I've been holding off buying a house until the next crash. Won't have to wait much longer.
There won't be another house price crash until there is another generation of people who forgot the old one. You could be waiting 20 to 30 years.
A truism of the financial world is that if you thought of it, so did everyone else. That means that unless you are truly original (you probably aren't) you can only make money on a particular position if that position is one that makes money if everyone does it.
A position that requires you to do it, and everyone else to do something else (like waiting on a crash to buy a house, while everyone else doesn't) isn't going to work. If you are waiting, so is everyone else, and that means everyone will buy, which means the price won't go down, and you have a self-canceling prophecy.
On a more serious note, I agree with you that it doesn't make sense to wait for a crash. It is better to position yourself such that when a crash happens (whether it be real estate, equities or baseball cards) one is in a reasonable position to take advantage.
Yes, and it will be ugly. It was already getting bad before the tax code overhaul, but now that the payment of interest on student loans is not deductible (by anyone, namely diligent debt-paying low-income grads for whom the tax deduction was originally intended, those making < $80K), it is kind of inevitable.
Most student loans are in the government's hands, most of the interest goes to the Federal Government, not to eg JP Morgan or Bank of America. The US financial system has minimal exposure to student loans and the default problems.
You're talking about $400 billion of present high risk default potential. The housing market crash wiped out ~$25 trillion in paper wealth just in the US, including in the stock market. American wealth dropped by 40%.
That drop would be equal to $40 trillion today. The entire student loan market is $1.4 trillion, a fraction of that is a default problem.
The Fed was running $85 billion per month QE programs just to stabilize the housing market.
If it were necessary, the Fed could fix the student loan mess in six months of casual QE.
The 2008-2010 great recession took down dozens of global banks, including making two of the big four in the US insolvent. Dozens of large corporations from around the globe required short-term Federal Reserve loans to remain operational as the global monetary & banking system froze.
Student loan defaults are a $50 billion per year problem. The loaned out money was conjured out of thin air by the Fed and US Government (which does not have a surplus to lend); the interest being paid is paid on that same magic money. The Fed shovels large piles of cash back to the US Government every year. If they need $300 billion to fix it, they've got more magic money (ie the Fed will debase the dollar and 0.2% of the value of all dollar assets globally and they'll do a program with the US Treasury).
The biggest difference is that owning a home has tax advantages over stocks, so it's even worse to sit on the sidelines if you can get in responsibly.
If you're looking for a big gain in real estate, you'd do better to understand which local markets are heating up--this can be predicted from data with some reliability, unlike global crashes. (Note: sitting on the sidelines until a crash happens is not the same thing as predicting when a crash will happen.)
Whether buying a home is a good decision depends primarily on your own factors--savings, income, tax status, family status, job stability, where you want to live, etc. External factors like global financial trends have little impact.
However, there is a significant risk of not being able to get a mortgage under reasonable terms in the event of another credit crisis.