Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends

in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe. I am going to talk to you today about the housing market,

a topic that in a lot of ways, if you think about it, is more practical and day-to-day for a lot of people than even the stock market,

bond market, various elements of macroeconomics. We talk about a lot and so forth. I wrote a piece

in May of last year that really tried to

pour out some of my feelings about the housing market and particularly what a primary residence

means to the balance sheet of an investor, what it doesn't mean and how I sort of think

philosophically about housing. This talk today is a bit more ad hoc to the current situation.

I'm going to conclude with some practical takeaways for you,

but I just think it would benefit people to kind of understand a deeper level of what's going on.

And to do so, we're going to incorporate charts that those you watch in the video

will see up on the screen and those listening to the podcast can receive the package of

the actual charts.

So you know how almost every week say you got to readdividendcafe.com because there's some charts

that'll be great.

This is a very chart-centric conversation. and so we're incorporating that in the video

for you.

First and foremost, I just want to kind of out of the way, get out of the way, the fact that

I don't really believe that one's consideration of housing ought to be something that creates a lot of distress or that creates a lot of headache.

If one is trying to make a decision about making a purchase, there's some financial practicality involved there.

One's looking at refinancing a mortgage. If one is looking at investment property, there's plenty of angles here. But the least relevant

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