During the boom times for real estate in this decade people were buying homes with $0 down, interest only loans, and jumping into home purchases with friends, family, and new significant others.  Mortgage options like subprime mortgages, Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs),  Reverse Mortgages, FHA mortgages proliferated during this period as they were extremely popular amongst [...]

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I don’t know if I’ve ever crunched the numbers hard on the first place we’d ever bought.  The first place we ever bought in 2002 was a 570 sq foot, one bedroom condo.  We paid $150k and sold it in 2005 for $250k.  The closing costs were minimal at the time, $2k I think.  We [...]

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Yesterday I talked more about our evolution. I wanted to talk a bit about the house and why it was a mistake. Buying our home was a financial mistake.  But it happened after we became more cognizant of our finances.  So why was it a mistake?
Well for one thing it was more expensive than renting.  [...]

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Apparently a family in Georgia got a free house in 2005 from Extreme Makeover, and now they are going into foreclosure here.  So what happened?
Well 2 years after Extreme Makeover rebuilt the new home for the Harpers and paid off their exisiting mortgage, the Harpers took out a $450k mortgage only 15 months ago!  And somehow in 15 months are [...]

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