This Is MY House
By Kit Eberhardt Edited by Mikkel Hyldebrandt
The housing market has been kind of crazy over the past couple of years, and many people made lots of moves, whether buying or selling. The economy looks very different now, but the real estate market is still strong. Or is it? What do you do if you’re looking to sell or buy? Together with real estate agent Kit Eberhardt, we answer some of the most frequently asked questions.
use for earnest money. With dozens of offers over ask or all cash, sellers essentially had their pick of the litter.
What is the current state of the housing market?
The current housing market is in a state of correction and balancing. The pandemic’s influence over the real estate market was a two-fold scenario leading to extreme appreciation – one, uncharacteristically low-interest rates (some as low as 2.49%!), and two, the need/desire for “more space.” Interest rates were unprecedentedly low due to the federal government purchasing mortgage-backed securities to keep rates artificially low. In Q4 of 2021, they then began to sell these bonds, causing bond prices to plummet and forcing interest rates to rise through 2022. Traditionally, mortgage rates follow mortgage bond prices. Home values and prices appreciated thanks to the average (%) rate, allowing buyers to take advantage. With a stronger incentive to buy and not enough inventory to meet the sudden demand, buyers were faced with the burden of deciding how to make their offer the most attractive and increase their odds of acceptance, i.e., waiving all contingencies, offering over the asking price, and having extra cash to
Is the housing market going to crash?
No, thankfully, the housing market will not crash, and we are not trending to replicate the 2008 market. What we are currently experiencing is market normalization. To incite a possible bubble or crash, we would need to see mortgage delinquencies on the rise and a mass wave of foreclosures and short sales. Since 2008, strict guidelines have been placed, forcing buyers to fully qualify for financing before closing on their property.
Is the housing market slowing down?
Overall, the market is cooling off compared to 2020-2021. Right now, going into the winter season, this is a natural occurrence; winter months consist of colder weather, political elections, and back-to-back holidays, all activities making consumers want to press the pause button. Fortunately for buyers, this is an opportune time to regain negotiating power; fewer buyers in the market provide leverage. Sellers can also look at this time as an opportunity when they go to purchase, too. What sellers may “lose” or “give up” in selling their property, they can look to regain in purchasing their next property. Fortunately for sellers, home value appreciation will maintain thanks to 2021 comparative values.
in cost, affecting the overall cost to build or buy new construction versus a resale property.
Everybody is talking about inflation; what does that mean to me if I want to buy or sell a home?
Inflation will not directly affect buying or selling property unless you purchase new construction. Supplies, labor, materials, etc., will all increase
What about interest rate; last year, it was low, and now it’s high(er). Does that mean I should not buy or sell right now?
Yes, you are still in an excellent position to buy or sell right now, even with the higher rates. Regarding higher interest rates, it is important to consider your option to refinance within the next 12-24 months.
The “over ask” sales prices and appraisal values from 2020-2021 continue to create opportunities for sellers to list their property for sale. Comparative values are still driving today’s market for a more substantial real estate ROI. During this current season of the year, the colder months provide ample leverage for buyers. Typically, consumers’ desire to purchase a home slows during the winter; yet those who want to make an offer on a home find they have enhanced negotiating power because of the decrease in demand.
Also, an overlooked silver lining: when it comes time to file your taxes, a higher interest rate means a greater tax return from writing off the mortgage interest.
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When will the housing market get better?
Realistically, the market ebbs and flows just like anything else. It can be an intense rollercoaster but considering the State of Georgia is in a housing deficit, real estate isn’t going anywhere. Looking into the next year, interest rates are expected to come down and average between 5-6% just in time for Spring and Summer to propel the market into a typical seasonal frenzy. Historically, the average interest rate has been at a comfortable 4.25% (pre-pandemic), so we really aren’t far off.
your lender and learn the best steps to increase the correct way. A loan officer knows and can provide the guidance you might need in credit restoration and improvement.
It is important to understand the difference between prequalification and preapproval. A prequalification is what most online lenders and major banks can provide and is a “best” estimation of how much you could be approved for a mortgage. For the most part, these online applications are only collecting basic information and not requiring you to submit supportive documents to be sent to an underwriter. This can lead to holes in your preapproval because not all information is being reviewed. When you complete an application for preapproval, a licensed lender reviews all the supporting documents to ensure there aren’t any holes.
