I’m going to do something very hazardous in our discursive culture, which is to talk about a rich man’s problem. It occurs to me that my problem, the buying of a house, should not be restricted to rich men, and there have been long periods of American life when it hasn’t been. But with interest rates sky-high and rising, inventories far lower than demand, and the death of the starter home, it happens that buying a house is a problem that few who aren’t affluent can have. (We need to build! Among other things.) It’s gotten that bad around here. I will therefore accept any jibes you might have regarding my fretting here; these are a rich guy’s tears over a rich guy’s problem.
So: we’re trying to buy a home. I’ve mentioned this before. We more or less have to wait until March to buy, as that’s when my Substack income turns two years old. We were told by a lender that we could get one earlier if we had an accountant look over my tax returns for the past five years and declare that I had been freelancing over that time period. I was and am not entirely sure of what the details really are there; I have been freelancing for more like a dozen years, but it certainly hasn’t been the majority of my incoming over the last five. Long story short, we’re going to wait, to avoid any confusion and because we’ll need to build up a bigger downpayment, thanks to those spiraling interest figures. We’re committed to waiting.
But, man, it hasn’t been easy. Watching the Fed crank up rates, and thus watching the amount of house we can buy go down, is a very particular feeling of powerlessness. And my attempts to remain rational about all of this have not borne fruit. There is a very deep and implacable part of my brain that’s convinced that all of the houses in [REDACTED LOCATION] will be sold by the time we can buy. Just all of them. We’ll show up at our agent’s office and she’ll say, “sorry, the last home in your area of interest was just sold to the Onceler from The Lorax,” and we’ll be back to an apartment in NYC with no space where the landlord might decide to double the rent when our lease period is up. I know that’s not rational, and I know I should count my blessings. But every day I scroll buy a YouTube video with the title like “Now is the WORST Time Ever to Buy!”
What strikes me about all this is how it undermines any sense of control of your own economic situation. I mean, just empirically, my decisions have almost no sway over what I can afford here. In early 2021 I’d be looking at, I don’t know, 2.5% on a fixed-rate 30 year? Now averages are, what, 6.5%? I have close to perfect credit so I’ll get a little better, but still, that effectively means that the house we can afford is hundreds of thousands of dollars less than what we could have gotten a year ago, without any decision of our own at play. It’s especially stark because the idea is to buy the “forever home” and live in it for my remaining 30 or 40 years. Even if I refinance, the house I get will remain the house I get. And so imagine how someone living on the American median wage feels. It’s just that the system we’re caught in got too hot, and the masters of the universe have decided to cool it off by engineering a recession. And that’s going to produce a lot of people who will lose out in ways that are far worse than not being able to buy the house they want. Yet the American belief in self-determination persists.