Good News - Housing Affordability

Jeanne Wall is a loan officer with LOANOLOGY in St. George, Utah and very knowledgeable about the market. I would like to share with you an e-mail she sent today. If you would like more information or to talk to her directly, please call her at 435-668-3739:

Since everything we are getting from the media and the government right now is bad news, we thought we would try a different angle. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some good news to chew on? So, let’s see if we can find some good news. First, the one-two punch is over. The numbers were every bit as bad as we thought and evidenced by the fact that the stock market rallied after the announcement that 600,000 jobs were lost in January, it was no worse than we thought. It does not mean that the bad news is over. It does mean that our expectations are not very high right now, and that is an understatement.

How about some real good economic news? Housing affordability is the highest in the past 19 years and most missed the fact that the current economic slump has caused the savings rate of Americans to rise to a high of 3.6% last month. We have had a zero or negative savings rate in the past. The real long-term fix for the economy is for there to be less spending and more savings. We know that does not sound right especially when the government has been trying to spend their way out of the slump for a year and more of the same is on the way. We are not against economic stimulus. Yet, if Americans had real savings in the bank and so did our government when the crisis hit, the crisis would not have been so bad. So how about some incentives for savings as well as spending? You just need to see the direction of long-term rates in the past month to know that borrowing has a negative impact, and we must solve our debt problems for long-term prosperity. So keep saving Americans!