A home is one of the most important assets that most people will ever buy. Homes are also where memories are made and you want to work with someone you can trust.
But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.
If I knew where I was going to want to live the next five or 10 years I would buy a home and I'd finance it with a 30-year mortgage... It's a terrific deal.
Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent... When bills come due, only cash is legal tender. Don't leave home without it.
When bills come due, only cash is legal tender. Don't leave home without it.
I've never been very fully employed either but just think of what it's like, you know, to go home with a mortgage payment you know and kids and everything else. My dad had that happen to him in the early '30s.
We've been in a recession, by any common sense definition, because if you look at the American public, they've got 20 billion - 20 trillion, I should say, worth of residential homes.
With housing it's something even more dramatic than that, because most people aspire to own their own home.If you really think that houses prices are going to go up next year and the year after, you feel if I don't buy it this year, I'm going to have to buy it next year.That's not true of an Internet stock. But it's true of a home.
