Sixty-eight percent of adults 70 and older are mortgage-free, while 15.9% of Millennials are free and clear of mortgage payments.
I'm in my mid-30s and I hardly have any friends that own houses and if they do they're tech workers with decades left on their loans.
"Lies. Damned Lies. And statistics"
> The phrase derives from the full sentence, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.";
> it was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain and others, who mistakenly attributed it to the British prime
> minister Benjamin Disraeli. The phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were
> years after his death. The phrase was attributed to an anonymous writer in mid-1891 and later that year to Sir
> Charles Dilke, but several others have been listed as originators of the quote, including frequent erroneous
> attribution to Twain himself.
looking merely at owned homes is ignoring everybody that rents. Renters falling behind on their rent are equally likely to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums are listed.
(and that in fact goes to my point about "your rent/mortgage is someone else's asset", a renter who's not making mortgage payments is probably still putting someone else's mortgage in the red and causing havoc in the rest of the financial system. I don't personally shed too much of a tier for the personal finances of highly overleveraged landlords doing the BRRRR type bullshit, it's been screwing up pricing for renters for a decade now, but it's a problem for the rest of the financial system too.)
BRRRR: https://investfourmore.com/brrrr-method/
Also, as another poster mentioned, the demographics of home ownership tilt very differently. Lots of boomers own their homes, in many cases free and clear. The numbers for people in their 30s (let alone 20s) are pretty low these days, so your statistic basically ignores everyone under 50.
(And in fact even if we got younger people into homes, the same wealth transfer that boomers enjoyed probably cannot be replicated - it was artificially created by lowering interest rates from the highs of 19% in the 70s/80s down to basically 0% now, allowing people to finance much larger amounts of money and causing the underlying asset values to soar. Nor would it be desirable to do so.)
And in general I disagree with your comment further down in the thread about "you can say anything with statistics". The obvious thrust of that argument is: gee, I guess we better just not use statistics and argue about feelings instead. That's so much better.
It's pretty much an argument made by people whose positions can't be justified by actual data - they don't reconsider their positions, they just want to stop looking at the data.
So before you can have any faith in stats, you have to know the source and how the research was funded and by whom (this is before we even begin to talk about methodology flaws). If you do not know that then you cannot trust the stats at all. They are indeed worse than damned lies.
As someone wanting a home in a high CoL area, I would love a 10-20% off rush from thousands of houses going to auction or sale but it wold be devastating locally. We simply are not equipped, as a nation, to address the fallout from this years events. Especially not with current (lack of) leadership and circling of wagons.
But I do take your point that banks don't necessarily want to immediately boot everybody out, foreclose, and crash the market at a time when potentially not a lot of people are buying.
Do bear in mind that the Fed has injected a shit-ton of cash into the market right now, and there actually would be more buyers than you think - it's just that they would be rental companies looking for more assets to snap up at firesale prices.
Homeowners shouldn't rely on the moratorium. They should have contacted their lender to get on a 3-month forbearance plan which can be extended for another 3 months when it expires.
I'm not sure how many times lenders are going to permit forbearance extensions, but once people are able to get back to work and start making mortgage payments, they need to call their lender for a loan modification. This brings their account back to current.
Most states (and all federally backed mortgages) have temporarily suspended evictions so the short answer is that people in financial distress dropped that expense, which is usually the single largest on most people's budgets (for low-income people this can often be 50% or more of take-home depending on the city - yes, the rule of thumb is that it shouldn't be higher than 25% but you simply can't find affordable housing in a lot of areas).
However that one eventually is going to come due because the federal mortgage eviction moratorium doesn't prevent you from going in default on your mortgage, it only prevents evictions. The 3-month timer is still running and as soon as the moratorium on evictions is lifted, they can kick you out immediately. So as soon as that lets up in a month or two there's going to be a massive surge in evictions in states that do not go out of their way to keep evictions suspended.
(and in fact this is probably a snowballing problem, the longer this crisis goes unchecked and the worse the economic pain gets, the more people that will be in default and the bigger the difficulty of getting "back to normal". Furthermore at some point that shit starts rolling back uphill economically, banks turned your mortgage into financial products and you not paying is cutting off the income of someone else, and in fact there is an eventual risk of a 2008-style crisis occurring on top of all the current problems if we get into a situation where people are defaulting en-masse.)