“If anything, your rant seems to be indicative of no small level of bitterness.”
My sentiments exactly!
fat_lazy_union is perhaps the first of many “jealous bitter OWNERS” who will be making their way to our humble little community, stating their bitter case for how stupid and timid we were to sit out the housing bubble.
Please stop, fat_lazy_union…you are hurting my “pussy” feelings! Hahahahahahahaha. This is beginning to get fun!
If you pass up an opportunity to increase your fortune, another one will be along soon enough. But if you lose your life savings just once, you might never get a chance to replace it.
If you look past his “white trash” writing style, the guy does make some good points. Namely, how many of us will want to buy real estate at the bottom of the cycle, when our jobs are in jeopardy (if we even have one), inventory keeps rising, foreclosures dot the neighborhood, and we have dozens of acquaintances who can’t even get someone to look at their homes; real estate will seem like a super risky purchase. Second, how many of us are mad we missed the runup. (I should have bought investment properties but am not mad.) How many of us would own a house if we had moved here just a few years earlier, or graduated from school just a few years earlier? We would have bought at bubble prices too, but we were too late into the game and didn’t buy because we are truly priced out.
However, the white trash poster missed a couple things too: we expect real estate prices to fall a lot more than 30%, you *can* find the bottom (thanks to jg’s charts for proving that point), some of us *did* enter the markets in 2001, and most of us qualify for a home purchase now but chose *not* to make it. Everyone I met on this forum is a white collar professional, independent thinker with a very good income, so the choices made by our group reflect the independent and contrarian thinking, not any lack of money to buy a house. We’ve got people who *sold* their homes at last year and are renting until prices come down, and others with 6 figure incomes who could easily qualify for a McMansion but choose to rent instead waiting for the bubble to pop.
So the guy completely missed the fact that we are the smart contrarians, like the people who dumped stock in early 2000 and bought it back in 2001.
I actually bought a house in 2003. My county appriasal said I’ve had $100+K of appreciation since then. But I did not go out and do a HELOC to buy useless things or invest in additional properties. Like a lot of people here, I bought a house not expecting to make a killing — it’s just a shelter and roof over my head.
However, I follow this site just like people who can’t resist rubbernecking when an accident takes place along the side of the road. What the heck, I admit it — I enjoy watching a slow-motin trainwreck. Being called a sourpuss doesn’t bother me at all. I just enjoy the feeling of shadenfreude — of seeing greedy people going down in (financial) flames.
I am actively rooting for chaos and bloodbath in the housing market.
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