At the end of the day, you are the head of the household but will always make priority your wife and then your kid's feelings.

I need to (well I need to pay for...) replace every interior door, patch 6 very large dry wall holes (think kicked in walls), retexture half of the unit  (due to the size of the drywall repairs), repaint the entire unit, new flooring for the entire unit, replace 2 broken windows, haul off 30 yards of furniture/household crap/misc debris plus whatever odds and ends I didn't/couldn't see on my initial walk through when the Sheriff did the lockout.  

The american household is the strong pillar in our economy.

Helocs, household debt, consumer debt, and national debt is at all time highs.

The first shows the median household income tabulated by MSA and the second at the county level. 

You’re essentially setting up a new household and that always turns into a lot of money and time.

After we did the exchange I informed her I flipped houses, I have a building full of materials if she was looking for other household goods. 

The better you know the city: the schools, the areas with high crime, what’s becoming trendy, where the new developments are going and which malls are closing etc.... the easier it is to know whether a property is a good buy or not.Regarding what to look for in a market is sound fundamentals: a strong economy, jobs, population growth, jobs, new construction (but hopefully not outpacing demand), natural geography, climate, desirability, solid unemployment rates, jobs, high household incomes relative to home prices (affordability) and jobs, but mostly jobs.By those metrics I think Seattle looks good, minus the affordability factor.

On top of that, he's been through something like 6 or 7 recessions where he might have seen the value of a lower minimum monthly payment over the lower rate: households have monthly budgets, the ones calling him for a fire sale listing back in '89 (S&L crisis) or '01 (dot com bubble) were the ones with the higher monthly payments, not the ones with the higher rate.

A startling number of American households are currently not paying their mortgages.