On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:17:50 +0100, Xeno wrote:

On 15/6/20 8:52 am, Clare Snyder wrote:

snipped

It was an
advantage for the folks selling our house when we bought - it had a
transferable mortgage at 6 1/4% when the going rate was 20-22%.

Wow! When was it that high? I thought mortgages had always been 3-6%.
Early 80s they peaked at about 24%

Only about 18% here for home mortgages. Business mortgages were higher.

How on earth could that work? At under 5% people can only just afford to get one.

We still had a mortgage on the house we moved out of too, but the equity
in house#1 allowed us to pretty much pay cash to the existing
mortgage. We payed off that mortgage before buying a gallon of paint
to do any redecorating.

So you bought a house worth less than your old one?!

No, we sold a $50,000 house to buy a $67000 house. What equity we had

We paid $67,000 for our first house with a loan of $56,000, sold it for
$300,000 about 18 years later. Paid $365,000 for for the next and
borrowed a mere $75,000 to get into that one. Sold it for $600,000 nine
years later. Because we did a sea/tree change, this house cost less than
we sold our previous for.

Double the price in 9 years is some profit. Mine has almost doubled in 20 years. Sid you deliberately buy something you thought would be worth more later? And I've no idea what sea/tree means.

in the old house plus the existing transferable mortgate on the new
house amounted to about $3000 less than the purchace price of the new
house - and we had $3000 cash available in cashable investments. It
took us a few years to pay off the existing mortgage, by which time
the value of the house had already climbed by over 50%. 38 years later
it is worth almost 10 times what we paid for it.