Then and Now
If you really want to geek out economically, here’s where I found inflation adjustment factors to be able to compare past costs and incomes with current (2004) ones. Turns out that my income now is the equivalent of $9460 the year I was born.
One of the reasons I keep repeating the housing bubble mantra is that a mortgage on a pretty decent, typical house in 1979 comes out to $587 in today’s dollars. Try getting a house for that! No wonder it feels like what I think of as affordable. My 1979 income would be $21,560 - higher than an amount a crazy girl at my high school chided me as meaning “rich” at the time. The payment on the same house now would be $2100 in actual “what the house would sell for and what a 20 year mortgage would be” terms. That’s an $823 mortgage payment in 1979, adjusted backward only for constant dollars, rather than wealth transfer.
Wow. I mean, I knew it was bad. I knew real estate had outpaced reality. But, wow.
Related:
Rents, Housing and Inflation
Heh. In about a week, all your talk about bursting bubbles will no longer scare the crud out of me
Hopefully, the parental home refinance will be complete and I can start breathing again.
Posted by Ith on 06/23 at 07:48 PMIs this the wrong time to mention that my monthly mortgage payment is $607?
Posted by CGHill on 06/24 at 08:44 AM
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