Shouldn't the price of a home be about twice the family's income. I always thought that was a good rule of thumb.
At least that way, the family has the option of paying it off. But when a family can borrow 10 times their income to buy a house, that seems crazy, doesn't it. So, how did that ever happen ? The loan people lost their minds...that's how. 
I think all of us who refinanced know why we did it.
We took advantage of the insane loan companies. For once in our lives, we could have money to play with.
Me, I took five years off. My neighors reinvested their refi money into their houses. I think thats great. What I should do, is buy all of their houses (after they default) for 1/4 of their loan's value, then  default on my house's mortgage.
One of my neighbor's refi'd his house.
It was valued at $250,000. He bought cars, fixed up his property, bought a new $15,000 air conditioner, then defaulted on his loan. A guy from San Francisco picked up the house for $75,000.
Now think about this...
If my neighbor could have defaulted on his loan, and could have bought his house back for $75,000, he could have afforded the mortgage payments. Wouldn't he be crazy if he didn't. But, unfortunately, he didn't have that option.
He had to go into foreclosure, and then someone else had to buy it.

And just taking a wild assed guess...I'd have to think this country's major downfall right now is defaulted mortgages. All of those ARM's are maturing to a whopping big house payment. When I look around Vegas and Pittsburgh, I see foreclosed homes everywhere. They are wasted resources.
Why can't the government bailout the homeowners that fell for those questionable loans ? Wouldn't that trickle upward ? FHA loans used to be the best deal around. I say, populate these empty houses with people. Make home ownership affordable. Offer consumers a way out. A buy out of bad loans could save the banks.

This is spot on and exactly what I think, but no, we will bail out the mortgage company's so they can give a bunch more loans to people who can't afford them and we will be right back in this mess again.
They would be better off doing nothing and letting it all flush out, 
In my opinion bailing out the mortgage company's is the worst of 3 options.
- Best option help the people and there foreclosures'
- 2nd best option do nothing and let it all flush out. Most of those people knew they were getting in over there heads and deserve what they get.
- 3rd and the worst option: bailout the mortgage company's who knew exactly what they were doing but didn't care cause all they saw was the short term gains in stocks and bonus in there wallet.

Its been a long life of disasterous things happening
For me, I grew up in a shack with an outhouse. I enjoyed those times, but the news was full of  Hippies ,  Flower Children ,  LSD ,  Vietnam War ,  Racial Wars  and the  Kent State shootings . Then it went on to  Food Shortages ,  Stagflation ,  Oil Spills  and  Gas shortages . Then there was the horrible  Aids  and the  Ebola  viruses. In Vegas, the  Mgm Grand Fire  killed 100 people. There was the  Gulf War . The  '.com' bubble  broke. In this decade, there was the fear of  Y2K  which ended up doing nothing, and the  Twin Towers  which ended up changing a lot of things. I'd guess Wall Street going bonkers isn't that interesting. I have camping gear with me. If everything crashes, we're going camping! YEA!

Well, I just can't talk about. All I can say is, we deal with the stock market, and as you probably know already, the stock world is crashing to its knees. Work aside, I'm getting that same strange feeling that I had after I saw those planes crash into the twin towers. I just know everything is going to change.
We haven't caught much of the news lately.
We've been too busy checking out our new environment to be that bored.
Sometimes, I think ignorance is bliss.
Maybe I'd rather not know that the one-way trail we all are walking down ends at a cliff. I'd assume that somehow, all of the credit so lavishly acquired and abruptly defaulted upon, will be forgiven. I should have borrowed the maximums. I didn't though. I would think the the sound of Lehman Brothers crashing is the sound made by money going into the pockets of the middle class, all cashing in on their home equity loans, then heading off to bankruptcy court. I just wonder how houses got over inflated in value in the first place.
If someone told me my $80,000 home was worth $1,000,000
wouldn't I be crazy not to borrow against its equity, then default on the loan? For those that did, my hats off to ya floating around the waters in your yatchs. For all of us others that have pride in ownership I say, "should of, could have, but didn't".

We hounds like reading new information...

We had those same winds, 60% of the louisville area was out of power. I'm on my 7th day with no power. Hurricane IKE can kiss my ass!

And I have 20Mbps Internet.... So there.

All because I am the heart and soul of a tiny little, passed away hound.

It is so fast, I can eat a pound of corn a minute...

- my internet mail is slower than real mail
- a sneak peek at a TV episode on http://www.tnt.tv takes an hour
- http://www.LVDude.com  takes a minute to load
- If I watch a video on http://www.YouTube.com , all I get three pictures
If the pop-ups are mostly all I get, why can't google be a pop-up.
Sorry if I haven't posted much lately. Lately, I get all of my email on my IPhone.
It all works out though. There's been so much to be done here that I've hardly had time for internet.

We had 70 mph winds Sunday. Power lines and trees went down everywhere.
Schools were closed on Monday. People were being told to boil their water in some areas.
The best story I've heard so far about it:
A coworker attended his brother-in-law's wedding that day. Twelve of them were in a basement watching a football game in their Tuxedos. When the power went out, it went completely black.
I couldn't imagine that. In all my travels, in all my experiences, I've never watched a football game with a bunch of other guys. It sounded GREAT!

Its a train and its going 60 mph..
Our track ends after 40 million miles, where our ride takes us off the side of a mountain in the clouds.
We know it ends, but we don't care. On our ride, we can look out the window at all of the beautiful things.
We can't become a part of them because our train won't stop.
But we can love all that we see.
And it is beautiful.

  

Hey Buddy So Pittsburgh is a good deal! you will have to go see ya steelers game while you are in Pitt It was good to see you last week, we will have to hook up in Cincy soon BTW i couldn't remember my password and the site is broke when i ask it to email me it doesn't work Your friend Chez