First, you should seek advice from a trusted lender when you have questions regarding the financial aspect of homebuying. While some agents have enough experience to share information, your loan officer will have the most up-to-date information and knowledge.
That said, if your goal is to purchase a home now, it is best to get full preapproval from a trusted local lender recommended by your agent. You should also have an idea or understanding of what you are comfortable spending on a monthly payment and how well the payment fits into your budget.
In looking at credit, it is typically the goal to meet a score of at least 640. For individuals with a credit score lower than 640, you can work with
An underwriter will review your income, debt-to-income ratio, funds required for closing, work history, credit, etc. When choosing between loan options, for a conventional loan, your minimum down payment is 3% for first-time homebuyers and 5% for experienced buyers. In considering FHA, 3.5% is the minimum down payment for first-time homebuyers.
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What financial considerations should I make if I want to buy a house?
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7 Ways to Improve Your Finances NOW and In 2023
By Mikkel Hyldebrandt
While 2023 may pose economic challenges, there are several things that you can do here and now that can impact your financial situation positively long term. You may not be able to do all of these as a checklist but use them to gauge where you are financially and where there’s room for improvement.
1. Control Your (Over) Spending
As we all know, much stress and feelings can be attached to spending and overspending money. Whether trying to keep up with friends or let those compelling insta ads influence you, you need to address how and why you overspend. Creating a bigpicture budget (maybe with the help of a budgeting app) helps you identify how you spend money.
car needing repairs or being out of work for a couple of months.
5. Get Your Retirement On Track
Whether you have a 401K or a personal IRA, it’s essential to start considering retirement at any age. Even small contributions to a retirement or investment account over time can help you generate more funds.
2. Ditch the Fancy Subscriptions
An annual audit of what you subscribe to is an easy way to cut out monthly costs. Do you need a fancy gym membership, or can you do a cheaper one? Do you need all the streaming services, or will fewer do? What about the online greeting card or meal prep subscription? Canceling just a few will instantly give you more money in your pocket.
6. Pay Your Bills On Time!
Paying your bills on time is the easiest way to manage your money in the smartest way: you avoid paying late fees and put the greatest importance on your essential expenses. An added bonus is that it will also positively impact your credit score and improve your interest rate.
7. Get Better Talking About Money
3. Save Up for Big Purchases
You may want to take out a loan if you buy a house or even a car, but if you’re going to replace your fridge or your TV or get new furniture, paying cash is the way to go. Building debt to purchase these things will take years to pay out, and it will feel much better seeing your savings accumulating interest instead.
4. Save Up for Emergencies
Unexpected expenses or life changes will occur, so have money set aside to deal with emergencies like your
Money can be a touchy issue, especially in a relationship between two people and different spending habits. Setting the same financial goals and considering joining accounts, if you haven’t already, is a great way to get clarity and agreement on money matters. Either way, start talking about money so it doesn’t become a hot-button issue.
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How Optics and Inclusion Tussle for Space in ‘Bros’
By George Elkind Photos: Universal
“Not all gay people are nice,” says Bobby Leiber, played by Billy Eichner as the lead character in “Bros,” the new Judd Apatowproduced feature which Eichner also cowrote and executive produced. As one of Bobby’s many corrective, prescriptive statements, the point is meant to give the new romantic comedy some teeth and currency, establishing daylight between “Bros” and more idealized (if often charged and tragic) depictions of queerness — and of white, cisgender gay men in particular.
In “Bros,” Bobby acts as the privileged public face of the LGBTQ+ community, a role that comes with a tangled set of responsibilities and anxieties. The film doesn’t try to hide that fact. Instead, it provides a space to examine the role of the cis gay white men it makes its subject, begging the question: As both social outsiders on one level and mobile insiders on another — in other words, as queer people who are also part of American society’s most dominant group — what should white cis gay men do to not be part of the problem?
