GREENVILLE, N.C. — My wife and I are just not risk takers. We go to work, pay into our 401k plans, make the house payments, avoid shellfish and occasionally rent a place at the beach.
Sharon and I are the types who see someone else's windfall and ask, "Why didn't I think of that?" We're thankful for what we have, but we've also sighed over our share of missed opportunities.
A few years ago, for instance, we passed up a chance to help finance a new product invented by a friend. The minimum investment would have required borrowing against the equity in our house with no guarantee that the device would actually sell.
That product is now shipped all over the world, and the could-have-been quarterly checks would have long since retired the should-have-been minimum investment.
Sometimes "better safe than sorry" is just plain sorry.
Last year, when the housing bubble was still filling up with worthless air, Sharon and I briefly looked into the prospect of buying a house at the beach. It was mostly my idea — an investment scheme to help finance college educations for our three daughters.
The girls are close in age and likely to be simultaneously enrolled — hopefully at the same university — in slightly more than 10 years. That thought, more than anything else, helps me see into Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's current feelings of impending economic doom.
If we bought a place at the beach, I theorized, we could do weekends and vacations there for the next decade or so while watching the equity swell beyond our wildest dreams. Then we could sell the property, pay for the girls' college and maybe even have a little money left over.
It seemed like a good plan until we actually picked up a few real estate brochures along the North Carolina coast. This was before the bubble popped, of course, but it's safe to say that someone else's wildest equity dreams were already being exceeded.
Any thoughts we had of beach-house ownership expired faster than washed up jellyfish. Even a tiny one-room condo — which looked suspiciously like a utility closet inside a parking garage stairwell — was beyond our price range.
I'm sure we still could have obtained a loan to buy the world's tiniest condo, but we decided that would not be a prudent use of our excellent credit rating.
Then came news of the mortgage meltdown.
"Good thing we didn't buy that beach house," I chuckled to Sharon. "We'd probably be stuck along with all those sad people holding properties worth less than their mortgages."
But now that the meltdown is swallowing Wall Street like molten lava, I'm not so sure we made the smart-money decision. A sizable portion of this federal bailout intends to take my money — tax dollars — and give it to banks and home buyers who made less-than-prudent real estate decisions.
Now why didn't I think of that?
Mark Rutledge writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, N.C. E-mail mrutledge (at) coxnc.com
