3/10- Asset #2: Residential Real Estate The second asset that keeps Americans mired in poverty is residential real estate, specifically homeownership in neighborhoods whose property values decline faster than the homeowner's ability to pay expenses. Home ownership has long been advertised as the ultimate safe asset. "Your home is your wealth," realtors say. "Buy early and watch it appreciate." But property appreciation is not automatic - it is contingent on local economic conditions, demographic trends, and future employment prospects. Even those families with stable jobs saw housing bubbles pop, property values erode, and mortgage payments become unmanageable. In Detroit and Cleveland, neighborhoods that once housed middle-class families now host boarded-up houses that sell for a few thousand dollars, or in some cases even less than a thousand. Many homeowners owe more on their mortgage than the house is worth - what economists call negative equity or being underwater. If you have $200,000 in debt on a property now worth $120,000, you are effectively poorer than when you bought it. Worse yet, foreclosure on an underwater mortgage not only wipes out any hope of recouping equity, it also devastates personal credit for years. Low-income families who believed home ownership was the guarantee of stability found instead that in downturns they could neither afford rising property taxes nor keep their homes. The widely cited subprime crisis of 2007 to 2008 was just the most spectacular example in recent memory. Those homes, assets only on paper, become liabilities - unpaid taxes, deteriorating structures, and stains on credit reports. Worse still, homeowners who stay in declining neighborhoods end up paying for the upkeep through higher insurance premiums and rising utility costs, often without any realistic expectation of a future payoff.

1/10- I wanted to share this powerful piece titled "The 5 Assets That Keep Americans Broke" by Thomas Sowell. It really made me reflect on the conventional wisdom we've all been fed from a young age about what constitutes "the good life" - go to school, get a job, buy a car, buy a house, and so on. What struck me most is how these five "assets" share a common thread: they're all products designed and marketed by the banking system. We've been brilliantly conditioned as a society to believe these are the essential pillars of success - that without some or all of these, we're somehow falling behind or destined to fail. But the cracks in this financial paradigm are starting to show. People are slowly beginning to wake up to the reality that these supposed stepping stones to prosperity can actually become anchors weighing us down. This is why I'm grateful for Bitcoin, which will fundamentally reprices goods and services while helping us realign our values and principles as a society toward more sustainable wealth-building strategies. Five Assets That Keep Americans Poor When discussing what keeps ordinary Americans from escaping poverty, it is natural to focus on wages, unemployment, or government assistance programs. Yet strikingly often, poverty is perpetuated not merely by a lack of resources, but by the very assets people believe will lead them out of hardship. An asset is typically defined as something of value owned by an individual - an education credential, savings, or even durable goods like cars and appliances. But if the acquisition of an asset entails debt, maintenance costs, or unrealistic expectations, it can become a trap rather than a pathway to prosperity. In my decades of studying economic behavior, I've come to recognize five particular assets commonly lauded as building blocks of the American dream that more often serve as millstones around the neck of the working poor.