I plan to put my house out on the market at a much lower than I would have, a year ago.

Fortunately, houses are selling slowly but surely in my area and I have enough equity (and no mortgage to pay off) to take less than other are asking.

Yes but in a positive way. There is a higher demand for rental housing now than a few years back. For a while there everyone was building and buying. Now with all the foreclosures and people having to sell their homes there is a larger pool of renters.

So from a landlord's standpoint I gain. Fortunately I have no mortgage to worry about which puts me in a position to buy more property if the situation lasts more than a year or so.

All those years of paying our mortgage, not moving up and not refinancing may finally pay off for us.

The financing/banking mess has affected us tremendously. My company has had to lay off more than 50% of it's employees. When you have worked for the same company for 20 years, that is like losing half of your family :^(

Not one bit.

When I was looking to purchase a home 4 years ago, I was fortunate. My original plan was to get a brand new built home with low down payment or none that many home builders were offering. Someone up there was watching me and stirred me to a different direction.

I fell in love with this house when I passed by. I ended up with an inexpensive 26 years old home (at the time) and a low fixed rate. Value price has risen and maintained a bit higher than my purchase price. The total square footage is much larger than most new built 1-story homes. It has large oak trees with big yard than of the new homes.

If my original plan went through, I'd be in big trouble now with an over-priced new home and a flex rate that would be more than my current fixed rate.

So, all is in good order for me now. That is, if I don't lose my job. Then again, that's the same for everyone, right?

not personally, but business-wise, dh's company might be doing more modernizing existing equiptment, than planning new...

I'm in the process of having my house refinanced. Should lower my monthly payment a little,

I think it will...no matter what we get for this place it has to be a whole lot more than we put into it....but because of the business going down we now owe a lot on this place. Two years ago it was paid in full...

Now I am hoping we will be able to sell it for more than we owe and will have a bit left over to buy something we can finish our lives out in...

Things change...it's no big deal...except I love it out here, and hate like heck to leave it.

None of that goes back to the Mortgage Mess....it's just a mess made by trying to help out..enough said.

Fortunately, it has not affected me. When I bought my house two years ago, I got a fixed rate and payments that are affordable even on a fixed retirement income.

I'm not sure if the mortgage situation is the problem. It could more likely be the highway that was built only 3 lots away. That is the comments that we get back from showings. It could also be an easy excuse rather than the real reason they aren't interested.

The end of May our house will have been on the market for 3 years and we have had 85 showings and numerous Open Houses. We have dropped the price 3 times and can't any more or we would not be able to afford to buy the kind of home we want.

SamKaren, I hope yours goes a lot better then ours. We, like you, don't HAVE to move, but prefer to "retire" from taking care of this house and yard. I guess we sort-of need to move because of our health.
Hayjud

Here in ND especially the Williston area (MT border area) they cannot build houses fast enough and the ones on the market sell before they are listed. Why?
OIL
This state has a big oil boom going and hopefully it will stay up. Too much oil, no place to send it.

Somehow, some way, they need to get refineries built! Needed them for a long time!

If we were selling our house, then yes. Homes are not selling very well here. We are staying put!

My retirement IRA has taken a big hit.

The mortgage mess has affected or will affect *everyone* eventually. Economist estimate that 70% of our economy has some tie-in to real estate. Our economy can not be sustained independent of a failing real estate market. Hopefully, this is another financial hiccup and not a real collapse.

It's affected us, to a degree. The house we bought last year is now worth $40,000 less than we paid for it. Of course, I wish I'd known that going in. And there are many people in much worse shape. We bought at the downside of the curve, after values had already fallen a bit.

And while we paid a premium price for this 1925-built home, the seller hired someone to do extensive repairs to the slate roof (several thousand dollars) and the entire house was re-plumbed ($12,000) and re-wired ($5,000+).

Still, it saddens me to think that our home is now worth *less* than we paid for it a short time ago. The stock market signaled the opening bell of the financial collapse in 1929. I hope and pray history doesn't say this sub-prime mortgage mess was the opening bell for this era.

