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Comment by itsgoats | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to say thank you, stretchwithme, for all of us who saved enough to buy a house, responsibly, in what just happened to be the middle of last decade and now have cause to sell (moving jobs because the economy stinks). We so deserve to seriously be screwed over because of our timing. Thank you US government. Thank you stretchwithme, your sentiments help the situation tremendously.

Surprisingly, there were actually many people who bought a house in 2003-2005 because they had a down payment at that time and they had jobs and they bought what they could afford.

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> who saved enough to buy a house,

If you saved enough to buy a house then live in your house.

If you're moving around then don't buy houses. They are places to live. Your problem is that you want them to be investment vehicles to increase your wealth. Well, if they are investment vehicles then you also have to accept that you will make a bad bet and will lose in value.

You want your cake and eat it too. It is like stock investors crying that Intel shares lost value. Well, then they shouldn't have invested in Intel, they should have put their money in a savings account.

You seem to think because you had a down payment, had a job, bought a house you could afford, you "deserve" to be screwed over less by a falling housing market, because you were "responsible".

Just the opposite! The migrant field worker who got a 0% down interest only loan on a 500K house is far less "deserving" of the screw than you, because he has no money to be screwed out of.

sorry, I didn't mean to be insensitive. you don't deserve this mess, but we own the risks we take on. There's simply no other way to run a society.

When the dot com bubble burst and I lost a lot of paper profits, that was unfortunate and unforeseen and I was responsible for the choices that got me there. It would have been nice if someone sent me a check for my losses, but how could the government do such a thing without making someone more responsible pay for my mistakes?

And we don't deserve to have our government doing this to us, again and again, but we own that until we make it clear that they should stop.

Its not China's responsibility or Saudi Arabia's. It ours.

Should we feel sorry for you because you don't have the patience to wait? Because you weren't smart enough to realize that maybe housing prices doubling in 1-2 years don't equate? Did someone make you buy a house at gunpoint?

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