Your home isn’t a ticking time bomb if you buy it now, unless perhaps you live in Detroit. Spare a thought for those of us who bought in 2008- our bombs went off.
Well, mortgage tax interest was priced into your house when you bought it. That car loan interest wasn’t tax deductible was priced into your car and loan when you got them.
I bought in 07, I know. And I work in real estate, it’s not bottomed out yet so buying a home now is, perhaps, insane. Especially if you buy from a foreclosure.
Hrmm. As long as the economy recovers I don’t see why home prices would not recover with it?
Because home prices were artifically and increadibly inflated well past whatever actual value that they may have. Anyone who bought or refinanced within the last 10 years or so did so at a value that will likely never exist again.
That’s one way to look at it. But your average Dick and Jane, when things get tight, don’t have the luxury to go to their bosses and say, “I’ve spent more than I earn, so can you just start paying me more.”
No, Dick and Jane, know that their income is pretty much static, and that the only way they are really going to get out of this debt problem is to stop eating out as much, cancel the cable, start buying generic groceries instead of name brand…i.e. they cut their spending.
This is what most people do when they over extend themselves. So I have a hard time understanding when our government overspends, that a lot of people assume the easiest thing to do is to go back to the bosses and say, we need more money.
But when your current debt is 59% of your annual income, cutting out cable TV will not significantly reduce it, especially when 86% of your spending is Social Security, Medicare and Defense. No, what responsible people do (in addition to spending cuts) is raise taxes and pay your damn bills.
I guess it’s time to reevaluate social security, medicare and defense. There are no sacred cows.
And responsible people, don’t get themselves in these kind of situations. Irresponsible people let their government get too big, which is the same as buying more house and car than you can really afford.
Unless you have perfected the flux capacitor, that is irrelevant for solving the problem we are facing today. We cannot cut our way out of this debt; the math simply isn’t there. The credit card is maxed; the only way to reduce the debt is to make bigger payments. WE are the grandchildren the debt falls on.
You might tell that to the Republicans. What they did was like a guy who bought lots of crap and took one day a week off work because he figured that he’d find some money making scheme on his extra day. Now someone has moved in, and tells him he needs to spend some money to keep the house from falling down, and that he should ask the boss to take him on again for the extra day, and the guy says, :man, I can’t ask the boss to do that. And we don’t need to get rid of those termites anyway."
Actually it is worse. It is more like the boss convinced the guy to work without pay, because he’d invest the extra money and eventually pay him more. Too bad he lost it all in Vegas. He got plenty more, but he sure doesn’t want to give it to the guy.
Agreed. 
At least there’s one thing politicians and voters of all ilks agree on:
(words of Senator Russell B. Long)