I'm worried.

Rose

No; as a matter of fact we just paid ours off. We had taken out a mortgage for an amount we knew we could handle, at a fixed rate, and could add extra principal payments when we had the money.

We're staying put, so that's not a problem.

My 401K and IRA, and my husband's pension plan - that's another story.

Of course, as someone above said - it affects everyone in some way. It hasn't affected me directly besides making me very grateful that things worked out the way they did. I was so anxious to buy a house when we got married that we bought the first house we saw. Sellers were desperate (they moved out of state quite some time ago) so the price was dropped and they paid all of the closing costs, which was a big selling point for us since we didn't have a lot saved. We bought at the top of our price range but DH wasn't really making any money back then.

That was right before the housing market took off. As time went by, interest rates dropped, our income went up and it seemed like we could have bought something bigger and more expensive. I had some regrets.

But now? We re-fi'd a few years ago so our rate is better, we have a very reasonable mortgage (comforting in these shaky economic conditions) and even with housing prices dropping we have a good amount of equity in our home. We weren't planning on having any children, never mind two and taxes have gone up more than we anticipated but we've been able to absorb those costs since our housing isn't an overwhelming percentage of our income (DH got a much better paying job and we've both increased our incomes).

This was one time that rushing into things didn't work out too badly.

Like marie, our local economy is booming - partly because of the oil industry, partly because wheat is at an all-time high, and partly because of our local Air Force base. Houses in all sizes/price ranges continue to be built and sold, people are still spending money, and there are tons of jobs to be filled.

DH has reached a point where he doesn't want to work overtime but sometimes has to, and I have more freelance work than I want. At 50, we have about 10 years left to pay on our 15-year mortgage at a fixed rate of just over 5%. I feel sad for the people who are struggling, as we are so blessed at this point in our lives.

If we could sell our house and move to a cheaper area, we would. But there is no way we could sell our house for what we even owe on it. And the company we currently have our mortgage through has a HUGE penalty if we refinanced before next February. We might miss out on these low interest rates because of that and we are NOT paying the penalty, so here we stay. I love my home, area, and neighborhood and don't want to move at all, I would rather refinance.

No! But i am hoping that rates will drop so i can refinace to a 15 year loan under 5%. Right now our loan is a 20 year loan at 6.25%. We have 19 years left on the loan. It really is a buyers market in my area. I see homes on the market for 1-2 years. My neighbors home was on the market for 1 1/2 years. It was listed for $180,000. It finally sold for 136,000. That was also the only offer it recieved.

My next door neighbor's house finally sold after a year and a half on the market. My neighbor across the street has had her house on the market for the last 6 months, no takers.

No. We always bought land, which was owner financed and everything else was paid out of pocket. Everything we own is paid for. I couldn't stand the stress of having a mortgage, especially since my husband's work was always so seasonal. He is getting ready to take a job where he works all the time, and we would like to build a house, but it will all be cash.
I hope I live long enough to get it finished, but having a mortgage would kill me for sure.

It affected me as I worked for a mortgage company for over 2 years and lost my job last July because of the mortgage mess.

I finally have another job (permanent) thank goodness (although it took awhile).

We had refinanced our home with a better rate about a year before I lost my job, so we are doing ok for now.

Sheryl - NJ

We have been thinking of downsizing, but now will probably wait a bit to see if the market rebounds so that we can get a better price when we sell.

I bought some shares of a Canadian bank several years ago.

I don't know what they were "worth" last May ... but I could have sold them for $106. and change.

I don't know what they're "worth" now, either ... but I could have sold them at the close of the market on Monday following the sale of Bear Stearns for peanuts ...

... for $59.90.

Dropped about 44%.

Drat those greedy money managers in the U.S. who wrote those stinking mortgages!

And didn't hold them themselves ... but sold them off to a bunch of suckers. Worldwide, it appears.

How much faith do you want to put in a bond-rating service?

I'm pleased that I'm not hurting for the money - I've been buying stocks for nearly 50 years.

Enjoy your week, everyone.

ole joyful