I count us lucky. Yesterday, Elly and I accepted an offer for the Co-Op townhouse in Greenbelt, MD, after putting it up for sale 3 weeks ago. Part of the sale (much of it actually) is due to a very aggressive real estate agent, part due to the quality of the property. But luck is a strong factor in this very poor market.
Indeed this is the second townhouse (the first being my wife’s most recent Hagerstown property) we’ve sold in the past few months. We have one more to sell (the one we are living in in Hagerstown), but we will be moving into a new property in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, when Greenbelt closes… hopefully in a couple of weeks.
Every day I watch the news on television of mortgage foreclosures and people losing their life’s investments as the market shrinks. Bush’s spokespeople say the economy is doing well, but, of course, I see people losing jobs all around (as I did… then searched for fourteen months for something new in the DC area before moving to Hagerstown to teach part-time) and lives changing, especially for Baby Boomers now in the upper 50’s and low 60’s – not an age that employers are eager for. Unless you are in the very rich category, this is not a great time to be living in America.
As I said, I feel we are lucky. Now it is a question of how long we will stay lucky. If we can sell the other Hagerstown property by January, then we will have escaped the mortgage crisis and will have reduced our cost of living substantially. As we get older, our solution is to shrink our expenses and get into a standard of living that is at best comfortable and at worst get-by-minimal.
I hope your situation is lucky, too.