overview for glomag

Yes it sounds like everything worked out great for you. Good job on timing your investment! But this is a perfect example of the type of financialization of the housing market that I'm against. You used leverage to buy an expensive, risky asset and sold it for a profit just a few years later. This doesn't always work out so well (ask anyone who bought a house in 2007) and I don't want to put essentially all my savings into a wallstreetbets style gamble just so I can have somewhere to sleep at night.

Student loan borrowers skip payments: It's "an act of civil disobedience", 1 in 10 say they won't pay in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm not saying mortgages should completely go away. I'm sure a mortgage is the right decision for many people's situations. It's just the way that people talk about buying a house, a mortgage seems to be assumed. If it wasn't just assumed then maybe people would put more thought into whether they want to save for a larger down payment (or the full price) or whether they want to pay $750,000 for a $400,000 house.
I don't know, maybe people see these numbers and think its a great deal. All I see is a bank making a huge amount of money from me that I would rather keep for myself. Also, if people stopped stretching their budget to the absolute limit with financing nonsense (3% down, variable rate loans, rate buydowns), in aggregate there would be less demand for houses at these high prices and sellers would have to start accepting lower offers.

Student loan borrowers skip payments: It's "an act of civil disobedience", 1 in 10 say they won't pay in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Your partner wants to finance a house someday. I know I'm on the losing side of this battle but I really wish people would stop associating BUYING a house with taking out a LOAN from a bank.

It just feels like people are only deceiving themselves by saying "I need good credit to buy a house" when what they really mean is "I need good credit so I can take on a lot of debt and pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the next 30 years."

Countries that let anyone in? in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

That's a good point. But the US is not offering this same path to citizenship to anyone willing to buy a house in rural Alabama. I assumed these visa programs were aimed at attracting wealthy foreigners which is why the US has something similar for anyone willing to invest $800K in a commercial enterprise. That's why I was curious if $263K is considered relatively wealthy in Greece and could buy a house even in desirable areas. The fact that apparently this is not the case makes the goals of this program unclear.