The Mortgage Crisis

People think I'm crazy for living in an RV. I will give them that -- it is crazy to live in 200 square feet of total space. But when I look at my mortgage statements for my house that I am renting out, I realize that I'm not actually the crazy one.

I bought my house in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. It's 2014, a full eight years later. I looked at my mortgage statement the other day, and even though my mortgage is a 30 year-fixed traditional mortgage (not interest only or any of the other scams out there) with a reputable company, I have only paid off $20,000 of the total amount I paid.

$20,000 sounds great, but after eight years? Even with the equity that the local housing market has picked up lately, I still might only have $40,000 in gross equity if I am lucky. If I sold it tomorrow, once sellers fees and capital gains taxes were taken out, that number would be significantly less.

After eight years of ownership, I own ten percent of my property.

I should be thankful for what I do have here -- most pay rent, like the folks renting my house now, and walk away with nothing, so I'm doing better than nothing. But where is all this money going?

My mortgage costs alone are around $11,500 per year, not including HOA and insurance payments. When mortgage rates were over 6%, I was paying more like $14,000 per year in mortgage alone. Over the last eight years, I have paid somewhere on the order of $105,000 in mortgage payments alone.

If the numbers made you tune out, the summary is that I have paid around $105,000 in mortgage payments in the last eight years, but I have only paid off $20,000 of the total cost of the house.

When I think about my choice to live in an RV, I realize it's crazy, but what's more crazy is the huge dollar amounts that go into housing costs and how little is ours. Is owning really "owning"? Who actually owns the house when you pay $105,000 and only get $20,000 of that over eight years? The answer is: Not you.

I currently live in a way that most can't, won't, or don't even want to admit exists. But am I the crazy one for wanting to save more of my money while I'm young and free? Are people who pay and pay and pay with nothing in return the sane one's? Or is everyone living in a van down by the river and they just don't know it? It appears to me that everyone is in worse shape than I'm in, but the facade of the American lifestyle has them believing that they're actually making it and doing well. I'm afraid steep rents and mortgages that don't amortize in a reasonable amount of time are the new form of slavery. I will inevitably have to give into slavery again in the future, but no sooner than I absolutely have to.