How is everyone doing it? (foreclosure, mortgage broker, loans)

[JerseyM'Fers]

Originally Posted by edenkens

So why doesnt every NJ homeowner complain to your local officials and protest this absurdity?

Edenkens~believe it or not NJ state or local officials could careless about what there fellow NJ residents really have to say Unless it election time then you'll be them kissing babies and do whatever else possible to get our vote. However even if we don't vote for the "Bad Guy" and we actually choose to vote for the "Good Guy" who actually is the Bad Guy to begin with we still get screwed over in the long run. I hope that not as confusing reading as it was typing.

[Condo Owner in Hackensack]

This is also one of my favorite commercials, I believe it represents what a lot of people are feeling these days.

Originally Posted by dataman1

I'll tell you how I do it. I'm in debt up to my eyeballs....please help me..

That commercial cracked me up, anyone seen that one? The guys is riding
around on a riding lawn mower talking about all that he has etc..it's for refi's or something, and it's true in alot of cases.

But the poster did call it, there are those few who have made good decisions in life and/or had some good luck and they actually can easily afford it and still save some. There are many many very rich developers and many many
poorly built McMansions out there to prove it.

[joe moving]

How we do it... my wife works like a dog while I sit home and surf the web!

We try to live rather frugally but I would say relative to most, we are cash rich. Frugally to us means 1 car (paid off), eating at home almost always, compact fluorescent bulbs everywhere, t-stat set at 62 in December, we don't have cable or a land line. of course we are young with no children, making it easier or possible to live like this!

[stevemorse]

500,000 is cheap for Bergen County, especially North Bergen County. The house that everyone wants is 1.2 million in that area, and that the low end for some. What do they do, doctors, CFO's, Regional Mmgt, Successful Businessmen, trucking bosses, mosters, rap singers, sports people, stock market types, lot of computer people, I know an arms trader, oil trades, jet sellers, invenstment banking, ummmm all pretty professional and good for them!!! This is called CAPITALISM !!!! Now I know some people who do not live in these homes, and are on section8 and are for wealth distribution. I have been living next to the rich and now the poor. Leaving the poor soon , learned alot.

[Diane Giam]

Originally Posted by JayCT

But what do you get for these taxes. Poor schools, no police or fire protection. No decent parks or beaches. No services at all. Also, the wages in the area are most likely at poverty levels. I firmly believe you get what you pay for and down south you pay nothing and you get nothing. JMHO Jay

My taxes are $3500 on a 4500 sq ft house. We certainly have police and fire protection. We have some really nice parks, they are beautiful and clean.
We have lake beaches as we are not on the Ocean.
We do not get nothing. I do pay sales tax, but this house in NJ would have a $20,000 a yr tax bill, and would have cost 3X what I paid for it., over $1M
Schools were good for the 1 year my daughter went to HS here. She is in college now and has done well.She was also given a Schlorship for graduating from a TN HS and getting a 3.0 or better.
Diane

[Diane Giam]

Originally Posted by tahiti

IMHO - mcmansion does not = cookie cutter, which is what you describe. the "mansion" in mcmansion implies a large house. how large is up to interpretation, I'd personally say about 3300+ not including basement.

to answer the OP, i think the question is more "how are first time young buyers buying $500K+ houses". they are either up to their eyeballs in debt, have rich relatives, or some whiz kids with large salaries. i do think most people who are able to buy these houses however are older owners moving up, who have sold their current houses for a large profit.

personally, my income has increased 4xs since i graduated college, yet housing costs have not. in other words, my first house has not increased 4xs since i purchased it. i suspect many in my age group are in the same boat, so if you sell and purchase up, you're still ok (the real estate boom a few yrs ago helped). if you do want one of those houses, go into a field that will pay you the salary - really the way to go. and prepare to start small and build equity, hardly anyone can go from diploma to $600K house in a year.

In my age Bracket some people are making real money on their homes/ If I had stayed in my first house I bought on LI for $32,990, and sold it now. I could get $440,000 for it which is roughly over 13X what I paid for it.
Some of the Baby Boomers could certainly afford to buy up with equity like that, but may think twice about paying higher taxes.
The taxes on that house in 1976, was $1600, and right now its $9100, and it was located all the way out, 2 hour train commute from NYC.
NJ used to have lower taxes than LI but they caught up.
I really don't understand how the young people with hardly anything down are buying these homes. I know my buyers had very little downpayment. They have 2 morgages totaling $450,000, insane. Maybe that is why Countrywide is having problems
Diane

[Sarah07080]

Originally Posted by VINMEGA

Ok, I am guilty, we own a big house in Bergen county.
Yes my taxes are 23k a year (we live in hackensack, the county seat so it is a bit more urban, so the taxes are slightly lower)

My wife runs her own business, and I sell specialty lines of insurance for a major european insurance co.

We generate alot of income from working smart and hard.
We are both in our early 30's

Not a stretch though, cars are paid for, and then you have the usual, cable, electric, insurance, cell phones...etc.
most people get all screwed up with trying to finance everything, how about saving for your purchase?!!

Our car insurance is only 2400 a year for 2 cars. Not so bad!

