I truely hope that the 'bailout' goes the way it's supposed to and starts things moving again. I'm only surprised that all these 'experts' didn't see it coming! But no matter how that part of it goes, some things should never go back to the way they were! That's how we got in to this mess in the first place! Maybe I see this differently because I'm older and have been through a lot, and maybe it's different for me because I've never had much to lose and still don't. But how is being forced to live within your means a 'crisis'?
Many of the younger ones have never known anything else, but seem to have such an inflated sense of entitlement. They feel that they are entitled to have all those things right now that their parents worked all their lives to be able to afford. It wasn't always this way. What's wrong with renting an apartment and living frugally until you can save up enough money for a down payment on your first house? And when you do buy that first house, what's wrong with a small 'starter' home that you can afford until you are able to move up to something better? It's scary to see so many people in their early 20's living in McMansions with shaky mortgages and everything they have bought on credit! Our local paper today had a story about people dealing with the financial 'crisis' ... a 25 year old single woman who had bought a 'high end' condo and ate out seven days a week. Now she's in financial trouble, can't sell the condo, had to scale back on her shopping habit, had to cancel her cable TV and internet, rent out the condo, move in with a relative ... and horror of horrors ... she actually has to cook for herself and eat at home now! Poor thing! She sees this as a 'crisis' but she obviously took on way more than she could handle and got in over her head - and she obviously could not afford to live in a 'high end' condo, spend all her time shopping, and eating out every day! That's not a 'crisis' - that's plain old fashioned stupidity!
And the inflated real estate prices just had to come back down to earth someday! People seemed to think there would be no end to it! Does anyone else watch those "Flip That House" shows? In areas where the prices are so high, you'd see them pay $500,000 for what looked like a tumbled-down rat-infested three-room crack house in a nasty neighborhood. They fix it up and sell it for $750,000!! Who could afford that? And if that's what three-quarters of a million dollars buys you, what would a decent house in a nice safe neighborhood cost? A lot of people are going to get caught up in the middle and I feel very sorry for them, but it had to stop some day!