The responses to my article for The Wall Street Journal “The Case Against 30-Year Mortgages” keep coming… They’re thoughtful, challenging, and occasionally humbling. What started as a critique of an outdated lending standard has evolved into a larger conversation about financial literacy, honesty in measurement, and the way we misunderstand the true cost of money.
This installment features one of the most level-headed exchanges yet: a reader who called me out for offering “a lament without a solution.” What followed was a conversation about truth, measurement, and the deceptive simplicity of APR.
“The Lament Without a Solution”
I read your article and you made some solid points. Yet you left the solution unstated.
While I personally am agnostic on the issue… you lament the large interest payments made over a 30-year mortgage.
And the solution? A much larger down payment or a much shorter payback period.
As you know, the main stumbling block to buying a home for most people is not having 20% or more to put down on a house. Do you have a solution to that other than people not buying a home and renting?
Fifteen-year mortgages are available, yet most people do not choose this option because they can’t afford the higher monthly payments.
So to me, you present a lament without a solution. My guess of why you didn’t propose one is because there isn’t one. It’s easy to complain about a problem. It’s much harder to say something about addressing it — which your article doesn’t.
Am I missing something?
–R.G.
My Reply
Hi R.G.,
Thank you for your thoughtful note and for taking the time to engage with my article. I appreciate the challenge — it’s a fair one.
To be candid, I’m not particularly concerned with the mortgage product itself. I used the 30-year mortgage as a convenient and visible example to illustrate a much deeper problem: the way APR (Annual Percentage Rate) distorts our understanding of cost and value in all forms of consumer credit. My central thesis isn’t ‘abolish 30-year mortgages,’ but rather ‘abolish APR.’
APR was designed to simplify comparison shopping, but it’s done the opposite. It makes long-term loans look artificially cheap and short-term loans look prohibitively expensive, obscuring the true cost of borrowing behind a single, sanitized annual figure.
If we replaced APR with a clear, total-cost disclosure — showing borrowers the actual dollars they’ll pay over time — we’d have honest pricing, better decision-making, and a more transparent market.
So while you’re right that I didn’t propose a ‘solution’ to mortgages per se, the solution I’m calling for goes deeper: truth in measurement. Until we fix how we define and disclose cost, we’ll keep debating symptoms instead of causes.
–Patrick
R.G. later wrote back:
I believe we are in agreement. Most semi-financially literate people don’t understand APR — your point, which I mostly missed at first. The vast majority of people have little understanding of the commitments they make financially or their implications in dollars and cents.
Truth in measurement, as you state, is indeed very important.
–R.G.
Reflection
This exchange captures what I hoped the entire column would do: spark conversations that move beyond the mortgage itself and toward how we measure the cost of credit. R.G. was right: it’s easy to lament a broken system, harder to fix it. But the fix begins with calling out the lie of “cheap” credit. Truth in measurement isn’t just good policy; it’s good math.