New Review: House Poor

The following is a brief excerpt from a review posted on PopandPolitics.com:

It has been said that if you have money to burn, you should invest in the stock market. Sure you could make a killing if your stocks hit, but if they miss, you're out of luck and a whole lot of money. So when it comes to purchasing a house or many houses, why are some people treating these transactions like they're playing the stock market? Especially when the cost of doing so may land you back in Momma’s basement or government-provided public housing AKA da projects.

Instead of just buying a home to provide the best and safest necessity of life for their family, some investors are shying away from trading stocks and commodities and instead have opted to trade houses. Rapid buying and selling, especially in hot markets, have resulted in inflated prices that in many cases are not justified by the real property value. Therefore, though people have been taken in by the dream of getting rich off the housing market, a number of folks with good intentions have been undone and broken by an increasingly volatile market.

For those people who are still willing to take their chances on housing as investment rather than basic necessity, this is where June Fletchers new book, “House Poor: Pumped-Up Prices, Rising Rates, and Mortgages on Steroids,” comes in nice and handy. Fletcher is the former editor of “Homes Today” and “Builder Magazine” and is the current “Home Front” reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

“House Poor,” as it says on the front cover, is a readily usable guide to surviving the coming housing crisis. Like all good books, there’s some history to provide context, but mostly it’s a series of survival tips to help keep the novice home trader from losing their livelihood to the tumultuous housing market.

Fletcher doesn’t advocate either way in whether or not to buy housing. She covers all the bases by saying when one should buy a house to live in, buy extra houses as an investment, or when one should just rent. Now if someone suggested to my mother that there are times when one should rent over buying a place, well she’d simply plotz. But it’s true, according to Fletcher; there are clear signs to show when the housing market is rising, falling, bubbling, and just staying kaput. These investment winds are what the prospective buyer should be looking out for and they are clearly represented and explained by Fletcher in her book. Continued