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corntrollio says

I wonder what the Nikkei's return during that period is with dividends. The number is sort of useless without.

Not entirely. You can assume reinvestment if you wish in which case buying at 15000 and selling at 10000 fifteen years later wouldn't be quite as bad as it seems. Dividends would be relatively low, since interest rates were extremely low during this period.

But point taken. This doesn't tell the whole story. It only tells you that there are recent relatively long periods of time in which investing in the nikkei would have been disastrous.

thomas.wong1986 says

Santa Clara County vote
by party in presidential elections

Yeah, and in some of those early years, there was still a substantial amount of land that was still orchards and other agricultural land. In the middle years, it was still when there was such thing as a moderate Republican (compare to the Republicans that used to be in the Northeast, are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins the only ones left in the Senate? Well, okay, theoretically Brown.). Also, you can't forget that both Nixon and Reagan were Californians. But I'm not really sure why this is relevant or why we're even talking about it.

marcus says

Boomers have to live somewhere, either they downsize, or they sell and rent

That's exactly what they will do. However, all that downsizing will greatly affect the market because everything is based on margins today. A slight change in supply or demand can cause large price swings. And use prolific use of leverage amplifies this effect.

I suspect that most baby boomers will not start renting. Rather, they will take one of the three courses:

1. Sell the big house, buy a small one or a condo. After all, the kids are all gone.
2. Take a reverse mortgage and use it for retirement. Live in the house until you run out of equity or die. Then let the bank take the house.
3. Sell the house and move into an assisted living facility.
4. Sell the house and move in with one of the kids. I think this will happen more than people expect.

APOCALYPSEFUCK is Tony Manero says

Tulips are a lousy investment.

But flowers are pretty and they smell nice.

thomas.wong1986 says

Santa Clara County...

Santa Clara County vote
by party in presidential elections

One county in CA is not indicative of the whole country. Like I mentioned before how could marriage be legal in IA and not CA? Most libertarian thought cares nothing about who people marry so it becomes a non issue. NY just made it legal but we have to consider it also means supposedly another 180 million dollars in the states economy over the next three years! A marriage costs about as much as a car so by restricting it technically it is holding back spending.

Dan8267 says

But flowers are pretty and they smell nice.

never got to play that game but I found a spoiler site / walkthrough and found the writing in that game to be amazingly deep and entertaining. Would make an excellent SF movie.

Dan8267 says

I suspect that most baby boomers will not start renting. Rather, they will take one of the three courses:

1. Sell the big house, buy a small one or a condo. After all, the kids are all gone.
2. Take a reverse mortgage and use it for retirement. Live in the house until you run out of equity or die. Then let the bank take the house.
3. Sell the house and move into an assisted living facility.
4. Sell the house and move in with one of the kids. I think this will happen more than people expect.

Except in California, because of Prop 13, where they will die in the house because the property tax is so ridiculously low and then let their children inherit a substantial majority if not all of the lower tax base. Yay, market distortions!

I purchased my investment property in 2006 for $2.5 million dollars. Recently, I’ve had a tremendously high vacancy rate due to the poor economy and it began taking a toll on all my reserves just to maintain the property. I tried to negotiate with my lender (CHASE) for a modification. I went round and round with the bank, submitting documents and so on and in the end, CHASE denied me for a modification. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t modify my loan when it was clear that the economy ham-stringed my ability to service the debt. The only thing that CHASE could tell me was that the investor was the one who declined the modification. I asked who the investor was and they would not tell me. It was then that I began to look closer at my original loan and I saw on the Deed of Trust that MERS was listed as the Beneficiary. With all the information about MERS in the news I decided to talk to an attorney. My attorney had an auditing company called Lighthouse Consulting Group review my documents for both a forensic analysis of my original loan documents as well as a Mortgage Securitization Audit. It turned out that my loan was securitized in a trust called “Structured Asset Mortgage Investments II Trust 2005- 8. It was in this trust; there is a pooling and serving agreement, which governs the rules of the REMIC Trust. In my loans pooling and servicing agreement, it said specifically that any loan modified would require a buy-back from the servicer. Now, it was about this time that I began to default on my loan and was looking at ultimately losing my investment property. I was already 6 months in default at this point. The individual I talked to that is an attorney and real estate broker immediately ordered a forensic audit for predatory lending. Commercial properties do not have TILA and RESPA violations. The attorney also ordered a securitization audit to verify if the lender that filed the NOD was actually in proper standing. Both audits reveled several issues about my loan. First, the forensic audit proved that my lender had wrongfully calculated my payment it was overstated by $350 per month. Secondly, the loan itself was an adjustable loan based off the Libor Index, which was dropping, but the loan always adjusted up. This was a major development in a very positive way for me. Then, I had the securitization audit show that my loan was never securitized properly and the note and deed were not even with the same party. My attorney drafted a complaint, outlining everything I have mentioned. As soon as the lender was served, they contacted my attorney and settled without going to court. The settlement I got was a principal balance reduction of $400,000; my interest rate was reduced to 4.5% fixed for 30 years.

Wow, that's such a great story I created a new thread out of it, here:

http://patrick.net/?p=894473