Anyone who wants to buy a house today has to dig deep into their pockets. The prices for houses became more and more expensive over the years. The average home price in the U.S. stated in dollars is currently around $375,000. Of course, the price varies from state to state. For example, in Alabama, you pay a much lower price than in California. The chart below shows the median sales price for homes over a 58-year period.
As you can see, home prices continue to rise over the years. But what is the reason for this development? Are houses getting bigger and more magnificent? Or are our fiat currency units becoming worth less and less?
To make things more understandable, let’s take a look at the development of house prices measured in silver ounces.
Here, things look different again. The fact is that house prices are as cheap as they were 5-6 years ago. To be more precise, it takes about 17,474 ounces of silver to buy a house today. In 2018, we paid more than 25,000 ounces.
Another example would be the house price measured in gold ounces.
In 2018, people were still paying over 300 gold ounces for a house, but today the price has fallen to around 215 gold ounces. At today’s gold price of about $1800, a price drop of 85 ounces of gold would be the equivalent of $153,000. Not exactly little for the average wage earner.
Home prices are expensive when measured in U.S. dollars. However, if you compare the price with gold or silver, things look different again.
I leave it to you to think about what that might be. Perhaps inflation is higher than the CPI illusion would have us believe and the U.S. dollar continues to steadily lose value. This would mean that the constant increase in fiat currency units has made the price of everything measured in U.S. dollars more expensive over the years. To be honest, it doesn’t sound that unlikely.
And who knows, you might consider buying your next home in gold or silver. Over time, and with today’s inflation numbers, you’d probably be fine with 150 ounces of gold or 6000 ounces of silver.