How would your point of view differ if you had bought your house right before the crash?

Just fine, because I kept it for longer than the recommended time that good mortgage brokers tell you to plan for evening out costs and riding out dips. It would have cost me an extra $300k to buy it before the crash, plus the four years it took to recover from the crash before prices started climbing again. In the four years that housing prices were dropping (2008 to 2012), my rent went up, not down. Sure it didn’t go up very much in those 4 years, but it didn’t stay flat like my mortgage would have (I don’t know if the property tax went down during the time due to assessments dropping, but I don’t think they did). And I wasn’t paying down principle like on the mortgage. Yeah, my house value would have only doubled in 10 years instead of tripled, which only means I wouldn’t have been able to leverage the equity to buy a vacation property that I still haven’t built on.

Also, remember that the stock market ALSO crashed during that time. It took nearly 5 years for the stock market to recover from the 2008 crash.

Finally, the guy who tried flipping it just before the crash made some questionable decisions on what changes to make for his flip, some of which I have had to undo. If he had just kept the house as it was and lived here instead of trying to be a flipper making a profit, he would have been fine after 5 years. But since I owned it instead of renting, I was able to change the house as I saw fit to be happier living in it.

Oh come on, that’s being extremely, EXTREMELY… I can’t find the word. Not pedantic, not pessimistic, and not near sighted. Whatever the term is for when you take the absolute extreme edge case to try making a point.

Rent will always go up over time due to inflation. Yes, you might have dips for a year or two, but landlords will always raise the rent based on inflation at the minimum. And regardless of big drops in house prices during economy crashes, your mortgage does not go up over time outside of adjustments to taxes and insurance. Even when there was the worst housing crash in US history in 2008, my rent never dropped. My rent kept going up every single year by the maximum amount the city allowed under rent control. Housing prices dropped, which allowed me to buy a house. And in your case where you talk about losing $360k due to buying instead of renting over 10 years, you are ignoring that $245k will be going to buying down the principle (amortization calculations for a 6% loan on $1.5M for 30 years). You spent $552,000 at a bare minimum, assuming no rent increases (impossibly unlikely), and have 0 to show for it. The owner spent almost exactly twice that but has $245k in equity on top of whatever equity had grown from house prince inflation over 10 years. Every year it gets better for the homeowner, especially when you hit 30 years and have paid off the house… while you are still renting.

In reality, when I bought my house 12 years ago my mortgage was $3900 (with taxes and insurance) and rent would have been $4000. Now, my mortgage is $4100 and rent is $6000.

Now, I’m also ignoring the money that can be made investing the money you save renting vs buying. But if we use your assumptions, then there is no guarantee you’ll make money investing your money.

What I’m seeing is that prices for lumber today are fairly flat based on location. Back in 2019, someone in AZ might pay $2 per 2x4 while someone in OK might pay $3. It was very variable depending on where you bought. Today, just about everyone has to pay $3.75 per 2x4.

The property tax on my house is $7000/year… and that is with a fixed assessment from 12 years ago. If I were to buy my house today, my tax would be $21000/year.

That is the state of the buy v rent trade-off on that house TODAY. In 10 years, the rent on that house will go up but the mortgage will stay the same. Regardless of the equity you build in owning (which can be leveraged for other things even if you don’t sell), your “rent” stays fixed while renting goes up every year.

Companies are able to take longer term stances and can sustain short term losses. They buy a house and keep it for 10 years, long enough that those losses transition to profits.

Those tax updates screwed me. Yes, it temporarily raised the tax deduction, but it also capped the tax deductions if you were above the standard. His changes cost me a couple grand a year.

The part of that which REALLY hurt me was the cap on how much you could deduct. I itemized even with the increase in higher standard deduction, so capping my deduction hurt me a lot.

This is only looking at a point in time, not the life of the loan. In the US at least, we have fixed rate loans (many countries do not have that). So your “rent” when you mortgage a home is fixed for 30 years. When you rent, your rental costs increase with inflation every year. While it might be 14% higher to mortgage than rent right now, in a few years your mortgage will stay the same while your rent will have increased. Yes, there are repair/maintenance costs, but after 5 years or so you are saving enough per month to pay for those repairs.

This is exactly the kind of math that normal people don’t get when it comes to this conversation. Every industry has some convoluted, obscure, non-intuitive way to actually make money when it doesn’t sound like you should. You have to think in different ways and in longer terms.

Maybe not in DC, but don’t underestimate how many hours most of these psychopaths actually work. They do come to work (maybe not in DC, but to some office somewhere) and work for 100 hours a week, because they place no value on anything other than work. You can fault them for many things, but billionaires are almost always true psychopaths with no concept of anything beyond working to achieve power.

Trump is a different story. He’ll say the golf course is his office, where he makes his deals.

Nah, I don’t agree with paying people more to come into the office. Working at home has costs for me that the company doesn’t compensate me for, plus it saves the company money in infrastructure and resources. If you get paid more to come into the office, I want to be paid more for my electricity, plus the desk and chair and monitor and the space in my house for them.

I used to get so mad at movies that had unrealistic portrayals of how people would act in a crisis situation.

After COVID, I no longer question the unbelievable stupidity of humans, nor the amount of hatred humans have.

It’s hard to shrug something off if you aren’t at all trying to shrug something off.

You might be surprised what the feelings are of people in the Pentagon vs those in the services at large. The Pentagon is filled mostly with officers, not enlisted people. Officers are college educated and are responsible for leading teams of people. They take their oath of service EXTREMELY seriously, and seeing a commander in chief who spits in the face of this oath is not taken lightly. Seeing a commander in chief who risks the lives of their people for questionable reasons is not taken lightly. I was in the Pentagon the month before and the day after election… most people there are not Trump voters.

A miscalculation is still a mistake. If their intention was to get him convicted, regardless of before or during election season, their slow-walking failed. They made mistakes.

You are correct about friendly judges. I don’t know enough about lawyering to know if there was a way for the DA to pick better venues with less friendly judges.

I try to, but there aren’t any near me. I resort to ordering from Powells or picking up from BN in person. I used to buy used from ABE books, but they got bought by Amazon.

Hell, I live in a huge city and don’t have many other options. Most of the independent stores here are focused on specific topics instead of just general fiction. Either that or they aren’t anywhere near me, which sucks in a city with crazy traffic.

It’s like he’s so close to sounding like a good, decent human being… and then he has his wife go do that shit at the end.

A) She should have never called it a term that has that much meaning behind it.

B) She should have maybe waited to hear some facts before speaking about it.

The prosecutors in every single one of the MANY cases against him fucked up royally every step of the way. How can so many people make so many mistakes? I mean, even though they were up against judges who were actively trying to fuck them, they should have ended these cases a year ago.