Our house is a 1920's construction with lots of detail, 6000 sqft, center hall, circular driveway, and has been updated lovingly by me and the wife with all the modern stuff, and being a guy, I like my toys and all (I am a big home theater buff).

We have a nice little piece of land (1/4 acre) with the pool and cabana house out back.

Purchased in apr 06 for 900k.

Plain vanilla 30 year fixed for us at 5k per month.
Down payment of 180k equaled 3 deals for me to close. I close 28 per year.

Granted its a big house for a young married couple with no kids, but no need to worry about it when we do have kids.

I love my work, my wife loves what she does. We are very thankful to god each day we wake up.

We both come from lower middle class fams (garden apartment dwellers) who did not want to do that again, and had the right ideas, skills, timing, luck, etc or whatever it was.

We like what we have so it is not hard to maintain what we have. We dont consider ourselves rich by any means. We just work smart. There are people on our block who spent 1.3m and up for their house. We dont fly first class (well not all the time!) and we shop at the farmers market instead of a fancy whole foods. We max out our investments each year, and dont spend like lunatics.

My wife loves cooking in our kitchen, and we love watching movies in the theater...we could go out and spend 2000 for a night out in the city, but if we did that too often we would be in the same boat as 95% of everyone else here.
I bought a big house so I'd save money in other areas.

Property taxes in NJ are a fact of life..get used to it or move.

Its just sensable living.

I will never leave NJ, leaving this area is like entering a foriegn country, people are struggling and bitter in America because there is not much going on, and most people buy into the BS!

We live 15mins outside of NYC, 1 hour from the shore, 1 1/2 hr from Philly, 1 hour to country side, upstate NY...any food, restaurant, language being spoken, we have it all!!

Making the bigbucks here is not too hard if you can find your angle. Most people struggle with this, and that is why Martha Stewart and Oprah are so damn rich!!!

Most places dont add up moneywise for us and the people are kind of strange and uptight. We love it here. I will freely admit that NJ is expensive, but not everyone is struggling!

No not everyone is struggling but everyone knows not everyone has the luck and smarts like you and your spouse to work harder than everyone else so u can afford to live in NJ ....Wheres the humility man ?...not everyone is cut from the same cloth the average joes who wants to purchase a first time home just can't in NJ and yes they work their butts off....We all come from different walks of life...and its not as clean cut as u make it seem ..

[cyntmac]

This is another post I doubted the validity of. Sounded o.k. until-

"I will never leave NJ, leaving this area is like entering a foriegn country, people are struggling and bitter in America because there is not much going on, and most people buy into the BS!"

At least in the "Is leaving the right thing to do thread" the intent was great and many people could relate even with the over the top, off the wall stuff.

There is some twisted mambajamba going on in this one.

[joe moving]

Maybe this is not the end all solution but I think children need to be taught about money management in high school. I think that working hard, saving and investing needs to be emphasized.

It is common sense but sometimes people esp. kids need to hear it anyway.

I'm just thinking about all the money I basically threw away in my teens and early twenties, living at home with no bills, when I could have been building up a down payment. Just for example, from 18 until 25 I owned probably 10 different cars. Three of them were new. But there is no reason I could not have had one car for those 7 years and not wasted 10s of thousands of dollars.

I could have owned a house for 5 years already and had some decent equity (and of course paid less initially for the home). I think that a lot of this teaching needs to come from parents too, of course.

Nobody ever said to me: look, you need to stop buying stupid stuff, going out to eat everyday, etc. because if you don't, in 10 years, you'll never have the down payment for a house. If nothing else my parents should have charged me rent. Nobody ever mentioned anything about a credit card but as soon as you start college they are throwing 18-22% APR cards in your face. Sure we are taught about interest and compounding interest in school but not in a real life scenario.

What about the expensive colleges kids are pressured to attend but then they have to take on the debt themselves. I can imagine graduating college with a 100k debt is not uncommon. How do you recover from that?

Even with education it is hard to make the right decisions but it would be nice to have been presented some of this information, maybe even if just to poke a few good ideas into some malleable brains.

For those who can't go back and change this, I think the answer is to put your head down, work and save, prioritize your life and don't buy a house until it is the right time. I don't think you can complain about not having a house if you have 300 television channels and a shiny new car complete with payments and comprehensive insurance, which we all know is very expensive, esp. in NJ. $100 a month cable bill isn't going to be the difference between a house and renting but it's a start. If this doesn't work and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, then I don't know. And if you have a family and children, I have no experience at all and can only imagine how much more difficult and stressful it is to be trying to provide for them and advance...

[Rutherford]

Some of us were lucky and got "on the escalator" at the right time. I was a poor textile designer renting in Hoboken in 1985 to 1997, when I bought my first condo with 5000 down for 135. I sold it 2 years later for 240. I bought another house in Rutherford for 234. I just sold it for 350. (I actually took a hit on the asking price, 50 less than asking. But I really wanted to move and the house had a shared driveway and was only 2 bedrooms, so I took what I could get.) So now I bought a 3 bedroom 1400 sq ft house for slightly less than 500. I am living with my boyfriend and we will share a mortgage of 155. I had $ in savings and put that into the house too. I just hope house prices don't plummet. But we are very happy with the house. I think most houses in stable areas will remain steady. I am a lower income person who could afford a house because this is my third property.