I refinanced during the pandemic and went from a 30 year to a 15 year and my mortgage didn’t change. If I tried to take out a mortgage now, it would be too expensive for me, just because of interest rates. It’s a terrible time for housing
I'm in the same exact boat. I'm glad we got lucky, but you shouldn't have to get lucky to fulfill basic needs like housing. Shits busted and I hope it gets better for others soon.
Exactly the same here, we were renting up until 2018 at 900$CAD/month. Our mortgage is 950$CAD/month and our old apartment is now 1200$CAD/month. All expenses included, it's s more expensive to rent than to own.
First time buyers can't hardly get a mortgage now unless you were stashing cash or staying at your parents' for a while.
Just checked local rentals (Boston Metro West area), cheapest 3 bedroom here in my town is $2,400 a month with only hot water included. That particular complex is a roach infested pisshole.
The luxury apartments they insist on building around here are minimum $3,200 and go up to $3,500+ with again, only hot water included.
Cheapest 1 bedroom available on apartments.com is $1,800 (again only water included) and is a converted attic. You could also rent a room in some else's house for about $900-1,200 a month off Facebook marketplace.
City governments are like “but developers pay us for the privilege of putting up the luxury buildings, win-win, right?!” and miss that it doesn’t house any of the population that needs it. I’d rather directly build public housing with my taxes.
I got a VA loan and didn't need a down payment. Only took a couple years for rent to surpass my mortgage, but I wouldn't have been able to save the down payment with ever increasing rent.
For profit lending has always been fucking shit up, that's why Christians forbid it for centuries. (But only if the borrower was Christian)
Of course wealthy Christians just didn't lend money rather than lend it interest free, but it was still better than letting an 18 year old sign up for 80k in debt it'll take their whole lives to pay back.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a similar, perhaps in some ways better system exists to this day in the world of Islamic finance. It's far from perfect and has plenty of real-world flaws and downfalls, but it was cool to learn about the spirit and morality behind it.
Youre banking 3k+/month into your asset now instead of paying someone elses off. You are making money every month instead of losing it. That alone should make you grin at the price difference.
The deep level of stability and control you get with home ownership should keep that grin going.
The fact, the utter fact, that Seattle rents will return to outpacing your mortgage shortly is something that should make you don clown makeup to begin a Harlequin dance of joy that you own a home in such a high COL area.
We are in the wake of one of the largest wealth transfers... robberies in history. The middle class has been drained, the poor have been robbed. There's nothing they can do to take back all the money they gave to the wealthiest in the country. It's going to take some serious reforms, none of which Biden is capable of. I'll fucking list the solutions if you want, as if that'd do anything. The bottom is going to fall out soon enough, we'll see change.
UBI and/or a wealth tax would do it. Hell I'd settle for USACorp doing Housing, Healthcare, Internet, and Groceries at cost. Especially in areas being literally left behind by the private sector.
There are a handful of politicians who actually care about people. Nothing will change unless we elect more people willing to change things. Barring that, we eat the rich.
You'd have to go back to around 2000 to find rates on a 30 year fixed comparable to today's. https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms
Historically we're still in a period of pretty good rates. However, the reality is who cares about what things were like more than 25 years ago. The new normal is 6ish percent, and we're over that right now. I don't think we're ever going to see rates below 5% again, not counting for some extraneous circumstance nobody can predict. But at this point any relief is going to be meaningful to a lot of people.
On the other hand, home prices are not coming down, and they probably will not come down even if there's plenty of overinflated valuations out there.
Therefore the only thing to give on affordability is increased supply to keep home values from continuing to grow in a pace that outruns incomes, and lower rates so more people can afford what's out there today.
CATO hates it. Which is generally a good thing. Okay, I'll give it to him for now. He's stepping up pressure on at least one part of the economy that's causing pain and suffering. The problem is as always, delivery. The last time he got pressured during campaign season it was about immigration and reforming a system that forced migrants to wait in dangerous areas. Then he continued most of Trump's policies and even took some of them further.
He needs to deliver or at least show progress. He's not just a candidate, he has the power to show his willingness before the election this time.
Polling indicates that it’s these voters — who are more likely to be renters — that Biden is now struggling with: those who cast ballots for him four years ago but are now leaning toward Donald Trump or considering staying home on Election Day.
In promoting his economic agenda in the summer of 2023, in what would become known as “Bidenomics,” the president emphasized three main planks: empowering workers, reviving domestic manufacturing, and reining in corporate power through competition.
In a newly released report, the president’s staff economists dedicated an entire chapter to increasing the supply of affordable housing and called for more aggressive federal action to lower costs, like pressuring cities to loosen zoning laws.
Biden also proposed new tax credits for first-time homebuyers and for middle-class families selling their starter homes, and a new $20 billion grant program to increase housing production.
“Biden’s backwards solution is to subsidize demand by handing out more government money to buyers, renters, and developers,” argued Judge Glock, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
It will be hard to make a real federal dent on housing without Congress, and it’s unlikely that any major congressional action will happen before the next election, with Republicans loathe to give Biden any more bipartisan victories to campaign on.
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And is working to try and pardon more, according to his own cabinet. The issue is that he has to find backchannels and other legal routes because the SCOTUS said he couldn't just order the Department of Education to just forgive federal loans.