LinvilleGorge

How in the hell do you end up with a credit score in the low 600s anyway? I've always been in the high 700s and I don't do anything to try to manage my credit score, just live within my means and pay my bills and it takes care of itself.

As of May 4th... https://loans.usnews.com/reviews/bankofamerica-mortgage Qualifying for a Bank of America Mortgage You'll need a FICO credit score of at least 620 and a maximum debt-to-income ratio of 55% to qualify for a conventional mortgage with Bank of America.

Everyone is just throwing mud at the wall because these are completely uncharted waters and so much depends on how the pandemic plays out. I'm betting very heavily on this playing itself out for another year with the worst still ahead of us this fall/winter. All of the optimism is betting on the worst of it already being behind us. The history of respiratory disease pandemics isn't on their side.

Yep, early vaccination trials are looking promising, but it's still likely next summer at best before we're looking at widespread availability.

Okay. I'm betting strongly otherwise. The vast majority of people are completely blind to the reality that the worst of this pandemic and it's economic effects are still ahead of us.

If we hit major inflation, that'll cause a housing market crash by itself. We've had ridiculously low interest rates for so long that it's caused housing prices to get to unsustainable levels without them. You take a $500k mortgage at today's rates and you're looking at a little over $2300 per month in principal and interest on a standard 30 year mortgage. At a 10% interest rate, that principal and interest nearly doubles to close to $4400.

I think you're gonna be wrong. I don't think it will fall as steeply or as long as it did in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but it's definitely going to contract. If you plan on selling in the next 2-3 years like we were, you better sell this summer. All the current economic bandaids and economic optimism is based on this pipedream optimism of no second wave. It's a house of cards.

Hence why I've made the decision to sell. I'd rather be sitting on a big ass pile of cash right now than a big ass mortgage.

And you think this is going to help stave off a housing market crash? That's just going to further stall the market. Some people are going to have to sell and it's going to be a total buyer's market. That's going to drive values down. Just because a credit crisis caused the last housing market downturn doesn't mean that's the only way a housing market downturn occurs.

The banks are being a little more careful, but not THAT careful. At the end of the day, our economy is going to contract for awhile and it's inevitably going to pull the housing market with it. Things are being kept afloat currently because of economic intervention and delusional optimism that we're emerging from this. When the SHTF again this fall... it's gonna get ugly.

Ideally, we'll end up somewhere up that way, but I have a feeling my wife would much prefer the Bozeman area. Actually, if I was betting I'd say we end up in western CO. At the end of the day, I doubt I'll be able to completely sell her on Montana. I'm fine with western CO. The access to southern Utah is a huge plus.

I'll be dealing with the idiocy soon enough. Looks like we'll be back in NC by the middle of next month. The sell of our house is set to close in a couple of weeks. All the major hurdles have been cleared. I'm just gonna cash in my chips and sit on a big ass pile of cash and buy another place in either western Colorado or Montana probably this time next year at a heavy discount. They're not going to be able to keep this economic house of cards afloat for as long as this thing is going to last. The housing market is gonna crash.

Too bad we have a bunch of people trying to politicize wearing masks equating them to "muzzles". WTF...

Find me a highly infectious novel respiratory disease that just petered out without a second wave. I honestly don't think it exists. It's wishful thinking. The Spanish flu in the late nineteen teens, the Hong Kong flu of the late 60s, and H1N1 in the late '00s all had second waves that were worse than the first.

I think a lot of people are blind to the fact that we haven't seen the worst of this yet. This spring was an appetizer for the main course that's coming. Just think about it. Coronaviruses are historically largely seasonal diseases. They're a lot less contagious in warmer temps. A natural tailing off of the pandemic over the summer is largely to be expected. The problem is that we've hit over 1.6M cases starting in late January at zero. Sure, it's possibly that small numbers of largely secluded cases existed before then, but for all practical purposes we started in late January. That's halftime of cold/flu season. This coming fall, we'll be starting at opening kickoff and we won't be starting with a score of zero. We'll be starting with COVID having a solid foothold across the country. Even in the best case scenarios, there won't be a vaccine available in meaningful quantities when cold and flu season starts to ramp up next year. Our only defense is going to again be social distancing and likely local sheltering in place as outbreaks pop up. We'll need a lot better testing and contract tracing programs for those efforts to be successful. Hopefully toward halftime of next cold/flu season we'll start seeing a vaccine supply sufficient for widespread vaccination of vulnerable populations but for all intents and purposes we're likely looking at dealing with a full cold/flu season of COVID before we have widespread vaccine access. That's why I just shake my head when I see all those economic predictions prefaced with "assuming there isn't a second wave..." That's like basing economic predictions on winning the lottery. It's completely unrealistic and just sets you up for total failure.

Alright, let's try again...

Not sure which part of this isn't a catch all "Tinderbox on the main forum" thread y'all didn't understand.

There's hardly a night out of the year that we don't get down to the mid-upper 40s here.

Really mild for Charlotte spring is still generally pretty warm for COVID. Multiple studies have concluded that the optimum temperature for transmission is in the mid-upper 40s.

This disease is a lot less contagious is warmer temps. They don't want to come out and flat out announce that because people act dumb enough already.

Politics is a Tinderbox topic. This thread constantly plays in a gray area, but it's a topic we'd like to keep on the main forum. This isn't a thread about voting and there won't be a thread about voting outside of the Tinderbox.

I guess the soft warning didn't work. The next comment about voting = 24 hour ban.

Alright enough about voting. This is a COVID thread, not a catch all thread to sneak Tinderbox topics into the main forum.

Yeah, I've spent almost the entirety of my adult voting life in Colorado. I've actually never physically voted at a polling place. I've always done a mail-in ballot. The concept of having to go somewhere to vote seems absurd to me given my experience as a voter.

You can when the second wave is a tsunami.