WSJ: 6/20/2019

Q: Have you ever had a buyer get a little too comfortable in a home for sale?

Hillsborough/Montgomery, N.J.

Summer is here at last, along with all the fun and pleasurable outdoor activities that come with it. But as we spend these longer, warmer days outside, gardening, swimming, hiking, camping, or just hanging out with friends, potentially dangerous insects are buzzing or crawling around us, threatening to spoil our good time. These "party crashers" carry harmful bacteria or transmit diseases via painful stings or bites, and an untimely visit from one of them could end in a trip to the emergency room. Fortunately, most bugs won’t go out of their way to attack humans. The best strategy for staying safe this summer is to know the enemies, then avoid and protect against them. Learn what to look out for with our guide to some of the most dangerous bugs found in America.

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Gardening is meant to be a relaxing activity that connects you with nature as you beautify your yard—yet crowded nurseries and finicky flowers can make the hobby feel anything but. To save you from frustration, we rounded up the easiest plants to care for that you can buy on Amazon. All are carefully packaged potted plants, so you can skip long store lines and cultivating seeds. The next time you're stocking up on goods from Amazon add these foolproof plants to your shopping cart.


Pentas

Pentas, also known as Egyptian stars because of their five-pointed petals, are slow to bloom when you start from seed, but you can buy starter plants that are already in flower by shopping on Amazon. Whether you choose to plant pentas in the ground or in containers, make sure to position them in strong sunlight. Pentas appreciate regular watering and the occasional deadheading, but don’t need much else. Get ready to enjoy the butterflies and hummingbirds that they’ll attract to your garden. Available from Amazon; $24.99 for four plants.

No matter the day, the yesterday today tomorrow plant will look good from spring through early fall. The easy-going shrub needs regular waterings and well-draining soil, and not much else. It can grow up to six feet tall, but you can prune it annually to keep it short. Flowers bloom in a brilliant purple and gradually fade to lavender and then white, creating a spectacular ombré effect within a single plant. Available from Amazon; $12.50 for one plant.

Hardy hibiscus

For a colorful statement in the yard all summer long, consider planting rose of Sharon. This flowering shrub, which is actually a hibiscus and not a rose, can grow up to 12-feet tall and six-feet wide. Provide it with rich, well-drained soil and full sun and you can expect large, beautiful blooms. Available from Amazon; $29.09 for one plant.

Barberry

Even though it doesn’t bloom, the barberry bush still adds striking color to your landscaping. The fuss-free plant needs occasional pruning, and is content with full sun and any type of soil. This barberry starts the season with vibrant yellow-green leaves and turns red-orange as summer gives way to fall. Available from Amazon; $9.99 for one plant.

Catmint plant

Keep deer, rabbits, and other garden pests away with a natural and pretty repellent: catmint. The tall lavender-hued flower is easy to grow whether it gets full or partial sun and can tolerate heat and drought conditions. Available from Amazon; $28.95 for one plant.

Beautyberry

The stunning beautyberry shrub will add color to your yard well beyond summertime—and without much effort required from you. Beautyberry's dark purple leaves in spring give way to white flowers in summer, and then its the purple berries that steal the show in fall and winter. Just when most yards lose their color color, yours will be bursting with it. Available from Amazon; $9.99 for one plant.

Lamb's Ear

Gardening doesn’t get much easier than lamb’s ear. The perennial plant tolerates almost any soil type and it can grow in the sun or partial shade. On top of that the fuzzy, gray leaves bring texture and interest to your landscaping. Available from Amazon; $19.99 for one plant.

Vinca Minor

Don’t be fooled by its delicate flowers, the vinca is one tough plant. While it can tolerate sun or shade, it grows best and spreads vigorously in partial shade. Because of its rapid growth and short stature, vinca is a popular pick as a ground cover—just be sure to keep other plants out of its path. Available from Amazon; $8.99 for eight plants.

