@Horseshoez wrote:
I have to laugh when I read all this fussing about "bad" interest rates; my wife and I bought two homes back in the 1990s, in 1995 our mortgage was just over 9.2%, so when we built our dream home in 1997 we were thrilled to get that "jumbo" mortgage for a flat 8%.
That must have been nice, before the price of the exact same house tripled. Or more.
My parents bought a house in 1980. Mortgage rates were even worse than what you describe, however the house was $20,000.
The last time it sold, Zillow said was a few years ago and the price was $127,000. So yeah, just make the house more than 6 times as much money and quibble about interest rates a little bit. Try financing this with bankruptcy credit and high rates.
The government lies and says the money has only lost 2/3rds of its value since I've been alive, in truth it's far worse than that, especially in housing. Where they have all these scams like Realpage for landlords (price fixing, illegal, being sued for antitrust) and the manipulation of housing prices (keeping empty homes off the market, suppressing new starts to inflate existing inventory).
In reality, the money has lost nearly half its value in the past four years alone. I've been alive for a little over 40. So they're claiming, amusingly, that the value has dropped by only 66% in 40 years when it's dropped by almost half in the last 4.
We made a lot less in 2020 than we do now and we were living fine off of it back then before this new landlord came in and they all started causing problems. Raising the rent $100 a month every year, not fixing the toilets not flushing and backing up on some of the people in the other building until you call the city on him, and then it becomes an emergency and he calls his "guy" from his vacation overseas and yells at him to rig it so it works again a day before the fines are set to begin.
These people are just criminals except that they control what the law says so nothing they do is actually a crime, per se.
Housing....don't even get me started on housing... Well, too late. It's steal steal steal whatever isn't nailed down. Landlords are terrible, banks are worse. Many of them want "$40 a month pet rent per cat" plus "a $400 non-refundable fee per cat", and "a pet interview" and "a $250 administrative fee" and a "$75 per applicant fee" and a "$450 move-in fee" and a fee fi fo fum fee, and then there's the deposit, and they're all collaborating, so it's hardly worth coughing up any of this, plus the moving van, plus time off to load it all up. Then the trips to the DMV and USCIS to update addresses where they all want to see every document you've ever had in your life, then they said the documents you brought were fine on their website, but when you get there, some guy says they're not and "What is the Selective Service System?"
Then imagine doing all that and finding out that the new landlord is an even bigger jerk than the one you just moved out on. Happens.
Also, what the hell is a pet interview?
Is that where they sit down with the cat and ask it where it sees itself in five years?
Paying all these fees in exchange for a 12 month lease and then maybe having to move again is always nice. I'll give them this much though, landlords have found a way to make themselves an even bigger bunch of freeloaders off of people who work than lawyers have.
