There's gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change me a little.

Joy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you and empower you so you make better financial decisions in your life.

I hear from so many listeners who are worried about every aspect of the housing market right now.

They're worried about buying a place right now and then the market collapses.

More and more articles I'm seeing about is a housing bus coming or a housing bus is coming and I want to talk to you about that about buying it a very very hard time.

And also energy prices spend bad ugly with energy prices want to tell you how this is likely to all play out.

And one of the important things we've got to be about individually and as a country as we deal with these higher energy prices.

So it's being of high housing prices the numbers are shocking how much home prices have gone up in the last couple of years.

Actually I shouldn't say the last couple of years so we had a bottom in 2012 and home prices have been going up and up and more recently.

They've gone really crazy and this is I've explained in the past is not because of a failure of government.

Although we like to give government credit or blame for everything or you know the occupant of the White House or whatever know what happened with housing.

All goes back to the banking scandals that culminated in the great recession and the financial crisis worldwide that started basically in 2007 and accelerated in 2008.

And so we ended up with way too few housing units being constructed for years and years and years not enough builders in the marketplace.

And it has been a problem with a shortage of every type of housing unit you know people who rent you know you can tell stories about what's happened with your rent.

And people trying to buy a home where everybody knows that the price of homes has gone crazy.

So what do you do here you are sitting right now mortgage rates have roughly doubled.

We're now looking at headline numbers above 5% for people with great credit on a mortgage.

And by historical numbers this is hard to get your arms around because we all think in the era that we came of age.

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