It's Not a Housing Problem; It's a Money Problem!

I can’t afford to buy a home!

I hear this lament often, especially from young folks. Boomers often respond, saying, “Quit buying $6 lattes and ordering Uber Eats, and maybe you could save for a house.”

It might just be me, but it seems like that may oversimplify things a tad.

I mean, there’s no doubt a lot of young people would benefit from budgeting lessons. However, that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant home affordability problem here in the U.S.

Last year, the average age of a first-time homebuyer in the U.S. climbed to 40 for the first time, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“The historically low share of first-time buyers underscores the real-world consequences of a housing market starved for affordable inventory,” NAR deputy chief economist and vice president of research Jessica Lautz said in a statement. “The share of first-time buyers in the market has contracted by 50 percent since 2007—right before the Great Recession.”

The median sale price of an existing home rose from $392,800 to $426,800 between 2022 and the end of Q3 2025. That represents an 8.7 percent increase in just three years. In 2016, the median sale price of an existing home was $274,400.

Meanwhile, mortgage rates climbed from just over 3 percent to over 7 percent between 2022 and 2023.

Boomers can lament youngsters’ spending habits all they want. That’s an easy target. However, the reality is that Boomers came of age in a different world.

They lived in a world where their money worked.

We Have a Money Problem

It’s not so much that we have a housing problem as we have a money problem.

The federal government broke the money, and the incessant inflationary pressure from its monetary malfeasance is one of the most significant factors driving housing prices into the stratosphere.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the stage in the 1930s when he revalued gold and tried to confiscate metal from the public to facilitate money creation. President Richard Nixon put the final nail in the dollar’s coffin in 1971 when he severed the dollar's last connection with the gold standard, making it a purely free-floating fiat currency.

When he announced the closing of the gold window, Nixon said, “Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation,” and promised, “Your dollar will be worth just as much as it is today.”

This was clearly a lie.

According to the Consumer Price Index data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the dollar has lost well over 80 percent of its value since Nixon’s fateful decision. Meanwhile, the dollar value of gold has gone from $35 an ounce to about $4,400.

This monetary destruction has driven significant socio-economic shifts, decimating the middle class. It has also turned the American dream of homeownership into a nightmare.

Turning Houses into Savings

Homeowner hopefuls say the price of houses needs to fall. However, people who already own homes want no part of housing deflation. And can you blame them? Many older Americans have most of their wealth tied up in their houses. Younger generations accuse Boomers and Xers of being selfish when they say they don't want to see home values drop, but what choice did they have?

This raises a question I’m probably not supposed to ask: Why in the world did we turn houses into savings accounts?

I know the answer.

It's because our money won’t preserve our wealth.

If you hold dollars, you are losing at least 2 percent of your purchasing power every single year – by design. And over the last few years, it’s been much worse than that.

Two percent might not seem like much, but over time, it adds up quickly. In five years, you’ve lost 10 percent of your purchasing power (It's actually 10.4 percent when you factor in compounding).

Economist Saifedean Ammous summed it up.

“Our monetary system is so broken that people have to preserve their wealth in their houses instead of in their money.” 

Historian Tom Woods parsed out the ramifications.

“This means the demand for housing includes an artificial component that would not exist under a system of sound money. In other words, some portion of the demand for housing comes from a desire to store wealth, since our present money is unsuitable for this purpose.”

If the government didn't print so much money, housing prices wouldn't rise so much. If the government stopped driving interest rates to artificially low levels, housing bubbles wouldn't blow up. And if we didn’t have so many people chasing home ownership to preserve (and in some cases grow) their wealth, that segment of demand would likely fall and prices along with it.

Simply put, if our money weren’t broken, we wouldn’t have to buy a house to preserve our wealth.

Sadly, very few people with power want to fix the money. They depend on monetary debasement to fuel big government. The inflation tax is the price you pay for government borrowing and spending. So, don’t count on the money printing going away any time soon – or ever. (It will only end when the fiat system implodes, which it undoubtedly will.)

If you can’t afford to buy a home, you can still take steps to protect your wealth by saving in gold and silver. Money Metals has a monthly gold and silver purchase plan that allows you to accumulate precious metals over time with as little as $100 per month.

Protect your wealth with real money.

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