I'm 18 months away from retirement. I took a 100K whippin' on my 401K, but am afraid to pull out now, hoping things bounce back as fast as they plunged (wishful thinking). I sure hope the new Prez appoints a special prosecutor for the CEOs and government "watchdogs" that sat around with their thumbs up their **** while this fiasco got going. I feel like the love slave in a Greek Army battalion... Better get me a Grey Goose martini and throw on some Steely Dan real loud
I think you might be surprised by the reslilience of the market. I doubt we'll bounce back in weeks, but I bet in less than a year, barring anything major happening, things will be turned around. We've already seen that the market can make up ground just as quickly as it loses it.
The economy has really stalled, however, and that will make things tougher, especially if we end up with an Obama presidencey and dem congress. That's our big fear here at our company and the view is shared by just about all the analysts I've spoken with.
I think we've also learned out lesson in the housing market... finally. I like the idea of many liberal mantras... they all sound wonderful and I wish most of them could be true, but real life... reality... has a way of interering with the eutopia. I think we've learned that home ownership is not for everyone and is not something to be taken lightly. I wish everyone could own a home... I do. The reality, however, is the not all can, nor deserve the right to have that responsibility. If you purchase a home with no down payment, and the value of the home drops, what is your incentive to keep paying when you have no skin in the game? Holding personal honor and ethics aside, why would you keep paying on something that is no longer worth what you purchased it for. That's why so many people just walked away from their mortgage. They have no real investment in their home. Basically, they rented it for a couple of years. I think we've learned that counting welfare as income towards the qualification of a loan was not the best practice. I talked to one of the players in the local lending business in my area and he said that it's not that people can no longer afford their payment, they just don't want to pay for a house that is no longer worth what they bought if for I think reasoning behind requiring 10 and 20% down payments on a mortgage in most cases looks to be sound in retrospect. It prohibits a chunk of the population from getting a mortgage, but unfortunately, it goes a long way to insulating us from financial turmoil.
