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The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

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141–150 of 162 posts

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most construction materials are cheap. Especially at contractor rates. Labor is the expensive part. If you're a contractor you've got to have an hourly rate that covers your business expenses and pays you well. If it takes even just 20 hours of work to run all the Ethernet that's probably about $1500 added to the top line. Added a dozen features like that to a home and you're at $15,000-$20,000 higher asking price to…

20 hours for just Ethernet? That doesn't pass the sniff test. It seems like something that would be done concurrently with wiring the house, certainly with wiring coax. Even wiring an entire house should take a few hours at most when drywall isn't installed yet.

Not sure. I've never done it but two long days doesn't seem that crazy to me. Even without drywall up, you're up on a ladder for parts, you gotta hang boxes, you gotta bore a bunch of holes, you gotta do the punching. It adds up. Between planning, routing, testing and the time it adds to drywalling I think it could be more. But again, I've never done it so I don't know for sure. I've just strung a fair amount of Romex which takes longer than you'd expect.

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to expunge education debt is what makes education lending possible. Otherwise, there’d be a line to file strategic bankruptcy after the last tuition payment was due...

Why would anyone file for bankruptcy right before paying their last tuition payment?

I think the OP meant “make their last tuition payment to the university”, in other words, they’ve fully taken on the debt of education and are about to graduate.

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#143
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel like this is it. Debt was introduced to parents of millennials. But it took some time to become institutionalized. Now millennials are in debt right as they get out of college. No matter what college you leave, you can have debt if your parents didn’t pay for your tuition. On top of that, wages have been stagnant. Then there is the credit card debt that is very easy to accumulate is you aren’t careful w…

A home should be about 3x salary at most, so down paymeny is 0.6 years' salary. Did you mean 5 years worth of savings?

Dallas median wage is $63.8k in 2016, median home prices closer to $230 to $250 depending on which town (some significantly higher). That is about 4x income, following your heuristic we should expect the median to fall a bit?

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone thinks a crash is coming. There has never been a crash where almost everyone has seen it coming. Therefore there will not be a crash at least in the near future. Prices might pullback but it won't be a crash.

Isn’t there some logical fallacy about believing that since something has never happened, it will never happen?

It's called the Black Swan fallacy. Ironically, it's what happened with the recession and housing crisis in 2008, except back then it was "the housing market isn't a bubble, people will never default on their mortgages en masse".

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel like this is it. Debt was introduced to parents of millennials. But it took some time to become institutionalized. Now millennials are in debt right as they get out of college. No matter what college you leave, you can have debt if your parents didn’t pay for your tuition. On top of that, wages have been stagnant. Then there is the credit card debt that is very easy to accumulate is you aren’t careful w…

Even as a DINK millennial couple with a combined low six figure income a home purchase feels like a poor investment. Not only the down-payment of $100k+ but the property tax increases and then having to pay that mortgage for 30 years. Since we expect mobility and a certain level of future uncertainty it just doesn’t make sense for us and many more of our generation to tie ourselves to such and expensive geographic an…

The "NK" part of your "DINK" is probably influencing your decision on whether it's a worthy decision to buy a home.

As a "DI3K", a house makes a ton of sense. We need space, we need a place for five people to live, and we need a house in an area where the schools are going to be great for the next 18 years. We don't need mobility as far as relocation goes, because it just doesn't make sense in our life choices right now. I mean, it's certainly possible, but I've seen second-hand what moving from town to town every 6 months does to a 7-year-old.

I'm not mad that our property (as far from the coasts as possible) has increased in value ~$50-80K, either.

Don't forget shorter mortgage commitments are available (And a much better deal when you can swing them).

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are lucky you can get money from renting. If you were unlucky and had a house in the rust belt and jobs disappeared then few people could buy or rent your house. So people can get trapped. At least you can expunge your mortgage debt with bankruptcy. Not being able to expunge education debt is what's holding our economy down.

Not being able to expunge education debt is what makes education lending possible. Otherwise, there’d be a line to file strategic bankruptcy after the last tuition payment was due...

Revocation of a degree with the dissolving of student loan debt in bankruptcy certainly could work for some.

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#147
post #143
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A home should be about 3x salary at most, so down paymeny is 0.6 years' salary. Did you mean 5 years worth of savings?

Dallas median wage is $63.8k in 2016, median home prices closer to $230 to $250 depending on which town (some significantly higher). That is about 4x income, following your heuristic we should expect the median to fall a bit?

I don't like this X-Salary rule. It assumes no other large notes, which is more of what mortgage underwriters are caring about (debt-to-income ratios).

Not having two student loan payments and a couple unnecessarily-high car payments (a couple well-to-do millennials surely make possible) could certainly push your mortgage affordability much higher than someone straddle with that debt (but completely able to pay and maintain it).

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#148
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bank is also privately owned and not by any government. Each of the Federal Reserve banks is structured on paper as a private corporation, yes. But the US government effectively controls what they do; the private corporations do not exercise any of the normal functions of ownership that other private corporations do.

Have you ever worked for the federal government? My part time job is military. The government in that case really controls what we do. At the federal reserve they aren't regulated as a federal employer or a federal agency.

> Have you ever worked for the federal government? My part time job is military.

I've done both.

> At the federal reserve they aren't regulated as a federal employer or a federal agency.

Not the same way, no. But that doesn't mean the Federal Reserve is not an instrument of government policy. It is.

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#149
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a DINK millennial couple with a combined low six figure income a home purchase feels like a poor investment. Not only the down-payment of $100k+ but the property tax increases and then having to pay that mortgage for 30 years. Since we expect mobility and a certain level of future uncertainty it just doesn’t make sense for us and many more of our generation to tie ourselves to such and expensive geographic an…

The "NK" part of your "DINK" is probably influencing your decision on whether it's a worthy decision to buy a home. As a "DI3K", a house makes a ton of sense. We need space, we need a place for five people to live, and we need a house in an area where the schools are going to be great for the next 18 years. We don't need mobility as far as relocation goes, because it just doesn't make sense in our life choices right…

"(as far from the coasts as possible)" piques my interest. Why do you want to be as far from the coasts as possible?

Re: The U.S. Housing Boom Is Coming to an End, Starting in Dallas

#150
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel like this is it. Debt was introduced to parents of millennials. But it took some time to become institutionalized. Now millennials are in debt right as they get out of college. No matter what college you leave, you can have debt if your parents didn’t pay for your tuition. On top of that, wages have been stagnant. Then there is the credit card debt that is very easy to accumulate is you aren’t careful w…

A home should be about 3x salary at most, so down paymeny is 0.6 years' salary. Did you mean 5 years worth of savings?

Yes, I meant 5 years worth of savings. Thanks for correcting me.
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