Virginia Is For Families

I have been talking to Beth about buying some vacation property down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I love the Outer Banks. I especially like those huge dunes that mark the location of the first flight made by the Wright brothers. The beaches are wonderful too.

But vacation property is not cheap. So I have come up with a plan and am presenting it to the board, pardon me, I mean bored expression that is on the face of my lovely wife Beth. She’s not buying what I’m selling. And it’s a shame because we could probably have two or three vacation homes in just a couple of years if she would jump on the band wagon.

Timing is the thing. All we need to do is sell all of our property now and rent a small apartment downtown. Or maybe get a trailer out in the woods. I can see us now living under the trees with a campfire burning and crickets chirping so loud we can’t even hear the twelve inch B and W television in the kitchen.

Then we sit back and wait for these smart businessmen to put all their empty houses on the market at half price. Six months from now when they are all still on the market the floodgates will open. Housing prices will really tumble and we will be able to purchase beach front property for pennies on the dollar. I wasn’t aware of how bad things really have gotten until reading this article about Hovnanian. But if you are a home owner don’t worry about it too much. Things will eventually come back to normal. The government is not going to let the housing market suffer too long. They want it to hurt but they don’t want it to die. So we are looking at a dip in prices that will afford opportunities to folks like me who don’t mind camping out in the woods or moving downtown near a college campus or two. Hey, maybe we can live near my son. He thought he escaped when he moved out last summer. This could be a helpful reminder to him that things don’t always turn out as planned.

When I was Zach’s age I was reading books about economic upheaval. I read about Germany prior to World War II and I read about other examples of hyperinflation followed by depression. Back in the 1970’s I thought it was going to happen here. I even bought a bunch of dried food so we would have something to eat.

Silly me. The shelf date passed and the food was never eaten. Maybe there was a depression in the seventies and early eighties. But the government paved the way out of it and most were not aware it had even happened. We had stagflation for awhile which was a stagnating economy that was not responding well to inflationary policies like Keynes said it would. And then we had Paul Volker and Ronald Reagan. They decided to forget that and try something else. The recession got worse and then it got better. They stopped giving the patient antibiotics and his fever spiked. Maybe he would die! Oh, well! But he got better instead. You just have to be willing to place a big bet and wait. President Reagan was always acting like he enjoyed doing that. It was pretty funny to watch him casually talk about WW3. I nearly died laughing a few times.

Anyway, all of this was so long ago. I was proved so wrong for so many years that I no longer believe any of it is possible. Now it’s just an opportunity to buy beachfront property and to catch up on my camping skills.

Hey, I bet I could get some really good pictures. Do they have broadband out in the woods?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aMY4kexu4198&refer=home