*The year can either be your year of birth, the year your graduated high school or college, the year you got married or became a parent, the year that a prominent historical event took place, etc., but the point is it’s a year you know the whippersnapper’s likely answer will be, “I wasn’t even born yet!”
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For about two years prior to that, I sat back and watched a lot of coworkers, many of them new to the job, buy big giant newly-built five-bedroom houses in areas that were not well planned as far as zoning was concerned, as in there were no schools or shopping locations or recreation locations nearby, just blocks and blocks and blocks of houses. By 2008, they found themselves in the first stages of that shifty home loan crisis. They were strapped with upside-down loans on houses that had plummeted in value yet they owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on them, many tried to sell or refinance, but the market was against them. One fortunate part of it was that they were not victims of loan officers who falsified income or assets on the applications, so they made enough money that they could afford their mortgages and weren’t faced with foreclosures, they just couldn’t prevail in the housing finance gambling casino.
That’s one of my most memorable takes on 2008.
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Art Lover 