question: how to know when is it better to buy? - now: high price but low mortgage? - later: lower price but higher mortgage? (or simply take this and later refinance at lower rates?)
Absolutely later. Then refinance.
Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
331–340 of 768 posts
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget to mention they still have full health coverage in the EU. It’s not possible to afford housing or robust healthcare in the US. Keep in mind there’s no rule we have to tolerate either. Imagine being a teenager in the US, having just seen how essential workers are treated, knowing in all likelihood your future is an “essential worker”. Then watch Congress scapegoat Facebook.
“Full health coverage” according to all my EU and especially British friends I would still be on a waitlist for a surgery I had 2+ years ago.
Vastly different across Europe
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s no rule that you should be able to afford a house on a middle class income. In fact in many countries, particularly in Western Europe, it’s unimaginable that you would be able to afford a detached, single family home on a middle class income. Lots of people in that situation will live in apartments, row houses, or condos for the rest of their lives.
You can't compare Western Europe to the US. Maybe to specific regions or super-urban areas, e.g., the LA to SD corridor or the Bay Area. In which case the two are comparable: there are few if any middle-class families in the bay area that own their homes except by inheritance or some other luck (gift, lottery). Even condos and other high-density housing are all but completely out of reach for all but the top 10% of i…
You wrote: > That is a bold, sweeping statement with no supporting evidence provided.
I Googled for about 10 seconds to find some statistics about Bay Area homeownership.
Zoomable map to visualise California homeownership (very cool!): https://dig.abclocal.go.com/california/homeownership-maps/BayArea_homeowners_zip_map.html
Homeownership Rate (5-year estimate) for San Francisco: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOWNRATEACS006075
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is clear that the parent is using home-ownership to include land-ownership.
Don’t know how it is in most of Europe, but I think that, in the UK, you don’t actually own the land your house sits on; Lord Such-and-Such owns it, and collects rent from you. In the US, we own the land, and that is usually the real value. I’m the proud owner of a 0.125-acre New York postage stamp. It’s in a fairly affluent area, so is fairly valuable. In Wyoming, they’d laugh at it. I think Japan is similar.
> but I think that, in the UK, you don’t actually own the land your house sits on; Lord Such-and-Such owns it, and collects rent from you.
I've never heard this before. Is this actually true? Is this some background technical legal truth that isn't noticed in practice?
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the mismatch? Biden got a trillion or two in handouts and Powell bought up all the bonds. Now Biden is taking a step back (not completely but not another trillion) and Powell said he’ll start selling.
Halting rent and college tuition paybacks while also spending trillions for people not to work and businesses to not open while the fed also cut interest rates continuously. They decided to test MMT and it failed so badly.
> They decided to test MMT and it failed so badly.
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t know how it is in most of Europe, but I think that, in the UK, you don’t actually own the land your house sits on; Lord Such-and-Such owns it, and collects rent from you. In the US, we own the land, and that is usually the real value. I’m the proud owner of a 0.125-acre New York postage stamp. It’s in a fairly affluent area, so is fairly valuable. In Wyoming, they’d laugh at it. I think Japan is similar.
You're paying taxes, yeah? And if you were to overlook those tax payments, what would become of your supposed ownership? And subject to eminent domain? Not to mention the many laws of the lands and social expectations besides. How much do you really own?
In that sense, you don't own your body either: At any time, the government could send goons to shoot you or jail you or harvest your kidneys. Even if you leave the country, they could put a bounty on your head or send assassins.
Sure, there's courts and laws, but they pick the judges and can choose to change the laws. They could pass a constitutional amendment tomorrow giving themselves the right to harvest your kidneys, the same way local counties can pass a law at any time raising your property taxes.
And, even if you argue that you have rights under the current government, empires don't last forever. 300 years from now, who's to say barbarians won't be ransacking the house you left to your kids? In that sense, your rights are only contingent on the barbarians being too scared to attack, and not absolute.
So if your argument is, "You can't own a house because the government could take it away", it seems like you have no hope and no possible policy change would give you any "true rights" to anything.
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s no rule that you should be able to afford a house on a middle class income. In fact in many countries, particularly in Western Europe, it’s unimaginable that you would be able to afford a detached, single family home on a middle class income. Lots of people in that situation will live in apartments, row houses, or condos for the rest of their lives.
Western Europe is both considerably more crowded and poorer than the US.
That’s a sweeping comparison. I’ve visited both and my take would be that Europeans have a higher standard of living than Americans. But that’s just a hunch, I’d be interested to see a breakdown by specific metric and class.
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Full health coverage” according to all my EU and especially British friends I would still be on a waitlist for a surgery I had 2+ years ago.
Non-essential surgeries tend to have longer wait times (such as hip replacements in elderly people), but conversely, essential care is accessible to everyone at no cost and in a timely manner. I live in Canada, and recently had appendicitis. My appendix was removed less than 24 hours after symptoms began, and 10-12 hours after I arrived at the hospital. I walked in to the ER (after a very painful car ride), they aske…
> Non-essential surgeries tend to have longer wait times (such as hip replacements in elderly people)
Something ridiculous like 70% of lifetime healthcare spending in the US occurs in the last two years of a person's life (half-remembered number from like 10 years ago). The uncomfortable truth is that we spend way too much on hail-mary treatments for people who are almost certainly going to die, and too much on useless shit like knee replacements for the elderly, and far too little on the earlier stages of their life. But nobody wants to tell the elderly "no" because they vote.
Obamacare had the right idea with "death panels". A lot of treatments that happen near the end aren't medically justified by quality-adjusted years-of-life or similar metrics. And that money comes out of the healthcare of younger people, whom the US treats like shit compared to the elderly. Because they don't vote.
But nobody likes the optics of "pulling the plug on grandma".
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#339Isn't this one of those "If everyone is crazy, you're crazy" situations? If every house is overvalued by some metric, then maybe the metric is wrong. People's perceptions of value are a large part of the actual value(meaning what someone would really pay) for things like housing that should depreciate over time.
Eventually, housing costs begin to outstrip income. Starts at the bottom and goes up. In South Bay a quarter million of household income can’t get you a modest family home. Simple single family homes go for $3M.
It's wild. Single family houses are being listed at $2M-$3M and going for $1M over asking. And the houses would often be considered fairly modest anywhere else in the country.
I imagine a lot of buyers can afford this by selling their existing homes. Or perhaps they socked away a huge nest egg during after an IPO or over the duration of the stock market run up.
But new homebuyers would need to earn about $750k+/year for the foreseeable future for this to make financial sense. That could be a risky wager over the next few years.
Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Halting rent and college tuition paybacks while also spending trillions for people not to work and businesses to not open while the fed also cut interest rates continuously. They decided to test MMT and it failed so badly.
Trump's tax cuts certainly didn't help either. Or let's just blame it on "handouts" again.
And ballooning debt and minuscule rates during the “good times”