Denninger over at market ticker agrees with you on the timing, and Charles Hugh Smith on the overall shape of things.
It's been a total drag not being able to get my family out of rentals and into a house where we're allowed to install window screens and dig up the yard and plant food. But every day it looks more and more like it would be an even bigger drag if we had succeeded.
When we found out how much the bank was willing to lend us, it kind of took our breath away. Really? On our income? We could barely make the mortgage payments on that (and we'd be over seventy before paying it off!), and we'd be in the soup the first time the roof needed replacing. It has been sobering to realize that the reason we can't buy a house right now, is because everybody else has been in an absolute frenzy of... doing exactly that. Mortgaged to the eyeballs, and borrowing more for routine maintenance. How much of the country right now is riding the knife edge of no savings, overwhelming debt, and one or two missed payments away from insolvency and homelessness, because a realtor and a banker told them "Oh yeah! You can totally afford a house! You've got this!"? You know, plus all the investor vulture types.
The town we live in right now... as much as we love the job and the church community, in a sharp economic decline it's probably for the best that we haven't been able to put down roots. We're already overrun with meth zombies thanks to an ACLU lawsuit a few years back that forced the city to stop enforcing panhandling laws (how the eff does the ACLU, who don't live here, get to overrule our elected government?). Throw in a sharp decline in employment and a sharp increase in foreclosures and evictions, and it's gonna look like a postapocalyptic wasteland... and we'll be throwing the kids in the truck and heading back to the family compound. And the fact that I think about this a lot says we're better off not buying here so it's just as well we can't afford to.
What remains the same is, whether we want it or not, God looks after us and puts us where we *need* to be. His mercy is not always comfortable, but it's always good. Thanks be to God.
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It's been a total drag not being able to get my family out of rentals and into a house where we're allowed to install window screens and dig up the yard and plant food. But every day it looks more and more like it would be an even bigger drag if we had succeeded.
When we found out how much the bank was willing to lend us, it kind of took our breath away. Really? On our income? We could barely make the mortgage payments on that (and we'd be over seventy before paying it off!), and we'd be in the soup the first time the roof needed replacing. It has been sobering to realize that the reason we can't buy a house right now, is because everybody else has been in an absolute frenzy of... doing exactly that. Mortgaged to the eyeballs, and borrowing more for routine maintenance. How much of the country right now is riding the knife edge of no savings, overwhelming debt, and one or two missed payments away from insolvency and homelessness, because a realtor and a banker told them "Oh yeah! You can totally afford a house! You've got this!"? You know, plus all the investor vulture types.
The town we live in right now... as much as we love the job and the church community, in a sharp economic decline it's probably for the best that we haven't been able to put down roots. We're already overrun with meth zombies thanks to an ACLU lawsuit a few years back that forced the city to stop enforcing panhandling laws (how the eff does the ACLU, who don't live here, get to overrule our elected government?). Throw in a sharp decline in employment and a sharp increase in foreclosures and evictions, and it's gonna look like a postapocalyptic wasteland... and we'll be throwing the kids in the truck and heading back to the family compound. And the fact that I think about this a lot says we're better off not buying here so it's just as well we can't afford to.
What remains the same is, whether we want it or not, God looks after us and puts us where we *need* to be. His mercy is not always comfortable, but it's always good. Thanks be to God.