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  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The lull before the real estate storm
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:58:32 -0500

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










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