Californians are arriving in Montana in droves. But they're not welcome.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

45. We moved to Colorado (from Arizona) in 1987.

Husband's job.

A year or so later there was a huge influx of people from California, who bid up housing prices enormously. We actually moved and sold our home in Boulder at the very beginning of that bid up. Had we stayed there six months longer our home would have gone for double what it did. I hate to tell you what it's currently worth.

I currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, long considered too expensive for ordinary mortals. Trust me, it's not. But recently, the housing bid-up means that my current home is worth a whole lot more than I paid for it. I'm not about to sell, mainly because I like my little place and hope to stay here a lot longer. I'm grateful I bought when I did, back in 2009.

In the early 1970s there was a weird shortage of actual money, which meant that people trying to buy homes often couldn't because the banks simply didn't have the cash available to complete the financing. I was not in the home buying market myself at that time, so it's possible I have something wrong here, but I had various co-workers trying to buy homes who were frantically scrambling to do so.

It does seem as though every decade or so there's some kind of huge barrier to buying.

We were trying to buy a home when balloon payments were in vogue, and actually got out of a house purchase because we decided that the balloon payment was far too risky.