Everybody Loves Your Money

http://biz.yahoo.com/brn/050716/14750.html

I liked this guy’s analysis of the housing bubble. Some key points he makes:

The past century hasn’t seen a run-up in the cost of housing remotely comparable to the past six years. The FDIC has identified more than 50 markets where home prices were up by an inflation-adjusted 30 percent or more per year in that period, through 2004.

In California, median existing home prices have pushed past $500,000, or double the $262,000 median price of four years ago. Many markets in Florida and Massachusetts have also doubled in that period.

Consumers are leveraging their unrealized home-value increases, or “gains on paper,” with more borrowing. It doesn’t take a Greenspan to predict what would happen should some markets go south quickly.

Many experts feel recent price declines in Australia and England portend the same for the United States.

Here is a great article that talks about what kind of insurance you should be buying. Pet insurance? Travel insurance? Mortgage Insurance (the kind that pays your house off if you die)? It’s all in here. Here is a clip from the article:

“Given the sheer number of choices these days in different types of insurance coverage, it would be easy to go overboard. The trick to determining whether a particular policy is right for you is to asses your risk, estimate you potential loss, and then decide if the cost of the insurance to cover that loss is worth it.”

Check it out!

http://money.cnn.com/2005/07/19/pf/armchair_insurance/index.htm