Happy renters?
Home prices fell at record pace in first quarter.
I think I mentioned a while back that Linda and I have been looking to purchase a house, off and on. We recently decided that we’d stick with our two-bedroom apartment for at least the time being, despite the fact that we’re going to have to do some serious rearranging to make room for our incoming third member of the family.
Perhaps we’re making the right choice:
Prices of single-family homes plunged a record 14.1 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, marking a pace five times faster than the last housing recession, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller national home price index reported on Tuesday.
We found some decent places for sale, although none of them really warranted their high prices, in our opinions, they were at the rates people were willing to sell. Then we went and talked to the loan officer, and it was basically a choice between paying 5% down and needing to pay mortgage insurance, and having some emergency cash, or going “all in” for a 10% down loan. Considering that even the happy estimates from our spreadsheets indicated that we would need to see 2-3% appreciation in order to break even on these loans, we didn’t want to risk everything
June 1st, 2008 at 9:50 am
It was really 10% down and pay obnoxious mortgage insurance rates b/c of all the defaults others have made, or put down 20% and deplete ourselves of most of our cushion. But, he’s not the one who built the models, so I’ll cut him some slack. Those 80/10/10 loans people used to do around here all the time are no longer offered by the banks, even when you have great credit history. Thanks to all the speculators and idiots out there who totally overextended themselves and then defaulted!