Quote:
Originally Posted by The Gaijin
Some guy somewhere is laughing. He bought his first house with a sub-prime mortgage with a variable rate, but in a rising market - sold for a profit and bought another and another and another. Flipped and flipped into bigger and bigger houses.. Someone played this game and got out before the music stopped with millions. And does not owe anyone a penny.
And some poor schlub bought at the top of the market - cannot afford his newly re-adjusted mortgage - can't sell and is losing everything, including his saving and credit rating.
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Precisely.
I don't mean to sound like I'm patting myself on the back here (I'm not), but I saw this thing for the Ponzi Scheme it was back in 2002/2003. I knew (and openly said) back then what was going to happen. It was EXACTLY like the dot-com bubble we'd seen only a few years before.
What short memories and attention spans people have to not realize it.
Honestly, my biggest regret was not having enough $$$ to make a play or two early on and cash out. It was actually my intention but we were rebuilding from a layoff in the post-9/11 recession that pretty much wiped us out and left us with bad credit and no life savings, so I just couldn't take advantage. Believe me, I'd have never stayed in longer than a year or two, but perhaps it's a blessing that I couldn't jump in. A few years later (2006/2007) when our situation was much better, I looked at the situation again but decided things had risen far too high. It was the wrong time to get in - and I was right. Had I jumped in then (and I could have), I'd be losing my shirt right now.
Oh well. No sympathy. People didn't do their homework, didn't make smart decisions and now want to cry "victim". Wrong. Your choice to get in at the end of a Ponzi Scheme is yours - not mine. Either get in at the beginning or not at all. That's the way these things work.