Buying a New Home
I may not have a lot of money at the moment, but as a young guy with excellent credit and just starting out, the environment has never been better for buying a new home! The housing bubble has popped, and now that the markets have come down out of the stratosphere normal folk like myself can actually consider buying property young. The government, in trying to stimulate the wrecked housing market, is also offering all sorts of incentives for first-time homebuyers.
I have seen a lot of “victims” of the bad economy show up on television, and some of them are definitely hurting, but a lot of them fell victim to their own shortsightedness. I see a volunteer firefighter earning no more than $2000 US a month, with 3 children, defaulting on a 5000 square foot house and I cannot help but think he had that coming. On what planet, even with the wild west of mortgages we had going for a while, would someone earning 24,000 US a year think they could afford that kind of house?
Another option for new buyers is the foreclosure market, which my friend just recently bought a condo from. He got a condo that initially sold for $350,000 US for just under $120,000 at the foreclosure auction. Minus some inexpensive work he will have to do for the interior (it was owned by a young family) to turn it into a bachelor pad, he now has a 3-story home for a fraction of what he would have had to pay not 2 years ago! This market is perfect for young professionals that want to get into property but were previously locked out because of artificial price hikes, so I count this crisis as a blessing!