Not the first time that this has happened to a house built on that show.
It all boils down to a lack of financial management skills, on which one may receive a semester's worth of training on during high school economics. It has NOTHING to do with how much money you either have or had. Who woulda' thunk that Ed McMahon would lose a house to foreclosure?
Shoot, even if the mortgage is completely paid off, just the property taxes alone on some of these houses are too much for the people to afford in the long-term.
Give a person a house, and they'll live there for a day, teach them how to build a house . . .
Great essay in the WaPo about this today. My favorite snippet:
You could (and will) say the Harpers had it coming, but really, we all had this coming. One thing we'll always remember about this decade was the constant home do-over fetish, in real life and in the reality of reality TV -- the constant warping of the consumer's sense of entitlement, the fairy-dust economics, the MasterCard reminder that the experience is priceless. We'll look back and think of all the time we spent watching shows where people flipped houses for easy profit, or traded spaces, or designed it to sell, or were led into rooms blindfolded to experience the paroxysms that came with new paint, new furniture, new life.
All the crying people did for the camera: They cried when television's magic wand touched them, and the hosts always cried, too, while telling the camera how good they felt making the dreams of the sick and wretched owners of substandard tract houses come true. Think of the many tears that were shed on American television over organized closets and new kitchen countertops.
Now comes a long period of tsk-tsk, and tut-tut. The schadenfreude potential is everywhere now in these newly sobered times, and it would be something if the Harpers would make themselves available for an entirely other kind of documented extreme makeover, penny by penny.
Every day, we are greeted with fresh evidence of the great American fire sale. If it was wrong to think the economy could go on forever subsisting on money that no one actually had, then it was wrong to think there was something wonderful about watching shows where people got houses for nothing, and then expect them to live happily ever after. Last week, the new numbers came out: Foreclosures were filed against some 740,000 U.S. homes between March and June alone.
Comments
It all boils down to a lack of financial management skills, on which one may receive a semester's worth of training on during high school economics. It has NOTHING to do with how much money you either have or had. Who woulda' thunk that Ed McMahon would lose a house to foreclosure?
Shoot, even if the mortgage is completely paid off, just the property taxes alone on some of these houses are too much for the people to afford in the long-term.
Give a person a house, and they'll live there for a day, teach them how to build a house . . .
And they'll gloat at the watercooler about wealthy their real estate acumen has made them?
Haven't had tv since a few years before the end of the last century.