Whatever the answer, Bobby at first appears to be doing something right. Winning a
(plainly comical) “Best Cis Male Gay Man” award and spearheading a fictional, first-ofits-kind National LGBTQ+ Museum in New York, he devotes his time to dredging up and presenting potentially lost but functionally obvious pieces of queer history, often with an archly righteous tone. (He lets us know who Marsha P. Johnson was, for instance). Working with a pointedly diverse, often bickering leadership committee at the museum and running a podcast highlighting often-ignored queer groups, the film positions him as a kind of intra-community ally. He’s doing his best by his peers but remains both lonely and in denial about that fact; despite his work, he’s unfulfilled.
Amid the film’s swirl of existential questions surrounding the societal role of cisgender white gay men, Bobby’s relationship status provides “Bros” with its other main concern, and a chance to dig into the personal and political contradictions of this experience. An anal-retentive intellectual at once fearful of intimacy and yearning for connection, the film opens with Bobby reacting to a a succession of anonymous, app-based flings. Bored with conversations rarely advancing
past “what’s up” and transactional sex, Bobby finds himself caught in a cycle of emotionally repressed fumblings toward connection; in this depiction of mutually stunted inarticulacy, “Bros” makes this masculine tendency — call it classically male bullshit — another subject, dealing with the prevailing pressures queer men experience so acutely around gender performance. Before long, Bobby meets an ex-hockey-playing hunk named Aaron (played with a welcome surplus of wit by Luke Macfarlane); with his swaggering, seemingly at-ease masculinity, he is a foil to Bobby’s own frail and anxious build and manner. For Bobby, attraction to Aaron constitutes a kind of political selfbetrayal, a fraught fraternization with a culture of superficial and assimilationist queerness he resents while taking part in — and which runs counter to his progressive image of himself.
For the film’s publicly accepted cis, white gay men – who can move in New York society with relative freedom compared to those who suffered before them – the meaning of their identity becomes jumbled and unclear. Left with little to worry about materially from day to day, they become preoccupied even in romance with their own and others’ perceptions of themselves. They may be gay, but they’re men, too, and prone to the kinds of emotional repression that entails. Struggling with even the faintest forms of emotional intimacy, internalized expectations around performance of masculinity constrict their expressions at frequent turns throughout the film — often enough that it quickly becomes a recurring gag.
While the gendered pressures shaping the characters’ more “bro-y” behavior are obvious, Bobby’s vocal, almost maniacally insistent progressivism is often presented critically in a way that proves refreshing. At its best, “Bros” dramatizes this as its own kind of insecure performance, suggesting that Bobby’s (mostly verbal and work-based) activist tendencies aren’t wholly altruistic, wrapped up in unease regarding his position in the community and in the world.
As a queer character flush with historically rare forms of relative privilege, he enacts solidarity with an urgency that’s not just driven by consideration, his attention to historical struggles scanning as a focus on difficulties that aren’t quite his. In grasping at
his own place within the LGBTQ+ community and seizing upon histories of hardship, there are moments where other, more marginalized characters in his orbit seemingly appear mainly to prop up his conception of himself.
But that unease seems to belong to more than just the character, bleeding into Eichner and co-writer and director Nicholas Stoller’s script more broadly. The film spends a good deal of time chiding its gay white characters, leaving less time to flesh out its more diverse (and often thinly sketched) BIPOC cast. With press releases touting the film’s use of authentic LGBTQ+ casting, the fact that even straight characters onscreen were mandated to be played by queer actors makes the move scan less as meaningful activism than as a flourish of PR. (Particularly distracting is the casting of Jai Rodriguez, from the original “Queer Eye,” as Aaron’s brother, who bears no racial resemblance to Aaron or his onscreen parents, in an act that comes off as eerie for its trivializing of such difference; a simple line about adoption could have made this click). What this and other clumsily inclusive gestures seems to express is an anxiety on
the part of the film’s backers about centering a movie today on a pair of cis, white, gay men.
