Today, the question in my head is this: is being the owner of a single-family home the "best" way to wealth? I'm thinking about the precepts that have been preached at Americans for many years - that owning your home is the way to virtually guarantee your retirement and, your home should be the major asset that you acquire.
I'm not seeing that American dream make sense, and here's why.
Even before the latest economic downturn, Americans are forced to buy into markets that are often inflated and oversold, securing mortgages at interest rates that keep them in economic slavery for thirty or more years at a time. When homeowners get to the mortgage-burning party, if they ever do, they've often invested more cash and stress than the property is worth, even if the property has appreciated in value. So,when you get to your glorious retirement, what do you do in order to tap into that major asset? You have to sell it and downgrade your life to fit the cash that you get for that asset! Sounds pretty anti-climatic.
Isn't there some kind of life you can have without being an economic slave? Shouldn't your major asset be the cash that you accumulate and not the cash you hand over making banks rich so that they pay a select few executives OUTRAGEOUS salaries, while paying the tellers little more than minimum wage? I think banks employ the top-heavy salary scales that Walmart uses: heavy on the top, light on the bottom. Why is owning a home important when it is subject to so many forces that are beyond the individual's capacity to understand or influence them?
Aren't we defined by more than this? I'm getting sick of economic slavery: mortgages, credit cards, credit ratings, and Walmart. I'm getting tired of being a sheep and following along quietly with whatever makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. We must do better than this.
2 comments:
Expecting to live forever? What if? What if you lose your job, inflation soars, interest rates take off, fuel prices soar, taxes go up, health fails, someone gets sick, car crash takes a year's wages, the economy collapses, eyes fail, heart fails, cancer takes its toll, local industries fail, et. al., ? To build a McMansion and expect to own it, payment free one day, is fanciful to say the least! America needs practical housing that only the (GRD) great republican depression can make them realize. "Zero running cost, Zero upkeep dwellings" are technically possible and Post GRD will replace the shanty towns now growing on the outskirts of large cities! When we learn to build solar powered, super insulated reasonably sized survival shelters for life on this earth, not life in the glossy pages of architecture magazines, we will have a better life long term, and a higher survival rate! Meantime, McMansions complete with rusting, oil dripping SUV's go on the block, and the Barbie Girl surgically enhanced, mindless sex-object wives wrinkle, drug themselves to oblivion and lose all value! One day, post GRD, when Americans grow up and live in the real world,America will try for greatness again, in the meantime, we need and Obama-miracle just to extricate ourselves from past sins! We are knee-deep in economic clownshit, excreted by our "savant" economists and still no Utopia! It is time to take a closer look at reality and live accordingly!
There is a solar-powered, self-sustaining home. It's an Earthship. Pricey right now, but demand may make them more reasonable.
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