Here are a pair of noteworthy comments from yesterday’s discussion about large price haircuts.
photo by Flickr user allyaubry
By Guest:
1. What’s up with the sudden popularity of phrases regarding debt and suffering that include the word “haircut.”
2. A “FUN” property? What exactly is “fun” about this situation. How is an inflated “boom-era” price anything other than merely predictable – why is it “insane?” Please explain. Surely this kind of price history won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog.
Did you contact the owner(s) of this property to get their story? If you did, I missed it.
Here’s my experience with this kind of “fun.” During the process to sell our home for $95,000 less than we had paid for it about a year previously, no one in my family ever thought they were having “fun.”
No one in my family was snickering or wanting to start a contest to see who could come up with the most misery and sadness and grief. There was only a quiet sense of purpose, to pay down the mortgage before the home was sold, and a sense of sadness and loss, then a sense of moving on. No one thought it was “fun” to have their home advertised on the internet and their privacy compromised.
OK, go for it fellas. Talk about how stupid you just know people like myself are. Throw in a few statistics and charts and hyperlinks. Talk all about how people like my family have caused all kinds of problems in the housing market even if it isn’t really true.
C’mon, give it your best shot. I want to hear some really mean stuff, some wonderful, snarky, repeatable witticisms. Maybe put me in an indefensible position, then laugh at me for exposing my soft stupid underbelly.
Bonus points for finding spelling/grammatical posting errors you can pick on.
Ho-ho-ho you are so darn erudite and cool!
Response from wreckingbull:
OK, I’ll bite.
I assure you it was not “fun” for me holding back and renting through the boom years, with a kind, reasonable, wife that wanted nothing more than a 1000 square foot roof over her head, whilst I quietly endured coworkers, friends, and even family commenting about how I was ‘throwing my money away’ each month and ‘living like a college student’, pointing out how foolish I was to allow myself to be ‘priced out forever’. I only quote these phrases to point out that they were literally used in almost every conversation. But I just nodded my head in agreement, knowing that the lunacy was not sustainable.
Sorry you made some decisions that blew back at you. I hope you and your family can recover as quickly and painlessly as possible.
While I don’t know your situation, I do know that many others experienced a serious case of the stupids during the bubble years. Now, you and I are literally paying for their mistakes, in the form of trillions of added national debt and an economy in shambles. I think it is OK to blow off a little steam in regards to this disaster.
I don’t really have much to add here. I can empathize with “guest,” and I certainly did not intend for the post to be implying that foreclosure was “fun” for those involved. My post was about properties, not people. Of course, I obviously relate more personally to “wreckingbull,” since I have gone through similar experiences myself over the last five years.
The bottom line is that the housing bubble may have seemed awesome to some people at the time, but the end result turns out to be pretty lame for everyone. Hopefully this is a cycle we will not repeat for a very long time.