A financial publication has published a guide on buying your first home when interest rates are high. The guide includes mortgage calculators and interest rate estimators. These are tools that perform addition and multiplication.
The premise is that people need hacks to get the best deal. The hack is apparently using a calculator. Revolutionary stuff. Next they'll recommend reading the contract before signing it.
Here's what nobody mentions in these articles. If rates are high and you can't afford the payment, you can't afford the house. That's not a hack. That's called being broke. The mortgage calculator isn't going to spit out a different number because you really want granite countertops.
The article promises to tell you everything you need to know. Everything. As if the entire housing market can be distilled into one listicle with affiliate links to mortgage lenders. The best mortgage lenders, no less. Best according to which metric? Whoever paid for the top spot in the sponsored content section.
First-time buyers are being told to save more when rates are high. Brilliant. Save more money to buy the thing that costs more money. This is the kind of insight that gets published on a website that also runs articles about celebrities' beach bodies.
The real hack is waiting until you have enough money and rates come down. But that's not a hack. That's just called waiting. Can't write 2,000 words about waiting. Can't embed twelve mortgage calculators into an article about patience.
Every calculator in the world will tell you the same thing: multiply the principal by the rate, add the insurance and taxes, and that's your payment. If the number makes you nauseous, you're shopping outside your budget. No amount of hacks will fix that.
The only thing getting hacked here is your attention span by a website selling you optimism with a 6.5% APR.
Photo by Jakub Ε»erdzicki on Unsplash
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