I'm having trouble parsing this. A lemon is a bad thing that happens to you, but this seems like it was a good thing for you?

Agree on that. I own my house with no mortgage since before the pandemic and it doesn't make much financial sense to pass up a 3% mortgage but it makes mental health sense.

Yes, I owe property taxes. Yes, the city could raise them. If I completely stopped paying them today, it would take them a decade to kick me out. It's nice from a mental health perspective to have a 10 year runway to plan your next move.

if the house was in good condition and an area that you wanted to live in, then consider yourself insanely blessed!

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/10/1197959049/zombie-second-mort...

I find it interesting that in all of these discussions it's treated as known that the person at hand is ignoring the notices and just pretending they aren't in danger of losing their home, just like in issues of evictions for rent, it's treated that for some reason the tenant has decided they don't need to pay. When IMO, in both of these, it's much more reasonable to assume they can't pay.

Maybe it's just a reflexive self-protection thing in people. It's easier to watch/envision a family being forced out of their home via state violence if you assume they were just stupid/inept in some way, that they did something wrong. That the very same thing couldn't happen to you because you would never just not pay your mortgage. And I mean, same. I would never not pay my mortgage. But I can easily conjure all kinds of nightmares that would render me unable to pay my mortgage.

Maybe people just don't like thinking about that.

Fun-fact: thems the benefits of being a mortgage holder.

If you're a tenant that's renting, you get no such legal protections - let alone discretion from whichever faceless entity actually owns the property: where I am in King County WA, I think, at most you can get 30 days' notice tops (and that's if nonpayment is the only thing they allege; it's trivially straightforward to make it a 3-day nuisance eviction, honestly).

The whole thing doesn't feel right (I don't want to say "class warfare", but I haven't heard a better explanation for this double-standard).

Getting overdrafts weekly, in that era where they reorder transactions to really turn the screws. Sleeping early because it's cheaper than eating. Working two jobs and still not getting ahead. The shame of having to ask to borrow a few bucks, but trying to hide it so you didn't seem ingenuous. Having better off people talk to you like a child, giving you unsolicited one liner advice that they probably read on a motivational poster at work that morning, like they're doing me a life favor.

The thing is, I got a lucky break in my mid 20s and haven't struggled a day since. Now it's been almost 20 years, and I find myself acting like the rich person you describe. I guess like all things, appreciation wears off with age and becomes the new normal.

I don't ever want to struggle like that again, but I'd love to experience the feeling and appreciation I had for the first couple years after climbing out of it. It's easy to forget.

For me, the biggest difference money make, is the freedom to choose better options. When you don't have money, or family backup, you quite often choose poorly not because you're dumb, but the choices you can really make are very limited. You end up taking a job that's good but not that great. You are renting, and even if the job is not good, you know there would be a huge risk to try to change the job, as you could end up unable to rent something new if you don't have a stable proven job...

These are things a lot of people never ever experienced in their life. It's not their fault of course, ideally nobody should. But yeah, you just don't judge people for poor choices that much, if you've ever been in a position where those poor choices are actually often the only real choices you have.

I grew up poor and I don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Terror? Predation? Being used and discarded? No, we just didn't have that much money, every penny had to be counted, our horizons were quite low, we lived in cheap areas.

Now, if we talk about things like bad parenting / broken families, dodgy immigration status, etc, I think I can understand what you're talking about. But that's a whole different (and much more complicated) issue.

They're soft.

Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007 allowed for the exclusion of taxes on forgiven mortgage debt. Many people used that law in conjunction with HAFA or HAMP. Myself in particular conducted a short sale during this time and did not pay taxes on the difference.

    > bankruptcy laws were skewed by GWB

During the 2008 crash, I heard of a lot of people seeing their home value plummet, end up underwater on their mortgage, and decide to just abandon it. I've never understood why someone would do that, rather than ride it out and keep paying while the value recovers?

I could MAYBE understand going "Nope, I'm out" if you had an adjustable-rate mortgage and your rate skyrocketed and now you can't afford the payments, but every housing bubble pop is temporary.

But like...I see my mortgage payment as more than just a payment on a loan, it's simply the cost of having a roof over my head. Whether I'm paying $2,000 to the bank, or $2,000 to some landlord (Really, I'd be looking at $2,800/month for a house like what I have now), I'm paying $2k/month. So why not just keep paying my mortgage, even if the value is less than what I paid?

The person who bought it is still holding the bag if Zillow is any indication, it’s still about $30k under what he bought it for. I often think about how many people are still screwed from that time.

You'd think the USSR would've been enough to stop people believing in central planning. But this is unlikely, since the desire for central planning is actually an innate instinct - a child wanting parents to handle everything for them.

Why? When would it make sense for someone to attach this addendum to a sale? All these penalties and restrictions would only mean getting paid less for the same property. On the buyer side, why would anyone want an asset like you've described?

I live in a home that I enjoy in part because it is a fantastic investment that is highly-leveraged (through a mortgage) in a way not possible for other types of assets. If I need to I can rent out rooms or the entire property. I can sell it to whoever I want, whenever I want. I can borrow against my partial equity in the property. My mortgage is 30-year fixed, but I can always refinance (with no prepayment penalty) if rates go down below my locked rate.

I wouldn't want to buy a house without these benefits, and I don't know who else would. If this became standard it would reduce demand for this asset class, and therefore make it less profitable to build new housing, which is exactly the opposite of what you want.

Why would anyone attach that to a sale? I bet that such terms would reduce the money you can get for the house to at least a tenth of the unencumbered value. Simply because it will make all future sales so much more complicated and risky. It would reduce flexibility for the person who now owns the home. (Especially the no-renting rule.) Banks would not touch such transaction with a 20 feet pole so the buyer better has the whole sale price in cash. Which means only wealthy people can buy your house.

You might be grinning about all of these consequences and thinking “yes, this is exactly what i want to achieve”. But what is the incentive here for the home owner? From their perspective choosing this option loses them a lot of money, so who would do this? And why?

Sounds like the home owner could just douse their home with gasoline and light it on fire. From a value perspective it has about the same effect. I predict it would be similarly popular too (that is not popular at all). Which means very few happless people would be stuck with this weird situation, while at the same time the option would have about 0 effect on the wider market. (Maybe it would add some extra legal checks to buying normal unencumbered property increasing the legal costs for everyone. Just to verify that nobody had added such an agreement to that particular property in any point in the past.)

It's not just the home-buying market where prices are high. It's also the home-rental market.

> so that no one has to be homeless anymore.

People that can't buy may no longer be able to rent either because of the supply you constrained. Homelessness would probably go up.

It's not bad.

But does lead to people unable to move. Because they don't earn enough from the sale to buy a new house. And buyers can't get a property nobody is selling (so you risk corruption too).

Could also cause a bit of market distortion. Probably not a huge problem.

Also: Take a look at housing in France (outside Paris), Germany (outside Berlin), and Italy (outside Milan). It hardly changes faster than inflation. How do they do it? Low population growth, combined with careful community planning (new housing starts, etc.)

Houses are only an attractive investment vehicle in the first place because there is a massive shortage of housing.

Or smile at you through the kitchen window while they disconnect the running air conditioner.

Despite our bravado and ammosexuality, it turns out Texans are people like everywhere else.