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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Heres the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase the typical valued U.S. home: January 2020: $52,041 January 2021: $52,087 January 2022: $63,111 January 2023: $87,092 January 2024: $93,227 January 2025: $98,900 January 2026: $93,061 While the income needed to buy the median-priced U.S. home is +78.8% higher than it was in January 2020, its down -5.9% year over year. Methodology: This Zillow calculation is conservative and assumes a 20% down payment and that the homebuyer spends less than 30% of their monthly income on the total monthly payment. This is a financed purchase, of course. For typical home value, Zillow economists used the latest Zillow Home Value Index reading. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Regional housing markets that have experienced outright home price corrections since the end of the pandemic housing boom have seen faster affordability improvements. That said, many of those placeslike the Austin, Texas, metro areaalso experienced greater home price overheating during the pandemic housing boom. How did we get here? During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate that new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand. Unlike housing demand, housing supply isnt as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up like that. As a result, the heightened pandemic-era demand drained the market of active inventory and sent national home prices soaring. The typical U.S. home value measured by the Zillow Home Value Index in January 2026 is still a staggering +44.7% greater than in January 2020. That overheated home price growth, coupled with the ensuing mortgage rate shock, with the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate jumping up from under 3% to over 7%, created the fastest-ever deterioration in housing affordability in 2022. Over the past two years, housing affordability has improved some; however, it still remains challenged. While the exact hit has varied, this decades affordability squeeze has spread across much of the countryjust look at the two maps below. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); The challenge, of course, is that incomes havent kept up. The gap has narrowed since the end of 2022; however, its still wide. While the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase a typical U.S. home increased by +78.8% between January 2020 and January 2026, average weekly earnings of U.S. workers have risen by +30.7%, and overall U.S. consumer inflation has grown by +26% during the same period.
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Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You dont have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you dont have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! A printable, personal, pocketable calendar To make your own single-page printed calendar, use NeatoCal. NeatoCal is a free web page that prints out a full-year calendar on a single 11-by-8.5-inch piece of paper. Printing the basic calendar takes maybe 10 seconds, but you can also spend a few minutes customizing it to your liking. Calendars are free to print with no sign-ups needed, and the underlying code is open-source. The default NeatoCal is a 12-month calendar for 2026, with one column for each month and the weekends highlighted in gray. Youre supposed to print it in landscape mode, and theres a little space for writing next to each day. NeatoCals default 12-month view is clean and simple. The real power of NeatoCal, however, is in all the ways you can customize it. Visit the project page, and youll see a list of ways to modify the calendar by adding some code to the end of the page address. For example, lets say you want to print a calendar for 2027. Instead of visiting the main calendar page at this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ . . . youd head to this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2027 Or lets say you want to print out a quarterly calendar instead of a full year. For that, we can use some code for specifying three months instead of 12: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3 What happens when you want to print a calendar for Q2? For that, well use some code to offset the start date by a specified number of months: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3&start_month=3 Notice how the above example uses an ampersand (the & symbol) to combine the code for total number of months and the number of months to offset. With a bit of easy customization, you can make your printed calendar look any way you want. The full list of URL parameters reveals all kinds of neat possibilities. You can add moon phases, adjust fonts, change the highlight colors, and tweak the abbreviation length for days and months. Theres even a calendar that highlights alternating weeks instead of weekends: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=hallon-almanackan My favorite feature of all, though, is the ability to import events from ICS calendar files via this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?ics Want to add events from your Google Calendar? Head to the Google Calendar website, click the vertical ellipses () next to your main calendar, head to Settings and Sharing, then select Export calendar. This will download a ZIP file containing an .ICS file, which you can drag and drop into the page linked above. If youre feeling especially crafty, you can also use this tool to create an ICS file with one-off or