In my dream, I was playing World of Warcraft and suddenly decided I needed to buy a strategy guide for instances and raids. I was unimpressed with the wealth of information online, and wanted to be able to page through a book. I hopped in the car and headed to my local game store where I found the shelves completely bare except for the book I wanted.

"What's going on here?" I asked the clerk, surprised. I gestured to the empty store. "Are you guys moving?"

"All the game stores in Washington are closing down," he told me forlornly. "The economy is so bad, no one's buying video games."

I was struck speechless, horrified, imagining not being able to wander into the store and browse the used section, looking for a good deal. It was too heart wrenching to comtemplate, so I turned to the one item left on the shelf, the World of Warcraft Instance and Raid strategy guide.

"Two hundred fifty dollars?!" I cried.

"Sorry," the clerk said, and started playing with his PSP.

I stared at the book, trying desperately to figure out how to work that two hundred into my budget when I - woke up.

It's funny how sometimes when you have a dream you know exactly why you had it. I live down a couple of side roads off a main thoroughfare that was once lined with businesses. The RV dealer is long gone, and one by one parking lots that were once packed full of shiny new cars have been emptying as the dealerships declare bankruptcy. The movie theater parking lot is sparsely populated, even on a Friday night. The coffee stand looks sad and alone without the usual stream of cars going through.

Small restaurants, coffee shops, car dealerships, tiny local stores.... all disappearing. It's one thing to read about the suffering economy in the news. It seems alarming in the abstract, yet clearly someone else's problem. After all, no matter what the news says, things are fine. Yes, I will stick my head in the sand, thank you. Then people you know start losing their jobs.

I've been thinking about it a lot as I work my way out of a hole I dug for myself with my finances. I'm extremely fortunate in the fact that my grandmother, who had a career in the banking industry, has been willing to act as my financial advisor and help me climb back up. I'm becoming acutely aware of how important money management is, and how imperative it is that we live within our means.

I'm not really sure where I originally intended to go with this post. All I can think about right now is how grateful I am that I don't have much debt and that I still have a job. And the fact that I'm profoundly grateful it's not up to me to fix everything. So that secret movement to take over the government and install me as Supreme Dictator... yeah, let's hold off for a little while on that, okay?

Well holy crap, look who actually has something to write about on Monday morning! I only got about three hours of sleep last night, so bear with me if this isn't written all that well.

I was talking to my mom the other day, basically being outraged over the fact that same sex marriage is only legal in four (I think? Can't remember) states. There is really very little that can piss me off faster than discussing that sad state of affairs. Four states.

My mom mentioned that one of our family friends (wickedly smart and notoriously argumentative) doesn't believe in same sex marriage. Before I flew off the handle, she added that he doesn't believe in marriage period.

Brian has been married for a long time with two lovely daughters. He loves his family. His point, then?

Marriage is a religious institution and therefore should not be recognized by the state at all. There is a division between church and state for a reason, and really, when I think about it, he's right. Civil unions should be recognized, not marriage. If a couple wants to get "married" within their church, fine! Go for it! But you should have to have an official civil union to have that "marriage" recognized by the state.

The rights granted to a married couple should not be granted to them because they're married, they should be granted upon a civil union.

So I guess right now you could say I'm "pro civil union" and "anti marriage" now. ^_^

I'm curious - what do you think?

You know, last week when I posted the "Monday Perspective" on real estate I intended to do something similar each Monday. Choose an issue, write something semi intelligent that proves I haven't killed all of my brain cells, publish. I even made a special label to file these posts under.

What I neglected to remember was that most of the time on Mondays I have difficulty focusing on anything, much less expressing my opinion in a reasonably coherent manner. This is pretty much what runs through my head on Monday mornings:

I'm soooo tired/COFFEE/the weekend went by really fast/COFFEE/do I have the meeting agenda completely prepared?/COFFEE/why does the phone always ring a bajillion times in the morning?/COFFEE/I need to remember to write that number down/COFFEE/COFFEE/COFFEE

So....

Yeah. I got nothin' today.

!Dry, Boring Post Warning!

Oh, the beautiful world of real estate sales.

