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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, given all of the articles about increasing consumer debt. I'd guess that a lot more people are motivated to do this, with mortgage rates fluctuating upward so quickly over the last couple of years.

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As this other comment pointed out [0] 40% of homes are mortgage free, but that says nothing about home owners.

Anecdotally I know that none of my neighbors are mortgage free. However I also have a few friends that had major cash windfalls things like startup exits or time working in hedge funds, each of them owns 3-5 houses outright as investments.

So, with this small sample I can easily see that of the total number of homes owned by friends/neighbors, 40% being mortgage free sounds about right, but far less of my friends/neighbors are mortgage free.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38612670

I agree overall, but the census should be measuring the primary residence of the respondent and exclude second houses or renters. Basically it's measuring households and not houses.

In fact the opposite is true. My mortgage is 2.125% and I have no motivation to pay that off because of rates spiking upward which gives me a better cash return than 2.125%.

If I could, I would pay off my 7.075% mortgage this minute. That's equivalent to a 7.075% guaranteed risk-free return, which I will not get on any other investment.

I think there's some of both. Plenty of people with low interest rates have little motivation for payoff.

But if you are moving right now for any reason, you aren't likely to be taking on more debt in the process. There's a pretty strong incentive to do what it takes to get debt to or near zero.

Or it just could be more polarization between the haves and have nots in the economy. Fewer in the younger generations can afford housing than previous generations could at that age, so the pool of US homeowners is going to skew to the older, more financially established boomer generation who bought homes decades ago for much cheaper.

Is there some sort of metric/data/graph for housing concentration? I'd imagine older people might have several properties if many of them bought a main residence, a summer home, etc, 30+ years ago when they were somewhat cheap.

There’s a clear correlation between age and homeownership. The data is relatively stable over time though.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

This is my belief as well.

In California, the haves will have houses. The have nots will have ADUs.

Our world is structuring itself to (more) obviously reveal the wealth disparity.

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