Homestead mailing list

[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Gene GeRue wrote:

> > tvoivozhd---If you own your own profitable business it is 
> > possible-----but the vast majority of the population works at a job 
> > for someone else .  I won't look it up, but the median family income 
> > is probably forty to fifty thousand dollars
>
>
> I think that is correct. With low interest rates and more lenient 
> income-to-loan payment ratios, lots of people can buy pretty expensive 
> houses, IF their credit history is excellent. In fact, today, if one's 
> FICO score is tops, you can buy nearly any price house, without 
> documentation of income or expenses.
>
>
> > tvoivozhd---around here and everywhere else I have been, a large, 
> > multiple-story house is for conspicuous consumption, most of the 
> > space unused.  Nobody, I repeat NOBODY really NEEDS that.
>
>
> Conspicuous consumption has become an American value. Look at the cars 
> we drive. How many people really need a Hummer? How about these plasma 
> TV screens or simply the huge TVs that cost many thousands? Television 
> viewing theaters. The latest fad amongst north Scottsdale homeowners 
> with more money than anything else is the patio kitchen. Used to be, 
> you had a BBQ and a table and chairs out there. Now they have 
> fireplaces, stainless steel kitchens with built-in refrigerators, 
> dishwashers, wine coolers, ceiling fans, misting systems, gas heaters 
> and more. These are the good Americans who keep the economy roiling, 
> creating jobs, paying taxes, electing Bushies.
>
> >   I have also seen thousands of these reduced to tax-foreclosed empty 
> > shells big mansions along the Outer Drive in Chicago---even owned one 
> > once---a twelve-bedroom on a 3/4 acre lakefront lot forty miles from 
> > Madison, Wisconsin.  Had two stoker-fed furnaces to heat it, and 
> > needed both. Impeccable shape, built entirely of beautiful oak, 
> > dining room could seat thirty comfortably Had a huge kitchen and 
> > pantry, cloakroom half the size of the average bedroom and a music 
> > room the same size..  Paid $4500 for it.
>
>
> So, see, you were once as profligate as the ones you now decry. Give 
> them their turn.


tvoivohd---nope, it was a bargain I could not resist  At the time I was 
building and selling houses  for  $10 a square foot---most  of them 1200 
square feet.  The 12-bedroom house was  about  9000 square feet.  I 
didn't hold it---didn't want to travel forty miles to fix plumbing or 
heating.  Sold it to my paint subcontractor for $14,500---his wife 
turned it into a nursing home  and made more money than her 
husband---not as a house, as a business.  The fact that it is currently 
possible to buy a house with payments fifty or sixty percent of the 
buyer's monthly income, doesn't mean it is intelligent to do so.  The 
odds of the buyer losing his job are a lot more likely than keeping it 
long enough to accumulate any equity.  All he can realistically look 
forwart to is foreclosure and destruction of credit

>