I tend to be very conservative with my finances and I've had to be more so the past year or so. A couple of years ago I talked to a mortgage broker, one a friend had used to buy a place. I really wanted to buy my own place, I had a down payment, I'd been working on keeping my credit history clean. The guy tried to talk me into a no-down-payment ARM ... actually TWO ARMs, one for the down payment and one for the rest. I looked at the numbers and just said no. He ran the numbers on what I could afford on a fixed-rate mortgage ... which, in DC, worked out to either a broom closet in a nice place or a big place next to an open-air drug market. So ... I'm still renting. But I don't regret that I didn't buy into the whole thing.

The flip-side of that is you have a thin grasp of economics and are easily convinced by an expert who spins or flat-out lies because they're taking no risk by giving you that mortgage.

Yup. Heck, I have no idea what I could afford, house-wise, or what would be a good idea for me to afford. Obviously I'd make an effort to find out if I wanted to buy one, but many people might not really have anyone to ask!

I have no idea how my mortgage broker managed to get us the rate she did on our fixed-rate mortgage, but I feel like I should send her a thank-you note. In retrospect, she was really amazingly helpful.

We are hoping to be looking to buy a house this summer, and from where I've looked (Durham NC and Athens GA) I can't see that housing prices have come down much if at all, yet. Not in the neighborhoods I want to live in, anyway - maybe in the newer pop-up suburban developments. There's a house for sale in my hood for $950K, which is, frankly, laughable. Unfortunately, where we are in our lives, it's not so practical to wait another year hoping prices will come down. I mean, if I move to a new city, I want to buy a damn house, not rent and wait and move again.

My local impression is flea's impression -- just from gut-level walking around info, it seems like houses in our (adjacent) hoods are staying on the market a bit longer, but the prices haven't really changed much at all.

FBI probes Countrywide for possible fraud

So here's MY completely clueless question: if Countrywide does get busted for something, what happens to people that Countrywide holds the mortgages for? (They weren't our original mortgage company, but took over/absorbed it.)

My parents have had their house (and barn, etc.) on the market for more than a year. I don't know if prices are going down or what, but I think there's much less actual buying and selling going on now.

Oh well. At least they got good money for the farmland. And the cows, etc....

Around here, they are staying on the market on average about 9 months and being sold for about 10%-20% lower than their asking prices.

Joe and I are thinking about the possibility of buying my grandparent's house. Maybe. Sort of. But only because we can get it for around $60,000. It's nothing grand, but it's about 2000 square feet, full basement, garage, yard.

Around here, and I suspect that includes Athens (Go Athens! Choose Athens!), people seem to be putting houses on the market at about the same price they were, but more houses have been sitting with a For Sale sign in front of them for months.

You know, it's almost 50 degrees right now and yet, it's supposed to snow sometime in the middle of the night.

We're in for some bumpy weather this evening, aren't we?