I may not watch all the trends but one trend that I’ve noticed is the growing popularity of the Dave Ramsey philosophy. I’ve also been on his web site and been amongst those forum participants. I see more and more people getting on the bandwagon of paying their debts off 100%, paying off their mortgages and planning to buy a house with the least amount of borrowed money.
I think that your average citizen, middle class America, doesn’t want to finance the American dream anymore. With lending already tightened and people getting smarter about not wanting to be a slave to the lender I think that demand for credit in general is going to decrease. With that in mind people will not want to pay the recently ridiculous high prices for houses and will not want ridiculous mortgages in the 300’s and 400’s of thousands that we saw during the last 10-15 years. Prices will continue to drop.
This is a paradigm shifting of values in America. A realization that having money in the bank is more important than behaving as if you had money in the bank.
But this realization is important not because it is being realized by isolated individuals but that it is morphing into group-think, into a new (virtual) demographic with its own mantras for getting out and staying out of debt.
