Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>  >Their losses, while large, still leaves them sound and whole.  And , I'm 
> having to pay part of the bill to make them whole.
> 

During the height of the bubble, the fellow who owns the 12 acres next to me 
called me up and offered to sell it ... at a ridiculously high price.  The 
only way I could have latched onto it would have been to put up the farm for 
collateral.  The woner was full of blather about 'price only going to go up', 
'ain't making any more land.'

We talked about it for all of seven or eight minutes and said, no, that's a 
line we will not in any wise cross.

My local bank, usually a fairly conservative bank, said "Sure, you can have 
the money, it will take all of an hour to process it."

I knew better.  I knew better because of logic, numbers, and instinct.

Now the land still sits there. I own the only notch into this valley (besides 
the National Forest, of course) and to build a road or bring utilities to 
that property would take a lot of heavy equipment work.  It is also 20 miles 
from 
anywhere.  Both of those are fuel dependent and make the property less and 
less desireable as a free standing property.  It is probably worth now about 
1/4th what the owner was asking four years ago.  And if it is like other bits 
of 
remote, rural land around here, there is currently no market for it at all.

To have bought the property back then would have been a financial disaster.  
Had we done so, whose fault would it have been?  The lender's for making the 
money available?  Absolutely not.  It is my responsibility and mine alone to 
determine what I can afford to do.  It would have been entirely my fault had 
I 
bitten on the offer.   </HTML>