It’s the same tension that’s played out throughout the film, which sees its two key threads — the thematic question of where gay white men fit into society now and, then, the matter of the starring couple’s romantic prospects in that context — jockeying for space onscreen. In this regard, one scene in which Bobby takes a stage alongside his variously queer colleagues to promote the museum’s attention to LGBTQ+ histories of struggle is particularly telling. While we glimpse a performance of solidarity that seems appropriate and right, it lasts just a few minutes before, in an act of writerly, actorly and character-based self-absorption I won’t quite spoil, his peers are recast as backing figures for his own story and the film’s romantic plot.
Demonstrating just where exactly the film’s real heart is, it’s a prime case study of inclusion for the sake of optics over anything else.
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Drag Bingo Featuring Brent Star
@ Urban Pie Atlanta
November 16, 8-10 pm
Brent Star, a celebrated theater connoisseur, drag performer, and comedic genius, is hosting a round of Drag Bingo. Free to attend, participants can put on their Bingo game faces while sipping on wine, brews, and craft cocktails.
November Socializers Club
@ The Kimpton Shane Hotel
November 17, 6:30 pm
This month’s edition of the Socializers Club will be at the Kimpton Hotel whee there will be plenty of opportunity to socialize. Raffle prizes included VIP tickets to Toy Party, gift to TukTuk, and much more. There will also be a toy collection for Toy Party.
AMEN! It’s A Drag Show!
@ Sister Louisa’s
November 17, 11 pm – 2 am Every 1st and 3rd Thursdays, come out to Sister Louisa’s Church to experience this amazing show featuring performances by Dotte Com, JayBella Bankz, Molly Rimswell, & TAYLOR ALXNDR.
Reverie featuring Patrick Heagney
@ KAI LIN ART | November 18, 7-10 pm
Come for the art, stay for the socializing and free drinks from Cathead Vodka. Intimidate friends, family, and co-workers with how cultured you are when you tell them you went to a gallery opening!
Hot Mess Dance Pop Party
@The Basement
November 18, 10 pm – 3 am
Calling all pop lovers! Nonsense ATL’s pop dance pop is gearing up for a night of curated mixes of the biggest and latest pop and dance music.
Atlanta
Bourbon Festival
@ Guardian Works
November 19, 12-3 pm
Enjoy 50+ bourbon and whiskey options, cocktails, wine & beer, and live music. Admission includes entry, entertainment, souvenir tasting glass and all of your drinks; food will cost extra.
Pug Fest 2022
@ Pontoon Brewing | November 19, 2-5 pm
Pontoon Brewing and The Pug Rescue of Florida and Georgia are excited to welcome you to the 5th Annual Pug Fest to raise money for these adorable pups!
Felix’s Annual Chili Cook-Off
@ Felix’s | November 19, 4-8 pm
The annual Chili Cook-Off is back, and this year Felix’s is partnering with Tito’s Vodka and Joining Hearts. Cocktail and beer bust, plus the chance to win VIP Passes to Joining Hearts Pool Party, Joining Hearts Love on the Rocks Party, and much more!
Bearracuda Atlanta
@ Heretic | November 19, 10 pm – 3 am
Bearracuda is back in Atlanta for their finalparty of 2022! This event returns DJ Wayne G from London. Tip the hot, beefy dancers, cruise, and socialize all night.
WUSSY Presents Bottom’s Up! with Jaida Essence Hall @ City Winery Atlanta
November 20, 1 pm
Enjoy this boozy drag brunch featuring special guest Jaida Essence Hall, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 12! Tickets at citywinery.com.
New Year's Weekend Dec. 30 - Jan. 1
When I started dating my boyfriend, I told him that I prefer to have an open relationship, but that we could have a ‘grace period’ before going into it. Well, now I think it is time, and my boyfriend is suddenly saying that he is not sure if he can go through with being in an open relationship. I want to be with him and commit to him, but I also want to sleep with other people. What do we do?
You say nothing about how long you have been to gether, but it doesn’t seem like a long time. If an open relationship is a radical idea to him, he may still be processing that you want an open relationship. You need to respect that if you want to be with him, but you can also engage in conversations with him about what he feels about opening up the relationship, and why he is hesi tant. Once you build that trust, he may open up to the idea. What you need to do is to respect his decision no matter what – even if it is a mo nogamous relationship – and not pressure him into anything.
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