[quote=CA renter][quote=cabal]I give on occasion, mostly on impulse. However, I will study their physical traits first and convince myself they are genuine before doing so. I pass no judgment and I don’t care if they buy a beer to extract 15 min of simple pleasure out of another miserable day. I’m ok with that because I know it is the hardest thing to pick yourself up when you’re at the bottom. If I saw a father begging with his kid, I would probably donate something. It takes courage to swallow your pride and to publicly humiliate yourself in front of your kid.
Regarding rants, I find the complaints by those who sold at the peak the most humorous and hypocritical. The housing bubble facilitated the greatest transfer of wealth in recent times. Specifically, the so called fraudulent money flowed from wall street/banks to naïve buyer to bubble seller. The bubble seller is the ultimate beneficiary of this fraudulent money, yet there is never talk about its morality or legitimacy. Fine, just don’t complain about govt giveaways of our tax dollars. You hold the solution. Simply return the fraudulent money and problem solved.[/quote]
As someone who sold near the peak and chose to rent, why do you think we should give our money away? Just because of the tremendous volume of foolish borrowers and lenders in this particular boom? Just because of the dollar amounts? Should everyone who sells something for a profit be obliged to give that money back, or does it depend on which boom/market **YOU** decide we should pay back the profits?
We didn’t want to sell and rent to make a profit. We needed to move to a bigger house/better neighborhood, and would have easily been able to do that (without bubble equity) if not for the bubble. Instead, after running the numbers, I realized there was no way we could safely buy another home without putting ourselves at financial risk. So, we rented and waited for prices to fall (which was obviously going to happen if you bothered to look around at what was going on).
Quite frankly, we were trying to help everyone we came into contact with, trying to warn everyone about the housing bubble and how it was going to burst. Do you know what all these people (now foreclosure “victims”) said to us? They literally argued and fought with us, calling us “crazy” and “jealous, bitter renters.” Everyone told us that we didn’t know what we were talking about. You want us to feel sorry for them now? Seriously?
We never flipped a home (though we’ve been fully qualified to do so — we don’t do it because we don’t believe in it). We didn’t play games when we sold, and took the first offer (this during a time when other sellers would “entertain” offers after a certain number of days to pick the highest bid). We even paid for the first year of gardening service, and we let the buyers walk through the home and choose any furniture/appliances they might want, and paid for new carpeting in a room — all after we were in escrow — they never asked for anything, we just offered it, and it was never used as a sales incentive. We never took on debt we couldn’t afford to pay (have stayed out of debt for years, even well before the bubble, BTW). We don’t wear fancy clothes or drive fancy cars or live in a fancy house.
What would you have done if you were in our shoes? Don’t even tell me you would have sold the house for less that half of market price when things were selling in minutes or hours at and above our price. Check yourself first before you go around calling other people hypocrites.[/quote]
There is nothing illegal about knowingly selling an overpriced asset to an eager, voluntary buyer. Whether or not there is a moral component is subject to debate as I see valid arguments on both sides. Is it the same as overcharging an 80 yr old grandma to remodel her bathroom? Probably not. Either way, it’s not germane to my point.
What I’m saying is that if I sold at the peak to naïve buyers, knowing they would probably lose their life savings in a few years, I would keep a low profile and smile at everyone. What I wouldn’t do is to publicly berate the US govt for channeling tax dollars to replenish the very money that ultimately funneled to my bank account, regardless of the fact that it was legal. That I do find to be hypocritical. If you disagree, please explain.
