I just happened to look at my home's apparaisal amount in 1998 when I originated the loan that I currently have. I made a painful....very painful discovery. My home appraised at that time at a value that was 36% over what I have recently lowered the price to. Obviously I will not get what I have it listed at in an offer so I'll probably wind up getting about 42-44% less than that appraisal amount in 1998. Just wonderful..... :cry:
There's one thing worse than owning a house in Michigan. That's owning 2. I'm taking twice the hit as you are and bitching half as much.
Dave, an article in yesterday's Detroit News about how the collaspe in housing values impacts Lake Shore Drive: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100215/BIZ/2150321/Metro-Detroit-s-tony-Lake-Shore-begs-for-homebuyers I guess the silver lining is that your wife and you got out of the state and were able to find work in Florida so quickly. I hate to think of the number of homeowners in Michigan who are presently unemployed with no job prospects on the horizon and in forclosure. With the stimulus money coming to an end in 2011 and the property tax base melting and considering the underfunded state and municipal pension and health care liabilities of its employees, my guess is that the next shoe to drop with be Michigan cities and counties going into receivership.
Gipper.....I didn't know you lost your job....moved to another state for employment.....and are forced into having to sell those two homes in an abysmal market. Damn man......that's tough. Bobda.....I have wondered a lot about what the state of Michigan is going to do. I agree with you they are running out of time before a real financial calamity strikes. The whole state will resemble Detroit.......yeech...
In this particular topic Tom I am not sure where you are coming from. I sure didn't invite acerbic comments from Gipper but I sure as hell am not in the mood to just suck it up and let it go. Maybe you have your own personal experience with this economy that ius just as compelling as mine. Let's hear it....
Dave I'm ready to retire. My home and real estate investment were two of the assets I was counting on to finance my retirement. Add to that the losses in my IRA and it's been a brutal 2 years. My wife and I will have to keep working years past where we hoped to. Last thing I need is some asshole whining about how tough his life is. Stuff it.
Dave, the sarcasm that you threw at Gipper was totally uncalled for. That is what sparked my comments. I have been pretty civil with you as of late but you have pushed my last button. So you deserve everything that is thrown at you in this topic. I am not in your situation but I was... WAS sympathetic to your situation. Now I am just irritated by hearing your continuous nails to the chalkboard whining. There are still people in the automotive field that have jobs. Why do you not? Did you do everything you could including adaptation to change to maintain your position? Can anyone that loses his/her job answer that positively 100%. I work for a company that is the leader in its field but is operating with less than 50% staff compared to 7 years ago. I am not in your situation when many people with more years with the company are. Adaptation to change and growing with change is my answer to success. Doesn't mean that I will not lose my job in the future but in the eyes of my manager, it means I have a better chance than most. My office alone had over 40 instructors just seven years ago. We are now down to eight. Am I worried, heck yes. Am I sitting around sullen and complaining, NO. I am looking for even more ways to make myself valuable to the company. Like Gip, I was planning on several avenues to finance my retirement. I fully expected to be able to retire at the age of 55 with my outlook in 1996. Several downturns in the industry and the economy have now pushed that out at least 10 years. That means 2024 at the earliest for me. I am just hoping that I can maintain and excel in my position which would have me retiring at 23 years with the company, 33 years in the industry. Nothing is guaranteed.
Retire? At age 50!!?? Wait a minute....maybe I made a mistake...where did I get that number at? Front 9? Back 9?......couldn't be handicap....the last time we played he only beat me by 1 stroke, and I play to a 2.3 USGA index..... :shock:
You're the man Tom......good luck. By the way......I was in the top 10 in sales at a major van line for many years running and my sales were still strong when I left.......only thing was my client base was heading for the uncertainty of bankruptcy and I couldn't even get credit from the parent company to bill them. My company was mandated by the bank to cut expenses and my higher salary was a nice target when compared to subordinates who could be coerced to take on my responsibilities at a fraction of what I cost the company. I have the satisfaction though of knowing they have lost 2/3 of the business I once booked in the time since they decided they could get by with cheaper help. It's a bittersweet win for me. 8) Another thing....I can't think of even one comparable senior sales account manager in any of the related auto show industry suppliers that I worked with who are still employed in their original positions or something even close to it. I was one of the last to go down and it was pretty unsettling and I could see the writing on the wall before it happened finally to me because I was losing all of my contacts that I worked years to develop. A salesman without close contacts is in a vulnerable position. I didn't owe you that explanation but your dismissive attitude required it.
