I mean it more like if you would have borred 100K for a house in the 70s that was a lot of money, if you still live in that house you probably paid it back, but even if you didn’t 100K today isn’t that much money anymore
Comment on Uber Eats or something idk
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days agoinflation is good if you borrow money
at below the rate of inflation
bier@feddit.nl 2 days ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units.
Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity from the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.
Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.
Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.
Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.
Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Actually its the inverse. Borrower A is borrowing the equivalent of $105 and borrower B is borrowing the equivalent of $125 and after 5 years the amount they borrowed is equivalent to $160.
Let’s put this into more real terms. Lets say 30 years ago borrower C got a $100k mortgage at a 6% interest rate. Ignoring everything else that often gets lumped into “the house payment” (insurance, property taxes, HOA/condo association fees, closing fees, etc.) their monthly mortgage payment would be $599.55 for the entire lifetime of that mortgage. That $100k in 1995 dollars that was borrowed would be about $210k when adjusted for inflation. Those 360 payments would also conveniently equal out to roughly $215k meaning they effectively were loaned the money for free over the timescale, and that loan payment of $600 in 1995 is still a loan payment of $600 in 2025 despite the fact that that $600 in 1995 dollars is equivalent to about $1200 today.
Basically with inflation, property ownership ensures a roughly decreasing cost of living over a lifetime and property has a tendency to gain value faster than a dollar does, so ultimately being able to get a mortgage creates wealth for the individual by stabilizing costs that would otherwise grow indefinitely and they gain an asset that generally increases in value.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to say here. It seems non sequitur if you are trying to say “borrowers of higher interest rate benefit less from inflation”.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I wasn’t the one who said that part. I just wanted to correct the simplified math with some real world numbers that put into perspective how much wealth just being able to get a mortgage sets one up for
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.