I currently live in a nice apartment complex. However, I look forward to the day when I can finally own a home. To me as well as to many other Americans, owning a home is akin to issuing a statement to the world that you have finally arrived and are staking your place in society. Even if you own the tiniest home on the smallest plot of land, it s yours isn t it? For most people, this is more than enough.
There are many benefits to owning a house. For instance, when you own a house, you can use the equity to help you make larger purchases such as buying a car. Many people borrow against the equity in their homes to purchase a new car. My father was recently trying to explain to me the process by which he could purchase a new car for my mother by using the equity in their house if he wanted to. Owning a home can also work wonders for your credit score. However, with the economy in the dumps, quite the opposite is becoming true.
No one wants to ever find themselves in a situation where they cannot afford to pay for something, but nothing is more devastating or more embarrassing than having the bank put a stake in the front lawn of your property that says “Bank Owned” or “Foreclosure”. Foreclosure simply means that you can no longer afford to pay the mortgage on your home. Many Americans made the mistake of putting themselves in this category of foreclosed upon homes back when the real estate market was at its zenith. You see, when people were re financing their homes during the height of the housing boom, many re financed their homes into what is called an adjustable rate mortgage or “APR”. However, what they failed to realize was that this adjustable rate mortgage could do just that: adjust to something entirely different.
The result of the adjustable rate mortgage problem was that there were many people left with huge mortgages but limited funds. There is a statistic (which I m not sure of the exact number), but it pretty much says that if you look around at the various home owners in the area, most homeowners are only one paycheck away from being homeless. Today, this is even worse as something like one in ten homeowners are actually in default on their mortgages. When will this crisis ever end? Will people ever learn from the mistakes that others have made? I have one friend who is married, and recently, she broke the news to my boyfriend and I that she and her husband were going to be purchasing and moving into their first home by the time December rolled around. Well, now it is December, and they are set to move into their new home in a matter of days. This is an extremely exciting time for them, and it also goes to show that not everyone is suffering during this economic crisis. In fact, there are some people who are benefiting from other people s misfortunes and learning along the way not to make the same mistakes.
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