Home Ownership - Overrated???

Parent Cafe
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<p>LTS:</p>

<p>We’re veterans of the used furniture business. But a long time ago, I read some articles about the need to fumigate used mattresses because of the possibility of TB and other diseases, so we’ve always bought new. </p>

<p>Furniture are one thing. Materials for repairing your house are another. I would not want my house to be repainted in technicolor, though we have some half-used paint cans in the basement. As for our roof, I have not seen anything useful. Maybe I should have investigated other neighborhoods?
Below is a link to a year-old article on home foreclosures that is of some interest</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/01/15/home_foreclosures_on_the_rise/?page=full[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/01/15/home_foreclosures_on_the_rise/?page=full&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Marite, the bigger issue from the link is our health care system needs fixing.</p>

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<p>LOL Marite, when I finally did buy furniture for the house I own, I bought everything new, although at very discounted prices, and/or from Pier1 Imports. I also bought new, top quality materials for roofing, siding, etc., and I will only use licensed contractors.</p>

<p>Re paint, when I started room by room, I studied paint chips obsessively, and when I finally chose, I got everything all wrong, and had to keep taking paint back, etc. D came home on winter break one year and spent the entire time fixing my various disasters. I have since heard that Home Depot has discontinued the practice of selling returned paint for $1 or $2/can - if true, I suspect I might have contributed to their decision to change their policy. I returned so many cans of paint, over and over.</p>

<p>My next major project is the flooring - I’m going to tile it, and D is begging and pleading with me to not attempt it myself, because she is certain it will be a total disaster. LOL.</p>

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<p>dstark:</p>

<p>I absolutely agree.</p>

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<p>Marite, I studied that article, and I thought for a while, and here’s what struck me: she has a husband, and two grown sons - living at home. I’m sorry, the four of them today cannot make the mortgage, which amounts to $500 per month each person? I am sorry that she is in poor health, and I would have some sympathy if she were all alone, but, she isn’t. I cannot get my head around how four adults, even if only marginally employable, can FAIL to come up with about $500 per month each. I don’t know the exact numbers but it seems like even a full time minimum wage job per person would cover it. </p>

<p>As to their living expenses, they are going to have to live somewhere, and so I suppose they will rent, but will they pay that much LESS money in rent for housing for four people? </p>

<p>The other thing that strikes me - especially from my own experience in the past few months, I’ve been looking around casually, not terribly seriously, for a new home to buy - is how very intensely aggresive the realtors have been. It’s astonishing how demanding these people can be. Trying to close a sale is one thing, but being obnoxious about it is something else entirely. When sales people get aggresive with me I just get turned off and walk away, but, I can see how between just the right combination of realtor and lender people can end up signing off on far more than what they’re prepared to pay, or what they can accomodate if some emergency happens. </p>

<p>As far as health insurance, doesn’t school employment, even if only a janitor, provide health insurance as a benefit? If so, and if this woman voluntarily resigned her position and relinquished her health insurance, she’s so stupid she deserves to be foreclosed. It would have been a smarter move to go on medical leave, or, if her employer got tired of her taking too much time off due to illness and decided to fire her, at least she would have unemployment compensation, which would give her something. Even if her job provided no health insurance, she still would have been better off to negotiate a dismissal rather than resign. But I’m thinking she had to have had health insurance, otherwise, how did she come to be diagnosed with illnesses? Did she pay for a doctor out of her own pocket, I wonder?</p>

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<p>latetoschool, you are asking for a little empathy from people like Barney Frank.</p>

<p>How about a little empathy for the woman in the article?</p>

<p>Barney Frank has never been in your situation.</p>

<p>You have never been in hers.</p>

<p>You’re doing the same thing you accused Barney Frank of doing.</p>

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<p>I don’t want empathy from Frank, or anyone else. I expect Frank to use his head, if he has one; and I expect him to not make blanket judgments about entire classes of people. </p>

