Harry Tran’s Daily 101

Trying to pass the load off to the next big fool has been practiced so often that it has almost become an art form.

The reason we got into this mess may be due to banks and lenders but some people have to take accountability for their actions too, particularly the individuals who tried to flip homes for profit. At a time when home prices were rising faster than an oven baked pizza, people were scrambling across state lines to pick up all the surplus homes being built. There was so much demand for buying property that there weren’t enough good homes to go around that people even began buying the bad ones, and by bad I mean some homes which were newly built in subdivisions that were 50 miles to the nearest town, with only a Wal-Mart and a Starbucks nearby. If it was a home they were interested in buying it.

Next came the issue of selling the house to get some of the gains, flippers were on the prowl for the next desperate buyer hoping to buy early and sell later when home prices doubled again. All this panicked buying kept everyone so busy from noticing that they were a fool for being the buyer, often taking out more than they could reasonably afford, often accepting crappy deals made by the selling party. While for some Christmas came early if they were lucky enough to sell their homes, the majority of them became property managers forced to rent out their property waiting greedily for a buyer who will offer more than the previous low-baller’s offer.

The Game of Fools has always been prevalent in life, when you were younger you gave your friends the Playstation controller, while keeping the one to yourself hoping they would think they’re just poor at the game, while getting pummeled by you. Clever you would think to yourself while giggling under your breath. As you grew older and bought your first car and found out you paid too much for a lemon you tried your hardest to sell off the bad car. You figured they wouldn’t know what a Head Gasket was if it bit them in the nose. Now it’s time to move on to the big ticket items, and what gets any bigger than homes? But like everything else, when you figure out what you bought was bogus you will try to unload it on an unsuspecting fool. Reality is that so many buyers are in the hole right now that you have to compete aggressively for the remaining fools out there, but with easy credit lending standards of the last decade, every fool has already been accounted for, they own your product.

So if all the fools have been accounted for in the game of home buying, why is the government making the only non-players in this mess, fools against our choice? I guess the message is we’re even greater fools because we know it was wrong to flip a bologna sandwich on another person.