Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Mortgages, Homeownership and the Debt Ceiling (and My First Video!!!)

Click the big, stupid YouTube logo to watch my first video (there goes some of the anonymity, I suppose . . . ) In this video, I decided to talk about something that happened yesterday: Congress raised the debt ceiling. AGAIN. To $17.2 TRILLION. Let me put the zeros on that for effect:

If you were to stack that many dollar bills on top of each other (each dollar being 0.0043 inches thick according to the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing), a stack of $17.2 trillion would be 1,167,300 miles long. That is almost 5 times the distance to the moon and would loop the earth nearly 47 times. A dollar bill weighs about 1 gram, so a stack of money that big would weigh 37,919,500,000 lbs, which is equivalent to 85 times the weight of the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago. Am I getting through to anyone???

So, in this video, I tackle debt as one of the motivation for me to live out of my car, and I specifically talk about mortgages. You see, when people say that they are "homeowners," they generally mean that they are paying on a mortgage for a home that they live in. That doesn't mean that they own it. Actually, the bank owns it. The "homeowner" is really a "mortgage owner." We've become so desensitized to debt that we shrug it off as ownership.

We often talk about the percentage of people that are homeowners, but this is once again talking about people who have a home with a mortgage. One topic that I didn't touch on in the video is the percentage of homes that are owned free and clear (that is, without a mortgage). According to Zillow, in 1940, 55% of non-farm owners in America owned their homes free and clear. However, in 2013, that number has dropped to 29%, nearly half what it was less than a century ago. That's pathetic! It's no wonder that we report the percentage of "homeowners," which was at 67.4% in 2009 (year of the last census).

So, I live in my car for a good reason. I don't want to be one of those statistics if I can help it. Call it pride, but I want to actually own the things that I have. I own my car. I own my degree. I'll fight as hard as I can to one day own my own home.

. . . now THAT'S dreaming big.