It's funny, as someone who was still a kid back in the 80s, the idea of a 6% mortgage sounds ridiculous to me. How on Earth could someone afford to pay all that interest? Yet, mortgage rates were at times in the past over 15% (!!!)

It's not so bad when the actual price of the home is 30% lower.

The interest rate on my first house in Sunnyvale was 13% and it adjusted every 6 months. Of course the house cost $153,000. Still it took both my wife and I working (she is also an engineer) to make the payments and we didn't have kids yet.

At the same time my Vanguard money market account was paying 15% annual interest. That was pretty awesome.

In New Zealand, interest rates were around 8% when I was growing up, and were around 20% when my parents bought a house. Would have been cheaper to put it on your credit card...

Because inflation? I assume the "real interest rate" was much lower.