Should the Home Buyer Tax Credit have been Extended & Expanded? (Poll)

This is a wonderful way to get the idea about people’s opinion on tax credit benefit. By this way, you can evaluate the opinion on real grounds. I have voted here and would love to see the overall opinion of people.

I'm still a fan of the recent tax credit.
I think it made a bit more sense when it was just a subsidy for first-time homebuyers like myself. Especially in a market where qualifying for a mortgage was already difficult for first-timers and home values were still in sharp decline. It served the dual purpose of making a larger down payment a little easier to come up with by reducing payroll withholdings and it stabilized home values a bit by prodding people like myself into the market. My wife and I moved here 2 years ago. Everyone was then predicting the housing bubble burst (though no one was expecting how bad). We moved into an apartment to wait it out. We extended our lease for a year as we watched home values continue to dive and we waited for it to hit bottom. We honestly considered another year leasing our apartment, but it seemed like some of these stimulus & mortgage modification programs would finally set a floor on the prices.

I do sort of agree with naysayers who think that people benefiting from the credit were going to buy a house anyway, but I assure you if there was no credit I wouldn't have bought this year. I'd still be predicting 30% price drops and waiting for an entry point because many more houses would be sitting vacant than there are today.
Instead, I bought a beautiful, perfect-sized house at a price I can easily afford and I'm comfortable that whatever decline in value there might be in the short term will likely be not much more worse than the $8k that I'll receive on my tax return.

Stephen - you sound like a smart home buyer (and congrats!). You did exactly the right thing, in my opinion.

I know there are more stories out there like yours, I'm just not sure how many. I still think a LOT of people bought a little earlier than they would have anyway to take advantage (and who can blame them?) and am not sure it helped stabilize prices.

Of course I could be completely wrong.

As for the cost that I've griped about before, it's going to pale in comparison to the health care plan (assuming that gets past the Senate).

Interesting tidbit on healthcare regarding "uninsured Americans" : of the 46 Million uninsured, 18 Million make more than $50,000 a year (about 7k over median income) and choose not to buy insurance. Of the 28 Million remaining, over 9.5 Million aren't american citizens i.e. temporary workers or foreign exchange students. so the real number is closer to 18 Million americans, who make less than $50,000. interesting stat mainstream media doesn't tend to look into very much.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf pag 28

I know of at least 2 other couples where I work who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to buy a house for over a year. One couple is still working through a short sale and fully expected to miss the deadline. The other couple was outbid on a house they liked and haven't found another one they liked enough to pull the trigger, deadline or no.
I seriously doubt the $8k credit would be the only reason someone would buy a house, but it was a real factor when we were looking at houses.
Whenever we looked at distressed properties, we knew we could consider the $8k as a part of a potential repair/renovation budget. We had saved for several years, but we still didn't have a ton of cash available to just throw at repairs after our down payment requirements were raised.
Maybe the credit didn't stabilize prices, maybe the market was just settling into it's price floor anyway, but I figured it was helping some by bringing more buyers into the market.

As for the cost, well- I don't know what to say to people upset about that. We will receive $8k to help us with our first house and I think it's a good thing. I've been paying taxes since my first job at 14 and my wife since she was 16. We are 31 and 30 respectively. The credit we will receive next year is a fraction of what we have paid in so far and a fraction of what we will continue to pay.

As for health care, I also have a different take. I'm an accountant and I've been watching our benefit expenses almost double in the past 6 years and we continue to pay more than half of the employee medical insurance. For every employee who chooses family coverage, we pay over $600 a month (the yearly premium is over $10,200). For singles we, the employer, still pay over $220 a month. These are not Cadillac plans and the coverage quality has declined each year while prices went up. I don't know how American businesses are supposed to stay competitive when all of our major foreign competitors have benefit costs at less than half of our prices if at all. The new health insurance reform plan isn't exactly what I would like, but this issue has been out of hand for several years now and needs to be addressed. If it doesn't lower costs, they will have to go back again and rewrite it.

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Thanks
Micheal,

It treats the symptoms.... not the problems.
Money could have been spent better elsewhere.

Money could have been spent in other or better ways, but this tax credit has given a much needed boost to the market, at least in my area. Many new families have moved to my neighborhood in the last year. It was a relief to those families that have been trying to sell for a long time. A few of them mentioned how pleased they were with the tax credit being made available. I never thought of asking them if the tax credit was the real reason they bought now. But they were happy to have it. I am not sure if it’s the best way, but it seems to be helping people in Oregon.
~Jake