lmt55
Note that the upper quartile having $800k includes $500k which isn't in their primary residence. Older people tend to own cheaper houses than you might think, since they are more likely to live in more rural areas.
If you're 70 and have a house you might be able to live quite a few years on half a million. In practice, you have a decent chance of dying before you spend all your capital.
A large number of poorer elder people will be in dire financial straits, forced to work beyond their ability to do so and unable to pay for health care.
However there are also a smaller number of extremely rich baby boomers and a very large number of comfortable middle-class ones. The former will obviously pass on large amounts of wealth. The latter have been forced to save large amounts for their old age, because they have known since middle age that the state would not provide for them very well.
In some cases they have decent final salary based pensions and other very good retirement benefits, no longer available to younger generations. In other cases, they have invested significant sums over the last decades and also made large investment gains.
This group has tended to save for the 'worst case' scenario - a long retirement of leisure spending, followed by drawn out old age with significant care needs. Most of them will not need all this capital - they'll either die younger than expected, or have better health into their 80s and 90s than they feared. The excess will be handed on to their children - and will be a significant source of intra-generational inequality in the future.
Remember also that middle-class baby boomers remain an electoral 500-lb gorilla. Governments have been very reluctant to claw back their benefits and care provisions as fast as has happened to other groups. In some cases they will be provided for better than expected when they planned for retirement.
Psychoanalysis, when tested empirically, produces therapeutic effects no worse than other talking therapies. In fact the great empirical paradox of therapy is that they are all similarly successful, regardless of the exact details of the theory they are based on.
Regardless of high or low rates, banks borrow low and lend high, and live on the difference.
High rates, if you want to express yourself in those terms, a transfer of wealth from people with debt to people with assets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/property-prices/london/ shows the median as having gone up around 6% in total since 2017. Trying a mix of neighbourhoods in that tool, I can't see any which are close to 100% up.
We currently don't know concretely how psychological phenomena like consciousness, happiness, selfhood, desire are formed or what they consist of. We know they exist, because we experience them 'in normal human experience'.
Analogously, Aristotle did not know anything concrete about how atoms, energy, time, cells in the body worked. But his natural philosophy created a speculative framework to talk about these things, explore possibilities, and try to relate what was known or observed, to what might possibly be true.
The potential advantage of modern theories like psychoanalysis, is that today we are able to make a clear distinction between falsifiable scientific knowledge, and other types of statements about the world. Thus, we can evaluate Lacan's thought on the correct level - as a form of philosophy which gives us a way of thinking about certain matters without attempting to provide definitive information.
The suggestion that 'the return will take longer than it has in the past' is a prediction with no evidential basis.
After all the boomer generation, on average, has over-provisioned for old age, whereas millenials are still underhoused.
1. Often if you move house they will let you transfer your mortgage (actually take out a similar product and avoid the refi costs).
2. If you win the lottery, or otherwise are in a situation to prepay your whole mortgage? Well you might care much less about the 5% early fees in that case.
3. You can prepay usually 10% a year, at their discretion, without any early fees. If you just become a fair bit richer than you expected, prepaying at this level will reduce the mortgage quite quickly.The rule of thumb is now obsolete, and 30-40 times rent is perfectly common in lots of places.
The newsletter is quite a lot more aggressive than even the rule of thumb from the 'good old days' when interest rates were much higher.
I used to pay around 0.2% of the market price of my apartment per month. The landlord was a professional property management company, and this situation persisted through several new contracts.
I somewhat agree with your argument. Housing costs more than other assets compared to its economic value, exactly because people have an emotional reaction to the idea of owning it - or the idea of not owning it.
However I have seen middle-class people overextend themselves to 'buy the dip', while their equally wealthy peers sit it out, for over 15 years now. Many of the people who did the former now consider themselves to have got a bargain, while many of the latter changed their minds and ended up buying several years later and at much higher prices.
I'm definitely not arguing that this makes buying right and renting wrong! Just that so far, this is how that choice played out.
(Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.)
Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.
I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers.
We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.
Non-Euclidean geometry has applications to reality, but before these applications were known, how did they determine that the notation would appropriately apply to the field?
Not sure why brokers didn't mention them to you. Perhaps they like to show people low headline rates, or perhaps they see longer initial terms as bad for the broking business?
As housing became more and more expensive to young professionals, some people in this group have worked harder and harder to buy property, even to the point where it no longer seems rational. For example, parents taking a lot of wealth out of their retirement savings or their own homes to assist children in buying. Professionals are working more than otherwise makes sense for their stage in life (young families with two full-time parents). They are committing a large share of their monthly budget, often right until the start of retirement.
They do this because they believe in the importance of owning property - beyond any reasonable narrow economic justification.
Of course, there is an inequality aspect to this - not everyone's parents have capital, not everyone can command a high enough wage.
But crucially, the presence of this group of people arguably turns the bubble into something else. These buyers put a floor on the market. If prices drop even a little, or something else changes to make mortgages slightly more affordable, they rush in and buy the dip. By doing this, they sustain the high prices for everyone else in the market.
This will probably happen now. Higher rates will make current prices unsustainable. As soon as they correct to the point where monthly payments are back to what they were last year, there will be buyers, only too happy to overextend themselves to get out of renting.
It's inaccurate to characterize these people as likely to default. They are actually very good mortgage risks - they have already shown themselves to be very committed to ownership. And the resources which got them into a position to buy mean they will keep on paying short of a disaster. The truly unrealistic borrowers of pre-2008 have never been let back into the market.