Housing is Lunacy. I refuse to fall for it anymore.
http://earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/the-sheer-lunacy-of-the-housing-situation/
“I think the sheer lunacy of the housing situation, what you pay versus what you get, will insure that alternative means of construction will prevail in the end. Even if you don’t have the patience to build yourself, you can buy a steel warehouse building, say 30X40, and play with it to your heart’s content–stone facing on the outside, rice hull insulation indoors, clay walls to cover the rice hulls and steel, earth floor, half height earthbag fencing around the house for utility and beauty–and you’ll still only spend $20,000 versus half a million or more with a 50 year mortgage.
I’m in my mid 40′s and it boggled my mind that I’d have been a slave for my entire life, +5 years just to own a plywood & plasterboard shack that requires constant maintenance to not disintegrate, especially in the humid South. The bankers really do want you to become an adult, and then work for them for your entire life until you die, paying them rent, the pharma groups not far behind, with their belief that everyone of us needs to be on lifelong medications just to line their pockets. Ridiculous.
Another reason for pushing these 50 year mortgages, by the way, is that the robo-signing scandal and real estate fraud that took place during the bubble puts them in serious jeopardy of losing during the foreclosure process, in court, if those people have a good lawyer. By getting fresh signatures on new, proper, documents and invalidating the old fraudulent documents, they gain a much stronger position in any future foreclosure process, and as a final bonus, they also turn some non-recourse mortgages into full recourse mortgages, if state law allows this.
