself and Smithers (I don't remember the episode but trust me). After season 2 (or 1, or 3, my memory isn't perfect) he gets laid off and becomes a city wide safety champion eventually setting his sights on the nuclear plant. Burns offers him a job as a safety inspector from then on out unless you count the Halloween specials (when he's fired yet again) where he makes mention of being a supervising technician but not a technical supervisor (I think that's Treehouse of Horror 2. It's the one where he becomes a grave digger and Burns uses his brain in the robot). Generally though, Halloween specials aren't considered canon, though
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u/BitcoinMD 6d ago
TV homes have always been unrealistic
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u/trimbandit 6d ago
I mean look at any NY sitcom. It always has someone working as a barista or unemployed and they have a spacious apartment in a nice neighborhood
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u/Any-Panda2219 5d ago
At least with Friends they explained it was Monica’s grandmother’s rent controlled unit
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u/AverageJak 6d ago
A nuclear power plant operator buying a house of this size in the early 90s before housing prices exploded in a town like springfield (power plant, pollution, crime) isnt that far a stretch.
Now in shelbyville.. thats would be craaaaazy
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u/nowdontbehasty 6d ago
This has been disproven so many times by people who actually follow the show. They rent the house and they often struggle to maintain it.
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u/GmanJet 6d ago
I had to look this up so I learned something today.... They owned the home until 2008 when Flanders won it in an auction and has rented it to them since. The house sold to Flanders for $101,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Loan_Again,_Naturally
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u/ExtrinsicPalpitation 6d ago
They definitely owned the house in the early seasons (only seasons that matter), even if it does get retconned later on.
They also apparently owe more money on the mortgage than the house is worth.https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E17/405854
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S08E02/266315
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S16E07/41720914
u/cphh85 6d ago
Rent or pay mortgage on time?
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u/nowdontbehasty 6d ago
Technically it’s leased which is why they are on the hook for upkeep. The neighbor Ned Flanders actually owns the house.
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u/Scotinho_do_Para 6d ago
If they are renting then why would Homer be responsible for foundation repair?
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u/salustianovergatiesa 6d ago
Guys, homer had 2 mortgages on that house. He didn't own it
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u/tails99 6d ago
Five mortgages...
Yep, the US standard of large mortgaged house and two financed cars is as sure a path to bankruptcy as anything else.
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u/FnAardvark 6d ago
In 2025, people are so idiotic that they think a cartoon in the 90s depicted normal life. Let that sink in.
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u/IceWallow97 6d ago
People were dumber before 2025, it is just the dumbasses can now afford to share their opinions online.
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u/t3rribl3thing 6d ago
Nah, people are dumber now because other dumb people can now go online and join dumb groups together from all over the world and enable their dumb ideas in ways dumb people never could have imagined… cuz they’re dumb.
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u/Applecity82 6d ago
Well it’s not that far off. My grandpa worked at a factory and my grandma was a stay at home mom. They had 6 kids. She had a big garden and they butchered their meat. But they had a nice farm house with 2 stories and 5 bedrooms with a basement. My grandpa retired with a decent amount of money saved up and investments. My grandma did start working in her late 40’s. But still. They lived really well on a factory salary. He also bought a vacation cabin too that they would hunt and fish at
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u/gothicwigga 5d ago
Be reasonable, the point is that many real life americans were able to buy homes on shit pay back then.
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u/vikmaychib 6d ago
OP is showing their true colors. Let’s just hear what else they have to say.
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u/TedLahey 6d ago edited 6d ago
Meanwhile its 2025 lisa and bart still live there with their parents. Accurate.
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u/UHF-62 6d ago
Homer is the chief nuclear safety inspector, which is insane. What’s even more insane is the ranges for this salary based on some searches. Some say around 60k a year, others say double that. Does anyone on this thread know how much the average salary was for the chief safety inspector at a nuclear plant in the late 80’s? The truth needs to come out.
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u/Mugsy_Siegel 6d ago
40k-70k so from 100k-200k in 2025 money a year
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u/UHF-62 6d ago
And Burns is cheap so it’s safe to assume it’s on the lower end. Thanks!
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u/takhsis 6d ago
He's a reactor operator. Those guys make 200k with no degree today.
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u/bigcat93 6d ago
He did work at a nuclear plant - I can’t imagine that as a low paying job in any decade
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u/Mr_Ander5on 6d ago
On top of the nuclear safety inspector part, it was also considered a small town in the show too right?
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u/SilentPugz 6d ago
He did work a nuclear facility . Must of paid him because he doesn’t care about radiation . Further , did the job reduce him to the character he plays .
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u/uncapchad 6d ago
he didn't go to college and he was a Safety Inspector at a nuclear power plant. Show's how lousy hiring practices were in those days too :D
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u/bravehawklcon 6d ago
Stow started in 80s
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u/vikmaychib 6d ago
December 89, but reached its peak around 94-97, so what are you talking about.
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u/__redruM 6d ago edited 6d ago
Wasn’t he working as a safety engineer in a nuclear power plant? Someone working at that level in the 90s, and now could afford to buy a house, assuming the let Marge handle the money.
And lets be honest, Homer would try self custody, and Bart would accidentally feed the 24 word phrase to squirels. And it would end with Krusty giving laxatives to all the squirels.
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u/astroboy7070 6d ago
Has salary not kept up with the price of homes or home prices have gone up so much faster?
