For anyone who lived through the homebuying nightmare of the Carter years, rates in recent years have been a Godsend. I remember how happy I was when our first house was financed at 12% via FHA when prevailing rates were 15-16%. Our current mortgage is below 5%, and fixed. People sometimes forget (or never learn) history.
yes, I remember writing an offer to buy a house with a Jimmy Carter-era 14% VA mortage. That looked good compared to 17% conventional rates. We lucked out as Carter’s incompetence lost steam and our mortage rate deflated to a mere 11.5% by time of closing. That is the house where we sat outside and toasted the landlside election of Ronald Reagan and also his inauguration day and the simultaneous release of American hostages after 444 days held by Iran.
History- ain’t it grand to have lived it, ain’t it awful to see the blind and greedy repeating it... Cant even imagine what an Obama-mortgage rate is going to look like by April 2009. “Change” for sure.
Our first house was financed at 14%. Our second home was financed at 7.5 and it was some kind of government loan that you had to be under a certain income to get. The rates at the time were 8-9. OF course at those rates we bought exactly what we could afford and nothing more. They weren’t much.