Kirts, I feel like you are being wise to plan ahead. With the continuing modernization of some countries, like China and India, where the demand for oil and gas and other petroleum products is increasing exponentially every year, I see our energy costs continuing to rise. Since the average item in a grocery store in the USA travels about 1500 miles BEFORE it reaches the grocery store shelves, obviously the ever-increasing energy/transport costs will keep food costs rising. The changes we are seeing in the commercial agriculture industry and the food distribution network may force a lot of us to try to eat more locally. In the slow food movement, I think they refer to the effort to eat only locally-produced food as being a locavore. In addition, when you consider that a lot of the chemical fertilizers used by commercial farmers are linked to the petroleum industry, it is easy to believe that food costs will continue to go up because of rising fertilizer costs as well. I think people will turn to organic gardening as a means of lessening their dependence on foreign energy/fertilizers. There are many ways to store food and I use several of them. We have a tornado shelter and I use it to store root crops like potatoes and onions harvested in the summer as well as winter squash harvested in the fall. I have even stored winter squash on a shelf in the garage/barn and have had it last as long as 4-6 months in there. We have a large pantry located under our home's staircase. It is about 3 feet wide and maybe 12 deep. The height varies from 8' to about 2'. Back in that 2' area I store odds and ends we don't use often, like the pressure canner and my set of 4 huge stainless steel stockpots I use a lot during the harvest season. I freeze lots and lots of stuff. I always chop and slice onions and peppers and freeze them. I can usually raise a year's supply (or more) in the spring garden. I usually freeze tons of corn (I could can it if I didn't have storage space, but I do have storage space so I just freeze it.) Some years I get enough corn from the spring and fall gardens that we don't have to buy corn at all. The same is true of green beans and black-eyed peas. I even freeze tomatoes--they go straight from the freezer to the soup or saucepot in the winter. Okra is a little more iffy. We eat so much of it that I don't usually freeze much. I need to grow more, but the deer have been an issue with it for years, although I believe we've finally solved that problem. Thus, I should be able to grow more of it in the future. Carrots do best for me in the fall garden. If you have them in a well drained bed, you can leave them in the bed for months and harvest as needed. Another way to store them is in a clean trash can filled with sand. Pour a few inches of sand into the container, then put down a layer of carrots and repeat until all your carrots are stored. You also can keep them in a root cellar OR a refrigerator for months. Carrots can be frozen and even dehydrated. I dehydrate a lot of stuff. I then store all my bags of dehydrated veggies in the freezer, but you don't have to put them in the freezer. If you are careful to get out all the moisture, you can store dried veggies in the pantry. Even cantaloupes, muskmelon, watermelon and other lesser-known melons can be frozen. I usually cut them into squares, or use a melon baller to make them into melon balls and freeze them. You also can slice them into rather thin slices and dehydrate them. Their flavor and sweetness are so intensified by drying them that they are like candy. Anything that you grow in the garden can be dehydrated although some things take a pretty long time. I've never tried dehydrating corn, but I am sure it would work. Shelled beans dry naturally without dehydration and so do black-eyed peas. Many herbs can be tied in bundles and hung in a dry, warm, dark location to dry naturally. Canning is a lot of work and can be hazardous if done improperly, but as long as you follow all the recommended procedures and are careful, it is a great way to preserve food too. Cabbage will store a long time in a refrigerator or in a root cellar type situation. Back when people HAD to raise all the own food, a lot of them make sauerkraut to preserve the cabbage for winter, but I am not much of a sauerkraut person. There's always pickles too. You can pickle LOTS of veggies, not just cucumbers. You can pickle peppers, onions, carrots, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, watermelon rinds, etc. You also can make all kinds of relish and, there again, not just pickle relish but squash and others as well. Fruit can be frozen, dried or canned and you also can make preserves, jams and jellies. You can even make tomato preserves or marmalade. Storing food is not as hard as most people think, but it takes a lot of effort. If you want to expand your garden for next year, you could start building lasagna type beds this year. Although, as much as the heat bothers you and with your allergies, you might prefer to wait until fall to start laying out your garden beds. I like to clean out my garden beds in the fall and remove all debris. This is very important because many garden pests overwinter in plant debris. Usually I let the chickens roam around in the garden beds in December and they will dig and scratch and take care of lots of insects, insect eggs, weed seeds, etc. I also like to heap up tons and tons and tons of shredded leaves, gathered from our wooded areas, on top of the beds as soon as they are cleaned out after the first hard frost. The chopped-up leaves decompose into a lovely leaf mold or compost by spring. (If you don't chop them up, they break down a lot more slowly.) I also prefer to go ahead and add manure and compost to the beds in the winter months, so my beds are "ready to go" in the spring. Sometimes in a bad wildfire year, though, I stay too busy to get the garden beds cleaned up and replenished with compost, manure and leaves in winter. In those years, I really have a hard time planting on schedule because the beds aren't ready. I do all my planning and seed ordering in late fall to early winter. By the time the new seed catalogs arrive, I am usually about "done" although there is always something new that convinces me to order one more batch of seeds. Because my family understands and supports my gardening habit, my Christmas gifts are always handy useful things like gardening gloves (five pair last year, everything from goatskin to latex-dipped cotton to suede) and hand tools and such. One of my favorite garden gifts (I always ask Santa for this one) is a big cannister of electrical zip-ties. I use them to attach tomato cages to stakes, etc. There are several really, really useful vegetable gardening books and food preservation books that I find ESSENTIAL to my success as a veggie gardener. I have had most of them for years and years and years and still refer to them constantly. I'll make a list of them later. I'm off to the store to pick up some more food preservation supplies--processing all that corn wiped out my supply of freezer bags, and I need some pickling supplies before the cucumbers get out of control. I'll write later about corn and veggies. Dawn

