You sound like you’ve been responsible – making payments, paying down principle, etc. I am in a similar boat, but I have not been paying down principle, just sticking with the monthly payments. I am definitely going into a capital preservation mode – I need to have the flexibility that if I get laid off, I have the cash on hand to pay my monthly bills for an extended period of time, especially if we are headed down to a fat depression.
I think a lot of non-defaulting Americans are going this way as well, leading to temporary deflation. Hopefully our future leaders in Washington, whomever they may be, start looking at saving and cutting costs as well, else we’ll just start printing more and more money to devalue the currency, and lead to inevitable inflation. Hopefully that is a worse case scenario, instead of these Argentina-like scenarious I’ve seen described as possible futures… which I’m not completely dismissing.