repeating events. Or you can use an AI tool like Claude to turn a list of plain text events into a downloadable ICS file. This is how I was able to create a printable calendar with every Yankee game in 2026: NeatoCal can even create custom calendars with specific events included. Once youve designed a calendar to your liking, just hit Ctrl+P or Cmd+P in your browser to bring up the print dialog (or use the Share command to find the Print option from a mobile device), make sure it all fits properly on one page, and start printing. Stick it to your fridge, pin it on your cubicle, or fold it up into your wallet and start enjoying the analog clendar lifestyle again. NeatoCal works in any web browser, ideally on a device that can send pages to a printer. The site is free to use with no limits or sign-ins. The developer says that everything is loaded locally in your own web browser, though as an open-source project, you can also download and self-host your own version. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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This week, Apples newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptops starting cost of just $599a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer. Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neos product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more. Yet if youve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should know that there are plenty of additional Mac apps that can elevate your productivity. Here are four cool and unexpected ones you should check out to take your MacBook Neo productivity to the next level. Magnet keeps your workspace organized on the MacBook Neo’s small screen One reason Apple can keep the price of the Neo so low is that it has the smallest display of any MacBook. At just 13 inches, the Neo has a smaller screen than both the 13.6-inch MacBook Air and 14-inch MacBook Pro. But smaller screen sizes mean that you have less desktop real estate to manage your overlapping windows, so things can get crowded fast. [Screenshot: Bootcode A.S.] Enter Magnet. This useful app helps you organize your desktop workspace in a snap. Magnet instantly moves your apps into a tiled pattern of your choice. For example, if you have a web browser, an email client, and a chatbot open, you can quickly arrange them into three neat windows on your screen. Or, you can use Magnet to snap one app to the left half of your screen, while the other two apps each fill one-quarter of the right side. The tiled arrangements are up to you. Magnet perfectly aligns window sizes with a click, so you dont have to waste time resizing your app windows manually, leaving more time for productivity. Glide sharpens your reading focus Small screens like Neo’s can also make it harder to focus on your content, especially when reading long text documents. Sentences in a document or web page can blend together over time, and if we look away for a moment, it might take a few moments to find the sentence we were reading, breaking our concentration. [Screenshot: Applorium Ltd] Thats where Glide comes in. The app dims your entire screen except for a narrow band running across its full width. This band functions as a rectangular spotlight that highlights your text and follows your cursor. The idea is to make it hover over the line you’re reading, which helps you focus. It also acts as a helpful visual cue of where you left off in the document when you return to your computer after stepping away. Perplexity is the AI chatbot Apple Intelligence should have been Apple markets the MacBook Neo as a great computer for using its Apple Intelligence tools. The problem, though, is that Apple Intelligence is a pretty disappointing AI platform. Everything from its writing to its image generation tools is fairly lackluster compared to other AI options. [Screenshot: Perplexity AI, Inc.] But the biggest drawback of Apple Intelligence is that you cant use it like most people are accustomed to using AI: in a chatbot format. Sure, you can ask Apple Intelligence questions via voice or text, but the platform doesnt provide a history of your conversations, and the answers it gives, frankly, arent very good. Thats why Neo owners should download the Perplexity app. This is the chatbot Apple didnt include with the Neo. Its also notably better than competitors like ChatGPT at research tasks, such as the kind you do for school or work, because it cites where it found the answers it provides to you. Soulver 3 is the calculator for people who prefer words over math In both work and school, we often perform tasks that involve calculations. The new MacBook Neo has a Calculator app, but its quite basic. It also relies on your knowing the correct formulas to get accurate answers. If you don’t know how to formulate the equation for, say, the price of a $3,500 widget order after a 17% discount is applied, the standard Calculator app is useless anyway. [Screenshot: Acqualia Software] If you struggle with formatting equations, Soulver 3 is a game-changer. The app is part notepad, part calculator, which allows you to input equations using natural language prompts. For example, with the scenario above, it doesnt matter if I dont know the exact formula for calculating a percentage discount. I can simply type 17% off $3,500 into Soulver 3, and it will return the answer ($2,905.00). Even in an era of artificial intelligence, Soulver 3 is one of the most useful apps your Neo can offer, since LLM chatbots remain pretty bad at performing math computations.
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