I'm already eligible for Social Security. It would nice to have enough time to recover from this mess. Unfortunately for my generation we don't have time to recover. And then we have to put up with all the whining by those that do.
Gipper....I'm 55 and now working for half the money I used to and without much hope for any improvement because my new business......the boating industry.....is definitely tied in to the economy. I don't see a retirement in my future which is one reason I looked very hard for a job back in my home state of Florida. I now have 52 mini-vacations a year. Seriously....if I had managed to land a similar job in Michigan I would indeed be miserable.....low seniority....no time off.....weekends spent in the gloom and cold of a Michigan winter that lasts several months...
If you own a home anywhere in the United States at present it is almost a certainty that is worth 30-40% less than it was in 2006. This affects ALL of us. I am 56 years old. I have two homes, one in NJ and one in FL. I bought the FL place in May 2005 and am completely underwater on that one with no hope of breaking even in the next ten years, probably never. My base home at the Jersey shore has devalued by at least 75K. My business of 30 years has shown declining revenues in each of the last three years after 26 years of uninterrupted growth. We have managed to show bottom line profits in 29 of the 30 years but recently only by slashing expenses faster than the pace of our revenue decline. Through normal attrition I have watched my workforce decline by 30% but I have not laid anyone off. I have taken pay cuts for three straight years, by my own hand. Employee salaries have been frozen for two years. My wife, age 57, is working harder than ever as an RN. My personal vision was that she would have been retired by now and I feel a sense of personal failure that she cannot. My own retirement, which I had planned at age 65, is a pipe dream at this point. Do you see a common thread amongst these various posts? I could blame Bush, who was an absolute traitor to conservative ideals. Or I could blame Clinton, under whose watch many of the careless policies that lead to our economic collapse were born. I can certainly blame Obama who has spent us into the most perilous national security dilemna in our history. Or I can do the absolute best I can do each and every day, count the blessings I have and let the chips fall where they may. I choose the latter.
I'm sure Obama's soak the rich tax policy will help your new industry a lot. ..good times just around the corner.
Mine is 40% less than it was in......1998. It is 65% less than it was in 2006.....but that's the disaster known as Michigan. If Clinton shoulders the blame why didn't W fix it in the 6 years that he was in control with a GOP Congress? What he did was engage us in two very costly wars when we should have been paying attention to what was going down on Wall Street. My wife is an RN also.....working her tail off at job here in Fla that she pretty much hates. I also feel a little guilty about that but at least in her case she is residing in an area that she seems to love and she doesn't want to be back in Michigan. In any event I have come to the same conclusion as you George....it's nice just to have a job and to be able to get out of bed each day and go do it. Might was well enjoy what I can while I can.
MCG Using your logic OK fine. So why are we still in Iran under Obama and actually increasing our troops in Afghanastan? After all [/quote]What he did was engage us in two very costly wars when we should have been paying attention to what was going down on Wall Street.
Actually I agree with the Afghanistan cause....always have but not with Iraq as you know. Maybe if all of those resources committed to Iraq were to have been combined into Afghanistan we could have captured Bin Laden and gotten the hell out of there. Part of the problem definitely is the WTC.....it distracted us from the business of running our country properly and extracted an enormous expense....with the creation of the NSA, the two wars......etc...etc.. When you consider the complexity of the wins and losses and add up the final negative impact to the free world the terrorists are in the lead. The problem is also that in this past decade we had ruthless elements of greed, dishonesty and recklessness on Wall Street that were left unchecked and the combination of which ruined our economy and cast blight on our citizens.
What year was the movie Wall Street released? How about Barbarians at the Gate? GWB did not invent greed.
As bad as our energy problems are, I think that they would be much worse if a significant portion of the world's oil supply were in the hands of Ahmadinejad and Hussain. of course if he were in Pakistan it wouldn't have made any difference.