Thoughts About Home Prices and Shark Attacks

Unless you run a drug smuggling ring, human trafficking operation, or some other criminal enterprise like a church, the purchase of your home will probably be the biggest financial decision you ever make in your life. That's why the news about the housing market is so depressing. It's like getting married in Vegas to a hot girl and then finding out that she used to be a man. Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but the sense of disappointment and dread are probably similar. Again, this is just an assumption since I've never been married to anyone, let alone to someone who used to have a penis.

But when I see house prices in DC (in my neighborhood, since I'm too lazy to look elsewhere) the prices don't seem to be coming down a whole lot. Well, it seems that the news was exaggerating how bad the housing market is. To make a boring story short:

1. the housing numbers that the news keeps quoting are coming from only 20 cities, some of which are doing much worse than the rest of the country;
2. the decline in REALLY EXPENSIVE houses is included in those numbers so it makes it look a lot worse than it is (like if you average your salary and Bill Gates' salary and then came up with a number).

So, in a way this is like the Shark Attack scares. A few weeks ago I saw on every news channel a story about a guy who was attacked and killed by a shark in South Africa. Now I try not to pay attention to these types of stories because

1. I don't live anywhere near the beach, so unless a shark is gonna come out of my toilet and try to bite my junk off, it doesn't really concern me;
2. if you're taking surfing vacations all over the world when I'm here working, then I don't have a lot of sympathy for you, even if you get eaten by a shark.

But the real reason I was thinking about this (besides procrastinating) is that shark attacks aren't very common. You're 10x more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head than you are to die from a shark attack. But people don't worry about dying from falling coconuts because the news only focusses on shark attacks, because, lets face it, sharks have huge teeth and are really scary; coconuts...not so much.

Same thing with the housing market. Some people overpaid for their houses in some parts of the country, but that doesn't mean that people everywhere are going to suddenly stop buying houses and living in their cars. It's not the end of the world.

If you want to worry about something, then stop thinking about sharks and housing prices and start worrying about the earth being destroyed by a black hole that could be created in a particle accelerator in Switzerland. Coincidentally, the Mayans had an advance system of math that calculated the movement of the planets until the year 2012. They stopped at 2012 because they believed that's when the world will be destroyed. Freakkkkkky.