Abby Badach Doyle
speaker
246 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 13 Aug
Abby Badach Doyle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Mortgage rates got really low.
In 2020, the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell below 3% for the first time ever.
And it generally stayed there until around September 2021.
So people rushed to buy, millions of existing homeowners refinanced, and they were locking in these incredibly cheap loans.
And a huge number of those loans are still on the books, almost half.
Half of outstanding mortgages today have a rate of four percent or less.
And that's according to realtor.com's analysis of federal data.
And that sunny 2021 market is casting a pretty long shadow on today's market.
And the people that scored those great mortgage rates then are now part of the reason that today's buyers feel so stuck.
How does that happen?
Basically, they've got a deal that's too good to give up.
So say you have one of those 3% mortgages.
You want another bedroom, or you'd like to move closer to family, and selling your house means.
Giving up that 3% mortgage rate and taking on a new mortgage closer to six or seven percent these days on a home that probably costs more too.
That's the mortgage rate lock-in effect.
You can afford to stay, but you might not necessarily be able to afford to move.
And that's why people call it the golden handcuffs.
And if you're a first-time buyer, you know, looking right now, or if you bought in the past couple of years like I did, it's really easy to be like, oh, boo hoo, champagne problems.
Your mortgage rate is too low.
But having that low mortgage rate really is a burden for today's existing homeowners.
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