I must admit that during my semi-required down time each day I am a sucker for the TV show entitled House Hunters on HGTV. I’m also not one to shy away from technology so I have a digital video recorder (DVR to those of us who are tech savvy). So, I have House Hunters episodes just about any time I want to see them.

The basic structure of each episode is as follows.

• For one reason or another a family (loosely defined) wants to get a new house
• We get a brief look at their backgrounds, occupations, etc.
• They look at three places
• They decide which of those three they will buy
• After a given time, usually between 1 -4 months the show checks up on how they like their new house.

Every show pretty much follows the above scenario. One of the reasons my wife and I like to watch is that we have an ongoing competition as to who will guess the house they choose. We often wish that somehow the show could be interactive in that we could ask some questions and maybe give them some of our senior wisdom.  Here are some of the observations that are made for almost all of the episodes

• Where do all those young folks get all the money to buy such big houses? I personally had to save for almost ten years before I had the required down payment.

• I thought this housing bubble thing taught us a lesson so I am confused as to how so many of them can buy houses with zero percent down? Isn’t this a big part of the reason for the current housing crisis?  Why are banks still allowing “no money down” purchases?

• Someone needs to point out to all these young people that their grandparents and maybe even their parents raised three or four kids in a house of around 1200 square feet. Almost everyone on the show seems to think you need a minimum of a 3,000 square foot home if you have one child. Maybe it is because we start our kids out learning the “stuff” syndrome as such an early age that they have so many toys that have to be stored away. 🙂

• Since the twenty-some years olds, who seem to be the most frequent searchers on the show insist on having the big luxurious house what right off the bat what will they aspire to in later years? In thinking about this I guess there are enough things out there to really not make this a problem. How about a couple of $60k cars every couple of years?

It just seems like these kid’s parents just didn’t get any family history lessons across to them about how previous generations lived. Like I said before my wife and I make a game out of guessing which house they will choose. But, it usually ends up that she picks one house and I pick another and then the people on the show pick the one we didn’t. I guess we just are not attuned to the current generation of home buyers.  🙂

And the journey goes on.