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[darkzack]

Tried to buy a fixer-upper house at auction today. Fascinating process. The auctioneer would pretend to see people bidding in the crowd to jack the price up. Sometimes conducting whole imaginary price wars where no actual people ever bid. I saw one real guy increase his 'winning' big by $60,000 bidding against another bidder behind him that

Comments

[aldabra]

Is it possible that the chickless auctions were being won by Internet bidders?

But yes, it all sounds even more dire than I would have expected. I went to an auction at the football ground here once where they demanded everyone present buy a lighter for a fiver as proof of seriousness of intent to buy (I hid behind someone enormous at that stage) and then locked us in. But they were clearly shysters to begin with and you'd hope real auctioneers would behave better.

Did they have a lot of houses left over from previous auctions that they were doing again? I couldn't find anything online about that auction (as opposed to the day before and the day after...).

[aldabra]

Please, though, get the cash out of the stock market and put it somewhere safer while you find a house that works. There's been a general asset price bubble, not just housing, and equities are overdue to crash too. Mum says the banks there charge per transaction, but $5 to put it all in and $5 to take it all out again limits your losses to $10 altogether...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/7966529/Stock-markets-face-a-bloodbath-warns-SocGen-strategist-Albert-Edwards.html

[darkzack]

It's in mutual funds and there are withdrawal penalties depending on how long it's been since I deposited the money I think. It'd probably be better to shift it to some other sort of fund that's less vulnerable to getting wiped out.

The interest rates from savings or cds are laughably pathetic.

[aldabra]

The *nominal* interest rates are laughably pathetic, yes. But prices are falling (particularly house prices, which is what you're interested in), so in real terms you're getting richer simply by preserving capital. In this kind of climate you want to ignore nominal interest rates altogether and think about the best strategy for preserving capital, and 0% interest beats being in a stock market crash.

I see people arguing that hiding it in your mattress beats 0% interest when the banks are obviously only afloat through widespread mis-accounting, but I think I'm the wrong personality type for that. I would forget and lose the mattress.

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[anonymous]

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