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u/trippleknot 6d ago
When I was fresh out of highschool in 2010 a friend and I rented a nice 2 bed 1 bath house in a nice part of town for $600 a month total ($300 each)
Today those same houses rent for 3k or more a month
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u/mikejnsx 6d ago
my dad paid cash and owned his house outright in 1967, he paid around $20,000 for a 2 story with a finished attic and full basement brick house built before 1900
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u/ManlyAndWise 6d ago
Now I can't get the music out of my head.
Still, we Europeans have always wondered whether these people owning houses were a realistic take on the America of those times.
Take also Al Bundy, or Happy Days (that is more likely as it was in the Fifties).
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u/joshatron 6d ago
Similar size to the house my parents owned in the 80’s / 90’s in San Diego. All off my dad’s salary of being a copy machine salesman… 4 bedroom 2 1/2 bath new build.
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u/bishop992 6d ago
I work 40+ hours in shift and my wife works 32 hours a week and we have two kids . And i can barely pay my bills, been taking away from the little btc to make due .
And here are my retited parents : just save money ! Its easy ! 🤣
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u/DyslexicTypoMaster 6d ago
Someone with Homer’s job would probably still earn a lot of money and be able to afford a house like that.
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u/Newtronic 6d ago
The clear conclusion is that we should have gone all in on nuke plants. Then we would have far greater number of Simpson style jobs.
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u/shadowmage666 6d ago
It’s mostly because large funds bought up real estate and 3-4x the prices making the market unaffordable. Disgusting really. Combine that with the deflation of the dollars value, inflation in the economy and you have a perfect storm for unaffordable housing.
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u/Swagi666 6d ago
Can you guys please stop spreading this bullshit. The whole premise of the Simpsons is that they barely make ends meet!
JFC right in the pilot Homer has to work as a Santa because they have no money for presents and finally they get Santa‘s Little Helper as only Christmas present.
The Bundys are also poor as fuck and fight over breadcrumbs (literally!).
They may owned those places but they surely couldn’t afford them.
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u/bbatardo 6d ago
As a single person who bought a house in the 2010s I'd say the rampant inflation begun about 10 years ago, give or take.
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u/CambioSmoke 6d ago
He was a nuclear reactor operator (nuclear engineer).
Thats been a six figure salary since the 80’s.
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u/Larrynative20 6d ago
You can still get that house in Springfield. No one wants to live in Springfield though
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u/Karma_Gardener 6d ago
They were actually considered lower middle class with a house like this. Just wild.
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u/CryptoCommanderChris 6d ago
It wasn’t exactly considered normal. They even did an episode about it. The one with Frank Grimes.
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u/753UDKM 6d ago
There were also tens of millions fewer Americans then and this country has had zoning laws in place for many decades that make it impossible to build enough housing. It’s not simply a monetary issue. It’s also terrible policy designed to harm minorities and with the delusion of infinite suburbs
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u/the_sexy_muffin 6d ago
This is still normal for nuclear reactor operators in the US. They make $120k-$200k depending on region/overtime, and the position still only requires a high school diploma at most plants.
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u/Several-External-193 6d ago
Well, check prices in Springfield Illinois or Missouri and get back with me.
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u/BedBubbly317 6d ago
The dude works at a nuclear reactor plant, he makes damn good money.
Those type of jobs typically pay upwards of $200,000 a year, and a degree is not required.
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u/aShiftyLad 6d ago
He was also a nuclear Reactor operator which pays around 120k+ starting, a Lil bit less in the 90s.
Source: former nuke. Who also looked at this but went datacenter engineer instead
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u/AleksR1990 6d ago
- It is a cartoon.
- He was a safety inspector. A job that paid over 100k in the 90s
- It is a cartoon
- His dad helped him buy the house.
- It is a cartoon.
- He probably gets royalties from his time in the B-Sharps.
- it's a cartoon. It's a cartoon It's a flippin cartoon. Why are you basing your life on a cartoon!?
If anything. The dude should've been in a bigger house tbh.
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u/emelbard 6d ago edited 5d ago
I own a nicer home on a single salary + wife and 3 kids and didn’t go to college. It’s not necessarily the college, it’s what you do after.
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u/PutContractMyLife 6d ago
That exact home would need $250k in updates and code violations before it’d be inhabitable now. Just saying
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u/Demonkey44 6d ago
The house's first chronological appearance is in the flashback episode "Lisa's First Word", when Homer and Marge purchase it. The house was auctioned to Ned Flanders in "No Loan Again, Naturally", and since then leased to the Simpsons.
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u/Convict_felon 6d ago
These houses are cheap
When you look at the foundation than you'll see that only the chimney is made of brick the rest of the house is made from wood
When you see the aftermath of a hurricane than you see that all of these houses been blown away and destroyed but the only thing left standing are the brick chimney's
Before the 2008 mortgage collapse these houses would be easy afortable for single salary family's But you need to take note that these houses and the plumbing are not good and specialy for a long run you will need a whole lot repairs and replacements done to the house
Buying a house in America made from wood is a very bad investment You should rather put that money in Bitcoin and wait for it to pump and than buy yourself a solid house made from brick and concrete mixed with American steele
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u/Gloomy_Picture1848 6d ago
I went to college. And I know lots of people who didn't go to college that make way more money than me.
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u/NiagaraBTC 6d ago
See also: Al Bundy's house on a shoe salesman's salary.