Common Sense vs Value

[34f3f3f]

Whatever happened to common sense? Most buyers are not savvy real estate investors …they just want a home to live in, and in the current market lots of people are simply locked out by silly prices. So it’s a silent war between the haves and havenots. All the clever talk, predictions, analyses is meaningless for swathes of people who simple don’t have the inclination to research something that is unlikey to give them the answer to questions like should I sell or should I buy? However, there is one valuable tool which most of us are endowed with, and that is common sense. When I look at a three bedroom SFH in SoCal and then look at the price tag …a little voice says “are you nuts?” Whether you’ve got the cash (and I have) and can afford it (I can) , or can get a good rate for a mortgage, who cares, the houses in terms of bricks and mortar, locations or whatever other ciriteria you wish to ascribe, are simply not worth the money being asked for them. It really is as simpe as that. If house prices never come down to realistic values …then I will never buy …and I hope people wake up and will the market back to sensible and fair prices.

[lindismith]

There is a general death of common sense in our society today.
It extends way beyond just house buying. It seems to permeate everything people do. It’s as if our whole society is on auto-pilot.

What you’re talking about is how emotional a home purchase is. It seems emotions and rational thinking are at odds in the human condition.

That voice in your head saying, “are you nuts?” is great, qwerty, because it means you’re still alive and kicking! You haven’t succumbed to the sheeple mentality.

[Doofrat]

In the past, our memory did not need to be long. We only needed to think back to the past few years to make decisions about what we were going to plant, where our tribe was going to move, etc. Now that short memory is a problem. We don’t notice when things move incrementally, we see something move, and if it stays there for awhile, we reset our baseline to that new level and forget that it was ever at a different level. Sure, we can look back and note that it was once at a different level, but we can’t wrap our minds around the idea that it could ever go back to that level.
I’d say that where the readers of this site differ from the “common” in common sense is that we don’t use common sense to make our decisions related to housing. If we used the common sense, we’d be buying up houses so we didn’t get locked out of the market.
We are using logic and not common sense (just because a bunch of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s true) to override our instinct of thinking that the new baseline of housing prices is set at about $500,000.

[PerryChase]

I love to examine the psychological aspects of life.

doofrat, i like the way you explained commom sense. I think what you said refers to many aspects of life from politics to business to family life. We need more rationale and less comomon sense.

[bob007]

i wish i bought a home for 200-250k. problem is that it was overvalued. then it is more overvalued now.

[34f3f3f]

“We need less common sense” sounds like a rhetorical statement. Common sense dictates that we use rationale, and a logical approach makes sense and is pretty common, but as the old proverb goes “one pound of learning takes ten pounds of common sense to apply it”.

[Doofrat]

Common sense really refers to herd mentality. Usually it’s correct like don’t jump in the water when there are sharks swimming around, or don’t eat the mushrooms you see growing on your lawn, that’s all common sense. But common sense isn’t always correct. Common sense in the late 90s was that you bought dot.com stocks, but look where that ended up. Like I stated above, common sense says that you don’t eat mushrooms growing on your lawn, but if you are a mycologist then you have specialized knowledge and can decide whether the mushrooms on your lawn are edible or not, even though common sense says not to eat the mushrooms.
The people on this board are not using common sense. It sounds bad, but it’s not. They are questioning the common sense and building their own specialized knowledge about the subject and making their decisions based on that, not common sense.
Sorry to get all English teacher on the term, and maybe I’m interpreting it incorrectly, but I believe that’s what common sense is.

[PerryChase]

doofrat, what you said makes perfect sense to me. 🙂

I went to middle school in France and we used to take field trips to the woods to collect mushrooms and berries. It’s quite common for kids to do that in France (maybe in other parts of Europe also). My parents would cook rabbit with wine from the mushrooms I collected.

[no_such_reality]

I disagree. Common sense isn’t the herd think, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Common sense is applying some pretty basic thought and understanding to something. i.e.
Spending $2000/month when you make $1000/month will lead to problems.

Sleeping with my wife’s sister could be problematic.

Smoking 3 packs a day won’t be good for me.

Having a house payment of $2200/month when your take home is $2400/month is going to get rough.

I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ll ask someone I trust that does… that’s common sense.

[34f3f3f]

I also disagree, and it seems so does my dictionary, which says “good sense and sound judgment in practical matters.” The herd mentality is when one person follows another without any notion of acting or thinking independently, viz; relying on the judgement of the majority, which is not necessarily grounded in common sense. However, I may have been playing devil’s advocate when I originally posted this issue. I am a BIG fan of this website and follow it avidly. It is the best site I have found of it’s kind and I value the content enormously, and agree with most of it. Anyone with any common sense would likely do the same 🙂

I guess I am a little grumpy with not having my own home. Sorry about the little verbal punch up everyone. Good fun though!

[Author]

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