<p>I don’t have to be in her situation to know the facts - just read the article. There are four adults in the household, and it only references that one of them is in poor health. So if I can then assume that three of them are healthy, sorry, $2,000-ish per month is just simply NOT that much money if everyone shares the debt. How can I possibly feel sorry for them? I’ve worked sometimes three jobs to create our financial position, later two, now thankfully only one - and as a mother raising a child. So it’s very hard for me to have any concern for four adults - three of them presumably healthy - who cannot pull it together.</p>

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<p>Maybe instead of spending his money on call boys Frank could help them out. LTS has it right–three able-bodied men should be able to pickup the slack or they made (highly likely) a bunch of other bad decisions in life and that has come home to bite them.</p>

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<p>You don’t know.</p>

<p>You are too judgmental. (Both of you).</p>

<p>Sorry.</p>

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<p>While personally a setback for them it is not the end of the world. I know many people who have lost far more in real estate over the years (mostly in commercial buildings) and nobody shed a tear for them. Even Crow and Hines came very close and Trump was negative to the tune hundreds of millions but fought his way back. A man who works down the hall was once one of Seattle’s top office builders and then lost everything including his house when the market turned bad in the early 90’s. Now he runs the office of a major Canadian firm and probably makes a decent living.</p>

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<p>I have no opinion about why that family is unable to come up with $500 per month. What struck me is the woman is trying to buy another house at 8% interest.
But this is only one example. The article has some pretty interesting statistics. We should consider them instead of a single story.</p>

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<p>Marite, you’re right, of course. The statistics are actually more interesting.</p>

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<p>Some very fine posts in this thread, dispite the fact that I’ll disagree with Frank in that he overlooks significant individual and societal benefits that aren’t finanacial; the social stability that having homeowners in a neighborhood that is just begining to grow and/or recover. This is what declining towns in the northeast need; homeowners. Of course, these towns need jobs too, but affordable housing would go along way in attracting businesses.</p>

<p>By the way, I watched Congressman Frank on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ last week. I could only exasperate as I listened to him. It’s time for him to retire. I admit my bias; I typically dislike long-term incumbents of any stripe.</p>

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<p>I agree completely about the social benefits you state about home ownership. On a larger level, it tends to give people a bigger stake in their surroundings and society as a whole.</p>

<p>But with respect to businesses being attracted, the much bigger help in this area (and far outweighing the housing issue) is whether we can compete with the wages of India and China in terms of manufacturing or basic white collar jobs.</p>

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<p>I can remember when 8% was a very good rate. The diff. in payments on a $200k loan is $268 most of which can be deducted on taxes so at a 25% marginal rate the net cost is about $200/mo. I spend that much at Starbucks in a month.</p>

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<p>Well I hope this woman does not go for a $200k loan!</p>

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<p>I’ll join the heartless, judgmental gang re: the foreclosure family. Three able bodied men can’t manage to bring home $180 each a week to keep a roof over their heads??? If the reporter was trying to rouse our sympathy, she could have found a better story.</p>

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<p>I’d like a little more digging and the “rest” of the story. Many a sob story has crumbled under closer examination.</p>

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<p>LakeWashington (and others): One of the things I think is implicit in Barney Frank’s position is that a bunch of undercapitalized homeowners teetering on the edge of foreclosure (or in it), and without the funds to maintain their properties, and losing value in a death spiral, does NOT contribute to the revitalization of neighborhoods. Some of the homilies get turned on their heads a little in the very low income world.</p>

<p>As for the family in the story – I have a negative reaction, too, but I would like to know their side of it. It’s pretty judgmental to assume that they’re just deadbeats.</p>

<p>And the line about Starbucks . . . barrons, that’s pretty bad. Another one of the points Franks was making explicitly was that the tax deductions are of no value to people with little or no taxable income. And most poor people don’t spend $268, $205 (about the net cash cost at 25% tax rate), or even $165 (about the net cash cost for high-income taxpayers) in a month at Starbucks.</p>

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<p>My point was–sometimes you have to sacrifice. If you were eating steak you eat burgers. If you were buying Bud you switch to Iron City ( my guess is beer is found in their frig at all times). Nearly anyone making enough to afford a house can cinch things down to save $200/mo. I used to be able to make ramen into 10 different dinners when I had to.</p>