First Things First
- You're looking for the Altoids 9v USB Charger, right? (Buy it here)
- If you're wondering who I am or what's going on, this might be helpful.

According to CNN as proxy of The Mortgage Bankers Association, there are now over one million homes in foreclosure in the United States.

This is a product of the "housing bubble" that recently burst. The value of homes was skyrocketing, properties were being bought and sold multiple times in a single day. It was ridiculous.

I don't know very much about real estate, but my dad was a Realtor with his own office for over a decade so some of that splashes onto me as a matter of course. Still, though, I'd consider myself pretty novice in the field. Also, at the time of this bubble I was around 19 years old and thereby an idiot.

Still, though, I could see that it was a bubble. Most people said it wasn't, that somehow houses were going to be a booming commodity forever. I don't know what plants you have to dry and smoke to come to that kind of conclusion but I bet they'd sell for more than a 2 bedroom house these days.

I had always thought the whole thing was the buyer/seller's fault. They're the ones who went overboard and drew the value of homes way above normal and tried to make their fortunes by buying a house for X, painting it, and selling it for 2X. If this was pet rocks or fashions or musicboxes or something, I'd be fine with it, but homes are kind of important to people, and there's a lot of people who just wanted a place to live and shouldn't have had to deal with hugely inflated prices just to put a roof over their family's heads.

However, with now over a million homes in foreclosure, I can't rightly blame this all on a few idiots who've seen Wall Street 9 too many times. A million homes in foreclosure is too large an anomaly to blame on human error. This has to be a product of a large, sweeping agenda.

You might blame the mortgage companies. They took advantage of the house-buying craze and began offering mortgages with gobs of hidden fees and interest rates that would skyrocket without warning. Buying a house with no money down is great if you're positive you can flip the house before you have to start paying the mortgage, but if you're just a guy trying to buy a house it will seem far too tempting. People buy houses beyond their means, and when the bank comes around asking for their money, game over. You would probably be right to blame them.

Me, however, I blame the show Flip That House. This is a show that airs on TLC and Discovery Home, where in each episode someone has bought a property for X dollars, will do Y dollars in renovations, and try to resell (or "flip") it for a profit. These shows were all filmed in the middle of the bubble but continue to be aired today, making people think they can still do this.

My problem with the show is that the goal of each episode is for the home to be sold for more than it was paid for, but they never show the house being sold. They don't even appraise the home. The ending of the show is just a real estate agent coming in and saying what he would list the house for. If it's a nice and big number, the owner gets all excited like he won a game show.

But that doesn't resolve anything. For one thing, real estate agents can't tell the value of a home just by walking through it, because most real estate agents are morons. To accurately calculate the value of a home it has to be professionally appraised, which includes a full inspection and a weighted calculation based on the value of nearby homes. To walk through a house, marvel at the stainless steel appliances, and say, "I'd list this for $310,000" doesn't have anything to do with what that house will sell for. The house might not even sell, or it might sell for much less.

It's like if there were a show where somebody paints a picture and somebody with an ebay account says, "I'd list that painting for $5,000" and the painter gets excited, as if he'd just made $5,000, and then the show is over. Someone has to buy the thing before anybody should get excited.

So all this show does is string viewers along thinking that house flipping is good, that they'll always sell their house, and that they'll always make a profit.

How many of those homes are probably in foreclosure right now?

That housing bubble pretty much destroyed our economy, and it's all Flip That House's fault.