By Matt Joy, Princeton Mortgage Wholesale
First and foremost, I would like to apologize for the delay in getting the blog back up and running. As I mentioned in my last post we’ve been growing as a company and as a result, certain things (the blog) had to take a back seat… but we’re back!
To be perfectly honest with you writing about our industry is boring… we drone on and on about the same things day in and day out (I said this before… I don’t need to elaborate any further). So… with that in mind, I’m going to try and switch things up a bit. I’m going to run a three-part series about one of our country’s favorite topics… “Living the American Dream” and how that statement has changed over the years… so let’s get started.
What was the American Dream? Well… the American Dream started shortly after World War II concluded (In case you missed it… we and our allies took home the win, stormed some beaches, defeated Hitler, etc. etc). We had 16 million veterans returning home with two thoughts in their minds… making babies and buying a house. The demand for housing was crazy and to keep up, home builders mass produced tract homes (for my Millennials think Edward Scissorhands, The Truman Show, or Pleasantville). Add in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s initiative to expand our highway system and boom… the suburbs were created. Life was simple or at least it seemed simple, right? Get a good paying blue-collar job doing some sort of trade-work, buy a house and a tank err… car (they were massive in the 50s let’s be serious) fall in love, have children, build a fall-out shelter in preparation of the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat (again for you Millennials the Soviet Union was Russia) just a nice simple life.
That was it though. We had this semi-sheltered idea of what life was supposed to be like back then. The news meant something. Going to the movies was a big event. We didn’t have immediate access to pretty much anything and there was no such thing as a meme. I feel as if some of the conservative v. liberal arguments are because conservatives want to get back to the way things were in the 50s. We listen to one news outlet, buying a home was as easy as getting a credit card today and the only worry we had was that our enemy to the East was going to wipe us off the face of the earth… if you think hard enough you can connect our President’s recent meeting with his North Korean counterpart as kind of a homage to the 50s, right?
In some ways I want that back. I understand why we, as Americans, could be chasing that version of the American Dream. Who doesn’t want life to look like a Norman Rockwell paint? Truth is… America changed, and its dream changed along with it…
Oh… the 10-Year is in a nice comfortable spot right now around 2.8%, the “trade wars” have helped to drive that down, Ginnie Mae is upgrading their software, Non-QM lending is picking up steam and there are still not enough homes to keep up with demand (why can’t we just build like we did in the 50s?!). See I can be creative and still give you market updates!
Talk to you soon!
MJ
The opinions expressed in this post are the sole view of the writer and do not reflect the opinion of Princeton Mortgage Corporation.