The Monday morning staff meeting started off fairly quietly. The Boss was out of the office taking a class, and one of the agents was off getting a certification (real estate agents sure like those important looking letters after their names), effectively leaving the meeting with just four attendees; myself, Office Manager, and two agents. We discussed a new listing, bickered good-naturedly over who was holding a house open for the agent tour tomorrow, talked about our newest overhaul to one of the company websites....

Then we arrived at our list of closed and pending sales.

It's no mystery to anyone in the country that the real estate market has plummeted, a fact that is driven home every time I look at statistics, and especially so when I glanced at the office's closed/pending sales report this morning. There's not much on there. It's a low number. Scary low. Lower than I've ever seen. Granted, here in my small corner of Western Washington we're not as bad off as some parts of the country, but it's still not a pretty picture.

There are a few things I wanted to touch on here concerning the real estate market in my town. The first is Washington's new(ish) "Distressed Home" sales law. This law, enacted somewhere around June of this year, created new duties for real estate agents and brokers who were selling "distressed" homes; that is, homes that are in danger of/ in the process of foreclosure. An agent/broker who agreed to help someone sell a "distressed" home is now a Distressed Home Consultant, which entails additional duties and much greater liabilities, including the potential for incurring much greater actual damages in the event of a violation of the law. From my take on things, this was an extremely important step that needed to be taken. Foreclosures have skyrocketed as homeowners default on mortgages, leaving them vulnerable to foreclosure rescue scams. Unfortunately the extreme increase of liability associated with taking on the responsibilities of a "DHC" caused many larger real estate offices to refuse to allow their agents to accept a distressed listing, leaving homeowners little option but to have their homes repossessed, something I'm sure the banks weren't all that thrilled by. They don't want the houses back.

The swell of foreclosures was met by an equal tide of cheap new construction homes, leaving resale houses to linger on the market.

Interestingly enough, home prices have not fallen all that much in my county (in comparison to other areas). Of course, the trade off is that there are fewer and fewer sales. Home prices are being forced to adjust until affordability is again on par with income, and from my personal experience, sellers are unwilling to acknowledge the fact that prices are dropping. They insist that the price of their home is exactly where it should be. The value of a home is a touchy subject for homeowners. It can be deeply personal, especially if the homeowner has done a lot of work to the property; put in a new deck, perfected the landscaping, added that bonus room.... they are often unable to recognize the fact that prices are dropping around them as their home spends more and more time on the market, with newer, lower priced listings leaving them behind, trailing in the dust. All listings are engaged in two separate battles - a pricing war and a beauty contest. Homes have to win both to even attract a showing, much less a reasonable offer. Top real estate agents in the country are now encouraging brokers to be extremely selective with the listings they accept - taking a listing is extremely draining financially with all the marketing and time necessary to attract a buyer, and if the seller isn't motivated and understanding of the current market, it is frequently, to be perfectly honest, not worth a broker/agent's time to attempt to sell it.

As more houses maintain an unrealistic asking price and don't sell, additional houses appear on the market, swelling the inventory.

Of course in conjunction with the rising home inventory, it has become more and more difficult to obtain a loan. We had a meeting last week with a lender from Countrywide that we frequently do business with. Countrywide has recently been purchased by Bank of America, and the lender expressed considerable relief. "Hey, at least Bank of America still has money," she told us. She explained a lot about mortgages that were still available though it is more difficult to qualify.

I'll admit, I'm not as knowledgeable as I probably should be. I don't know all that much about loans, though I do think it's probably a good thing that companies aren't handing out mortgages left and right to people who can't afford them. What I know about the statistics and seller reactions are what's staring me in the face every time I come to work. I could do more research, but I don't. Why? Honestly, I'm kind of freaked out. It's not a real fun time to be working in real estate. Agents are having their own homes foreclosed on, and dropping out of the business. An agent working in my office, two years older than I am, told me today that he thought he was going to have to find a second job. He's brilliant at what he does, and has done exceedingly well in the last couple of years, only to tank in this difficult market like so many other agents.

So....

Most of this morning's meeting was taken up by discussing the market. One of the agents asked my office manager (my boss's husband) and asked if he had ever seen a market this bad.

Office manager shook his head. "Honestly? No."

I know this has been a pretty disjointed ramble, but hey, it's Monday. Give me a break. ^_^

(By the way, I had to write that note backwards for Photobooth. My handwriting really isn't that bad, promise.)