Hosta June

Looking for a plant that doesn’t require a whole lot of sun? You'll love this leafy hosta, which looks best in partial shade. The landscaping favorite requires minimal maintenance and grows back year after year. In the late summer be on the look out for pretty purple flower spikes in addition to lush green leaves. Available from Amazon; $6.95 for one plant.

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The latest S&P/Case-Shiller Index numbers drop Tuesday, giving us a peek at the direction of home values. The index tracks national home prices. It's an important indicator, but it's only really finance nerds who talk about it, which is weird because Americans hold about $26 trillion of their wealth in their houses. That's about a quarter of their entire net worth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks stock prices, gets a lot of attention — but for many families, their house is the most valuable thing they own.

The history of the index is pretty fascinating. For a long time, we were mostly in the dark on how home prices change over time. That all changed thanks to Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, who co-created this index with his colleague Karl "Chip" Case (as the name would suggest).

So Shiller knows the housing market, and he has long been skeptical of whether buying a house is really a surefire investment. His index shows that home prices haven't really grown much over the long run. Should you use your life savings to buy a home? It's debatable.

A different way to track home prices

Shiller and Case's research began in the 1980s, when they got their hands on "Univac tapes" — basically the Stone Age version of a thumb drive — that had data from real estate appraisers on home sales. With these tapes, they constructed the beta version of their index, and they published a couple papers about it.

"We didn't even submit them to the prestige journals because we thought it was not a cool topic," Shiller says. It's cooler now though; their index is the gold standard of assessing national home prices. And it can be a powerful tool to spot housing bubbles, as Case and Shiller proved back in the early 2000s.

The long-run growth of home prices is pitiful

In his classic book Irrational Exuberance, Shiller looked at the history of home prices

going back as far as 1890. He found that they've gone up and down, but over the long haul, they've actually grown very little. Between 1890 and 2019, national housing prices grew by less than 0.6 percent per year (after accounting for inflation). That's pitiful! To put that number in perspective, the average real return of the S&P 500, the index of the stocks of the top 500 corporations in America, is about 7%.

Shiller is not alone in finding that home prices haven't climbed much over the long run. Mostly that's because we've built more. That said, there is some evidence that across advanced countries, home prices have been trending upward since WWII, and that could be because development has slowed.

So, should I be renting?

While the Case-Shiller index tracks national home prices, it does not track rents. A recent working paper by Òscar Jordà and other economists tracks the prices of major forms of wealth in 16 countries from 1870 to 2015, finding that when you incorporate the value of rent, homes look like a much better investment. Homes have a similar return to stocks, and the housing market also shows less volatility. In the U.S., the authors estimate, the total net return from a typical house, including rent, is about 6% per year in real terms, which is one percentage point less than the average return from the stock market.

The Case-Shiller index also doesn't measure other important things, like the pleasure you get from having your own little fiefdom, putting down roots in a neighborhood, building a community or being free from an awful landlord. Homes also come with tax benefits and force you to save, which can be helpful for the many of us who need motivation.

That said, homeownership has headaches. It's harder to move. You have to pay to fix stuff and pay property taxes. And if your city's economy crumbles — as did Shiller's native Detroit — then your home's value goes down with it.

Many people make the mistake of believing homeownership comes with a unique opportunity to build wealth. Renting, they believe, is "this idea that you're putting money down the drain," Shiller says. "I don't think that's the right way to think about renting a house." If you rent instead of buy, you can use what would have been your down payment to invest in potentially more profitable investments. Whether this is a better financial strategy depends on many factors, including how long you want to live in one area.

Are we in another housing bubble?

Shiller warned the world about the two big bubbles that devastated our economy over the last 20 years: the dotcom crash in the late 1990s and housing crisis from 2007 to 2009. That — and the fact that he's a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale — means when he talks, people listen.

"I think we should be concerned," Shiller says. "Home prices have been going up since 2012 at a good, strong clip." He says it could take awhile, but booms like this come to an end. "With the housing market showing signs of slowing down, the turning point could be at hand already for us."

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