It’s hard to visualize how much money $7 trillion is. It is one of those numbers that is just so big it is almost meaningless. Most of the time, large amounts of money are never as impressive as you imagine it. In the movies they have a briefcase of $100,000 that is jam packed with neatly stacked hundred dollar bills, but in real life, $100,000 would be one stack measuring less than five inches thick.
One million dollars would be a small stack that could easily be stuffed into a backpack or, the preferred method of transport in movies, a briefcase, without anyone ever knowing. $100 million dollars starts to look a little more impressive as it would be stacked about three feet high on a standard pallet. So what about a trillion dollars? Imagine ten by ten squares of these pallets arranged in five columns of twenty rows. In other words, imagine 10,000 pallets stacked with $100,000,000, and you have your one trillion dollars. Otherwise known as one seventh of what was lost during the housing recession. It’s a pretty mind-boggling number, but there is now some good news regarding that massive loss.
Since the 2006-2009 downturn, homeowners’ equity in real estate has more than doubled and it is poised to reach a new record as early as second quarter, Bloomberg reports.
From the end of 2013 through fourth quarter of 2015, home equity increased 22 percent. Many cities are seeing prices at all-time highs, including Dallas, Denver, Portland, and San Francisco.
Even the markets that were the worst hit are starting to see home equity restored as only 95,186 properties had foreclosures filed in January, that is the lowest number in almost 10 years.
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