Feb. 19, 2009 - Remember the Good Old Days?
Remember the good old days of, say, a month ago when our bitter complaints centered merely how Obama wanted to redistribute wealth?
At least that, as Alan Reynolds points out, was based on income. The housing "rescue" provides redistribution based on debt. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500284970517737.html
You owe more, you get more goodies. Have you been responsible, saving appropriately for a down payment? Too bad, so sad. No goodies for you.
Did you lie on your loan application? No matter. That's not an issue or criteria for assessing who gets the goodies. Liars welcome.
It irks me when the responsible have to pay for the irresponsible. That irks me because I fall into the former category.
But you know what? I'm in the former category now. I've been in the latter too and I can tell you that these proposed "solutions" would have delayed necessary life lessons.
We've been in a home we couldn't afford, cutting that magic mortgage payment-to-income ratio too close. Never in our wildest dreams would it have occurred to us that someone should bail us out. We sold the home, moved into an apartment and began again a few years later on a much more solid footing.
That provided one of the best financial lessons ever. One that saved us in this current market as we about killed ourselves to put down 20% in our expensive geographic location and we determined to pay off the balance in 15 years rather than 30. Trust me, once you've been to the land of stupid, you really don't want to schedule a return trip.
We've drowned under a mountain of debt. We repaid it all and never again took on any debt other than our mortgage for longer than 30 days.
We made the leap from irresponsible to responsible because of the school of hard knocks. We need a better housing plan so that others can learn that as well. Assisting people to stay in slavery to debt is no plan at all.
Blessings, Holly
