I got my first and hopefully last bank mortgage when I was nineteen years old.

Despite not having a full-time job, me and a teenage buddy pre-qualified to borrow up to $250,000. We bought a fourplex, renovated it, and flipped it for a modest profit.

We were lucky.

Most people have no idea how money actually works.

They definitely don’t understand how mortgages work.

We certainly didn’t at the time.

Most people assume that you go to the bank, borrow their money, and then pay it back with interest.

That’s just silly.

Kind of like believing America is a democracy.

Or that Subway is healthy for you.

Here’s how modern mortgages actually work

Back in the day, the middle class worked good-paying union jobs, borrowed a reasonable amount of money (typically less than 3X annual single-earner income) from local bankers who risked their own real capital.

Now, the middle class no longer exists. Instead:

• You and a partner try your best to find a job (or two, or three, or a gig job, or start a business or a side hustle), work hard, and save within a vampire system that is preying on your labor, devaluing your money, and trying to automate+eliminate your job in real-time.
• You then pay tax on that money. Income tax, sales tax, property tax, excise tax, gift tax, tolls, tariffs, capital gains, inheritance tax, 97 different types of taxes, while the elites who control the government pay as little as 0.10% and their corporations pay zero by offshoring your stolen tax money, giving them a huge advantage over your company at all times.
• If you’re one of America’s 115 million renters, you then fork over a massive portion of that after-tax income to one of the nation’s 23 million parasitic land-lorders, passive speculators who contribute zero real value while flaying a profit off the backs of productive workers simply because they monopolized a property.