I recently saw a real estate story here at the RealtyTimes site with the headline - Broke and Buying: Financial Options for Buyers with Money Problems. The story was written by another Realtor® and actually had good advice for people who might need a little assistance with a home purchase; so, that was a good thing. It was the headline that was annoying. Now, I know that one is supposed to use a catchy headline to grab the attention of would-be readers; but, it’s the mentality that one can be broke and still buy a home that got us into trouble the last time. Remember the housing bubble and the Great Recession?
The hope and belief that anything and everything is possible in America is one of the bedrocks of our success as a nation; however, there has always been a concomitant belief that one achieves those dreams and desires through hard work and perseverance. It is when we stray away from those accompanying values of achieving dreams through effort and begin to see the things that we want as entitlements that we step onto the slippery slope of failure and disaster.
I know that the word “entitlements” is fraught with heavy political and moral baggage; but it is used correctly here. The dream of owning one’s own home is strong and pervasive in our society, but it is not something that everyone is entitled to, whether they can afford it or not. It is not something that society owes to anyone. It is something that must be striven for and achieved through hard work and perseverance.
The evening news shows often have people shown demonstrating for one thing or another and many times when they interview someone from the crowd they will use the phrase, “It my right to have…”. Fill in the blank. The last time I checked there are a few rights that are defined in the Constitution and none of them say anything about owning a home. Perhaps the advocated of that view would lump that under the “pursuit of happiness.”
I don’t have any problem with the various programs that were alluded to in the article. They certainly aren’t designed to help someone who is broke and can’t afford a house anyway. Those days are long gone. In order to get help these days, one must prove that they are credit worthy and have a very good chance of actually paying the mortgage payments. Most of these are programs designed to assist hard working people get past the hump of the down payment that is required to buy a house.
Hopefully the lenders learned enough of a lesson from the Great Recession not to repeat the scenarios that we saw prior to the collapse, where anyone who could fog a mirror could get a mortgage loan. I suspect that the majority of them have; however, there’s always a fringe element willing to take advantage of any situation and we are starting to see those ads that holler out, “No money, no problem!” I certainly hope we are not seeing Deja Vous all over again.
