Posted on 06/26/2014 6:47:21 AM PDT by george76
If you’re a typical family, you’re considerably poorer than you used to be. No wonder the “recovery” feels like a recession.
...
The median household in 2013 had a net worth of just $56,335 -- 43% lower than the median wealth level right before the recession began in 2007, and 36% lower than a decade ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Looks like all is going according to plans to get rid of that pesty independent middle class and make everyone dependent upon the federal government.
Wealth? Dude, what happened to my paycheck?
A very significant factor is the decline in housing prices in many areas. If your “wealth” was the inflated value of your house, and if you still have your house, even though its appraised value has dropped, have you really lost anything?
As long as people keep believing the welfare state is redistributing the wealth from the rich to the poor it will continue.
The welfare state redistributes the wealth from the middle class to the rich.
I find it hard to believe that the average wealth of the top 5% has declined between 2007 and today. If you were holding $1.6 million in 2007, you should have considerably more now....if you played your cards right.
Money that used to be set aside for savings is now going to guns/ammo/preps.......
Yes, but only because people were using that inflated equity to buy things.
Now there is no equity, and hence no money. So prices slip a bit more, and the cycle continues.
There are houses out here that are sell for 75% of their 2010 values. We never got that over heated, but things are sliding.
You nailed it brother.
Oh, good point.
(Fixed it for ya.)
Those who leveraged that inflated value to buy things that they couldn't have otherwise afforded lost quite a bit.
Know plenty of people like that, glad that I don't live like they do did.
I often used to say to my wife "Look how Bob and Karen are living. They go on expensive vacations every year and buy new cars every two years. How are they doing that?"
Now we know. They walked into the bank three weeks ago, turned in the keys and walked away. Sold everything else they had and are now renting a much smaller house struggling to survive.
They aren't the only ones I know like that. Plenty of both my son's friends and families did the same thing. We turned that into a life-long lesson for them: This is what happens when you live beyond your means and why its important to have savings set aside to get you through the rough times.
That's about the only good that's come from all this that I can think of.
“We turned that into a life-long lesson for them: This is what happens when you live beyond your means and why its important to have savings set aside to get you through the rough times. That’s about the only good that’s come from all this that I can think of.”
Young people today will bear the scars of this “fundamental transformation” for years; they won’t breed, they won’t buy a home, and they’ll probably regard all jobs as temporary in nature.
On a related note, Hispanics and Asians are being imported to compensate for America’s current birthrate of 0.
I didn’t leverage my house but bought more house than I should have and we have been working hard to pay off the mortgage and wait out the recession/depression. Looks like we are going to need to move now so despite having equity, we are going to have a non imaginary loss comparing what we have put into it and lost opportunity on that cash with what we will be able to get out of it.
There are two values to home ownership, the tax deduction and the likelihood that that the property will increase in inflated dollars along with food and energy and services, in short it is the one vehicle that will at least keep your debased dollars in line with the value of your debased dollars for everything else you need to buy.
Food and energy, you have to eat, you have to have electricity, transport and heat. These will necessarily skyrocket according to Obama before he was ever elected.
Health care? Increasing at multiples of even the BS statistics the Alinskyites in the government reaease.
It will take Congress—both houses—to rid America of the satanic imps.
Vote out every Rat and Rino in every election, default on the debt (660 trillion and rising), exterminate CDO swaps, all derivatives, elimate “short” sale investing.
If people want to gamble to amuse themselves they can go to an Indian reservation and throw away their money there.
Just like the casinos, the brokerage firms and “investment” bankers are always ahead of every move, you can’t win, but you just might get lucky, which is the epitomy of gambling.
Go figure. The default will happen anyway, but what will come next will be absolute serfdom and poverty, a boot smashing into the face of every American, for all time.
At the top, the nine figure thiefs, and the government will do quite well. The proletariat as Marx envisioned and named will be as Jesus said, “the poor will always be with you”.
What is ahead? More debt, more taxes, more crippling regulations until everyone fully feels the boot of the Alinskyites on their neck and whimper in submission. “Tell me what to do, what to say, what to think, what to eat, what to believe, just get your effing boot off my neck please”.
Or not.
Just my vision of what is coming based on what has already transpired and what is already working for the future. Confiscation of private and public retirement funds to be replace by a government “guaranteed retirement income” is next.
Oh yes, it is coming.
I never have considered my house an "investment". 22 years ago, my wife and I found the place we wanted to live for the rest of our lives, we took out a 15 year mortgage, paid it off in just under 10 years. I know what we paid for it but at no point in the 22 years have I known what its market value was - it's our home.
I'm not knocking people who think of their home as an investment, it's just not how my wife and I think.
Last year we had a new double wide concrete drive way installed, it cost us $7,000, not to increase the value of the house but because that's what we wanted for our home.
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