You’re funny, and I didn’t mean to ignore you! I have been a little unattentive to blogging due to the holidays. Speed reading failed me, and I would be delighted to stop in for a visit!

Having read a few of the recent threads/posts it’s clear to me that Sven is NOT suggesting that every homebuyer should be planning for “absolute certainty” with respect to their economic situation vis-a-vis purchasing a home. His point, I believe, is that given the home prices of the past few years and the types of mortgages (e.g., option arms) that were required in order to make the properties “affordable” (at the time, of course), that MANY (dare I say most?) buyers had no business purchasing the home they chose to purchase using even aggressive assumptions regarding their future earnings and conservative assumptions regarding the possibility of a rising mortgage payment. We’re not talking about certainty here – we’re talking about being moderately objective regarding the normal vicissitudes of life and how such issues might affect one’s ability to pay a mortgage in a rising rate environment. If “certainty” were an issue, no one would ever buy a house – I’m not picking up the “paralyzed with fear” vibe from Sven’s posts; merely that people should be somewhat rational and level-headed about making a big financial decision such as buying a home – recently, in aggregate, people have not exercised such rationality… and they will pay for it… as they should. That’s how markets work. I find it humorous that you take Sven’s worldview of “Hey, prices are crazy and you should be really careful out there” (to sum it up) and interpret it as, “Oh my, one should never ever make a purchase unless they are absolutely CERTAIN that everything will work out alright.” In so doing, you just create a straw man that didn’t exist in the first place in order to pretend to knock it down to further your own worldview. Certainly you can do better than that.

One of the hurdles I’ve had to get over going along as been my relationship to the bubblers. Fortunately for me I’m enough of an ass#$#@ so that if they get on my nerves enough, I just engineer them off my site — but I noticed that poor Steve got an earful of one of my ex bubbler nemeses after I did that.

Sorry about that.

Maybe it’s just you’re in San Diego and I’m in Sacramento, and as we all know, nerds fly south in the winter.

Oh wait, no, that would be “birds”.

Yes, I suspect that after all is said and done the fact that some people don’t like me is no big whoop — let’s face it, I’m a professional salesman, and no one likes a professional salesman (except someone with a need to buy or sell, of course — then like cops on a crime scene we suddenly become popular). But like you I sympathize on behalf of my clients when the bubblers erroneously portray them as dupes of the big bad real estate machine rather than as hairless great apes like me who do better with shelter than without it.

I try to keep both the bubblers and about 80% of my colleagues as well in perspective. Perhaps the best quote I’ve seen about the level of discourse on the Internet comes from Steven Lower’s pseudoscience page (http://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/pseudosci.html):

“It’s been my policy to view the Internet not as an ‘information highway,’ but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.” —Mike Royko

That said, I do think you and Steve come up with some really good stuff. Maybe some time when you’re not too busy you could come by my Sacramento blog and pretend to like me? I could use some imaginary friends.

Another babbling loonie,

John

Doug – Thanks for chiming in and for calling my attention to your blog.

Sven – Thanks for responding with grace. Your horror story is not an isolated one, I am afraid; I will give you that much. Absent absolute certainty of the future, if we live our lives paralized by fear, however, we could look back with different regrets – Such as not having made that purchase.

Basket Lady (or, shall we call you “Donna”?) – Thank you for the email this morning. Who knew you read our blog? Glad you enjoyed the testimonial, and here is the promised plug: http://WelcomeHomeGiftBaskets.net.

I told you we would end up talking about gift baskets!