• Carrot@lemmy.today
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    6 days ago

    What? You’re confused. Lower is always better. I bought my house when interest was 2.5%, pretty much the bottom of the interest rates during the start of covid. My house loan was around 450K. By the time I’ve paid off my loan (if I were to make the normal monthly payment) I’ll have given the bank over 750K dollars. Even at an amazing rate, some bank gets 2/3s the cost of my house in interest. At 12%, a 30 year, $450,000 loan would have you paying the bank 1.8M dollars, meaning some bank gets over 3x the cost of your house in interest. That’s insane. I get that you’re saying people will buy worse houses to not borrow as much money, but that’s not really a win. A family of 5 can’t fit in a one bedroom apartment.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      See my comment above.

      You would pay 12% for 8 years not 30, because high interest rates drive housing prices down.

      Also no, people wouldn’t buy worse housing, it’s a closed market. If no one can pay 450K because it’d be insane and you couldn’t afford the monthly payments (you as a large swath of the population), the prices go down.

      This is market economy with the twist that everyone needs housing, and the supply is quite fix.

      • Carrot@lemmy.today
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        5 days ago

        That’s just not true. To buy my house right now on a 12% loan for 8 years, the monthly payment would be $10,000. If someone were to buy it right now on a 6% loan for 16 years (trying to match your numbers to the current state of the market), their monthly payment would be $5500. And they’d pay just a few thousand dollars less than I did in interest. Why? Because prices went up along with interest rates. For what you are saying to be true, prices would need to drop when interest rates go up, but that isn’t the case. Most people can’t afford to drop $10k a month on a loan just to save a few thousand long-term, let alone $5.5k. My monthly payment is less than half that.

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          If you take out a loan at 12% today well then you’re an imbecile.

          If rates go up to 12%, then housing prices will go down because as you yourself just showed (!), it’s too expensive to buy at todays prices. So they will go down. If that happens.

          Nothing spectacular in the housing market will happen just because you throw money out the window.

          • Carrot@lemmy.today
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            5 days ago

            That’s why I ran it with today’s numbers as well. You talk in hypotheticals that just don’t reflect the behaviour of the current market.

            • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 days ago

              I’m talking about housing economics, not like what’s the current loan cost. The current market is what it is today, buy what you have the financial possibility to buy.

              But if rates go up wildly, I’m gonna repeat this once again, then housing prices will go Down.