I’m old enough to remember what getting a mortgage used to be like. You had to put 20% down. You had to have good credit. You had to have enough income to make the payments. Adjustable rates either didn’t exist or were extremely rare. That was 1992.
If you were doing an off-books family loan for your 20%, you had to do it in advance – banks looked suspiciously if you didn’t have your 20% down payment sitting in the bank, ready to go, months ahead of time.
I had ok credit scores (mid-low 700s) but still had to write a letter explaining why I’d had a few late payments on credit cards in college. I sweated over that letter.
Plenty of people bought houses. Maybe not in their 20’s… you had to save up. But people did it.
I don’t think we’ll go back to those standards. We should. But we won’t.
