davelj, my budget for a home is less than 15% of my net worth. Why? Because I am so conservative that the other 85% of my savings is “spoken for” – all used to pay for all my other living expenses. I try to live within my investment income. Earned income goes to increase my investments, which produce more income, and that allows me to spend more (eventually). So it’s actually very hard for me to substantially increase my material living standards. Getting a few hundred thousand for free in a legally sanctioned, government-supported, scam that I am paying for anyway could dramatically increase my total housing budget.
I will have to skip describing the regulatory bodies I must give background info to. I am reasonably known in my segment of my industry, and I enjoy the anonymity of this board.
Valuing acquisition targets: I just couldn’t imagine our CEO caring if my credit score was good when I gave him the estimated value for an acquisition target, so that’s why I raised that example. Bad attempt at humor. I don’t normally do acquisition valuations, but this one would have been on the front page of the WSJ if Mr Geithner had approved it. (I liked this decision of his, since I didn’t think we should buy the target.)
Anyway, I want to remain anonymous, so I will have to quit giving any more info that could be clues. I still would buy a house using borrowed money provided by a hare-brained govt scheme to support home prices, as long as it was easy and I had no liability. The recent events really have altered my view of the prevailing morality in our population and their institutions, and what I should do about it. All that quick dumping of the moral hazard issue, in ways that just happened to work nicely for the people doing the dumping? Well, since they don’t much care about moral hazard, I know they won’t mind my little addition to it.