I agree that "how much am I making now" and "how confident do I feel about the future" are important but I also believe that interest rates impact those decisions. Up until recently the Fed used interest rate manipulation as the main tool to spur the economy or ward off inflation. Housing is one of the industries that is most directly tied to interest rates. If rates go down housing becomes immediately cheaper and spurs demand which increases prices. You can argue that the other factors are more important than interest rates but lowering the interest rates also affects those factors. Someone who has a high interest loan may now be able to refinance and have more money available for additional purchases. It also gives business a lower cost of capital for which they can use to expand to meet the increased demand for goods from consumers. Expanding causes more people to be hired and generally improves salaries and confidence in the future. Sooner or later the fed is going to have to raise the interest rates. When that happens it will have a negative effect on the economy as a whole including housing prices. But since housing prices are not only affected by the indirect forces of the raised interest rates but also by the direct cost increase to consumers, they will likely suffer more than the economy as a whole.

Do your friends know anything about the house? What are they saying about your questions? They must have had to get the title etc too. When did they buy it? If it's not been more than a few years then the title shouldn't be a problem. Was the land subdivided while they were living there or before? A water heater from 1978? That's still in operation? That sounds odd to me. Taxes are messed up how? Would you be responsible for any unpaid back taxes? I'd wait on the appraisal until you hear back from the county. The appraisal will cost, depending on your area, around $250-350, unless it's a very big house or is so unusual that the appraiser has to do a lot of extra work. Legally, in RE, the only thing that counts is written contracts, not verbal, so you can't be held to that price agreement. Anything written I would make contingent on getting an appraisal for the sales amount and clear title. Otherwise, I'd find another house. This one sounds like a lot of work already.

We made a lowball offer on this current house, but only after doing some careful research. The first, and most important to us, was that this house was one of 14 rentals that the owner had, and he HAD to dump this house because he was at the end of the period where he could deduct it on his taxes. Second, we looked at similar houses that were turn-key, and figured in how much the house would need to get it to that level, and deducted it from the asking price. Then, we looked at DOM-over 365 because of disrepair and a Harry Homeowner single car semi-detached garage that was falling down. The house itself was a diamond in the rough (ok, very rough!), with good copper piping, solid build, and what looked like an exceptional amount of thought put into the design by the original owner 37 years ago. So. The listing was 374,900. We made an offer of 300, which was rejected outright. We then let them sit for three more weeks, came back at 340, and got the house for 350. The guys next door with an indentical turn key house just sold for 500. We think it will take us about 5 years and 100k to get it turn key, which puts us at a total investment of 450. No big profit there, and when I mess up an improvement I sometimes wonder why I didn't choose the turnkey, but there are ways that lowballing can be effective. Let me emphasise that if this had been someone's home that they had loved and lived in, we would have passed on the house at the price they were offering because it's not an investment for them, it's part of their heart.