A reader emailed last week, requesting some information on the historic rate of price growth for King County home prices, in order to make a more educated guess when making buy-vs-rent calculations. To that end, I am providing the following charts and table. First up is the average growth rate for King County Single-Family homes…
Tag: Stock Market
Checking Up on the “Forced Savings Plan” Myth
Please consider the following excerpt from a post I wrote that was originally published on the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly (and later here): …if home buying is like a savings plan, it’s probably the worst savings plan on Earth. Would you voluntarily sign up for a savings plan where well over half of…
Crash Comparisons: Job Losses & Dow Jones
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently posted an alarming chart of job losses that has been making the rounds. What jumps out to me when I look at her chart is the fact that the y-axis shows raw number of jobs rather than a percentage loss, and therefore fails to account for the increased size of…
Stock Market Crash Historical Comparison Update
I thought it would be interesting to post an update on the stock market crash graph that I first posted back in October. In the chart below I have graphed the crashes of 1929, 1973, 1987, and 2001 alongside the current fall, with the peak points aligned near the left. Each crash is scaled on…
2008 Pop Quiz
Pop quiz, hotshot. Let’s say you had $100,000 on January 1st 2008. Which of the following “investment” methods took the largest loss in 2008: 20% down payment on a $500,000 SFH in King County. S&P 500 index fund. Cash under the mattress. … And the answer is… A! According to the NWMLS, the median price…