I've been surfing, and this is a question on my mind. Really, why? Tell me why you think owning is better than renting, or not. Be specific. I just did some reading on our housing situation, and I'm left with this feeling that...it's very stupid, if you're not really, really rich and very, very armed and buying property with a natural, deep well in Idaho, to buy long-term financed housing. Am I just bitter and off base? This isn't about those who already own or mostly have paid off their homes, but about peeps today who don't own and are thinking of changing that. Yes, I'd like to own a sheep farm in New Zealand and a French wine-growing estate with a huge Chateau, but I probably never will. So why is buying a pre-fab near-trailer 55 miles away from an urban center with no municipal amenities a good idea? Because I want to be a debt-slave, thanks to the new BK bill, for laminate floors and Chinese-made plastic shelf fillers? Home ownership is dead to people like me, and with it, the "American Dream." Am I an outlier, or just a loser?

Updated with WSJ Bush-hating goodness!

Schadenfreude is wrong, I guess, because a superior person doesn't take pleasure from mocking other people's pains. I am not a superior person. People looked askance at me when I had a financial blowout, and I felt a lot of shame and guilt for signing my name to credit lines when I suppose I didn't have to. In my defense, it's hard to say "no" to spouses who beat you and then demand another credit line to support their profligate spending habits, and when they abandon you and you're trying to pick up the pieces of your life with only a part time income, things like food seem important. But anyway, I got over it, and no one will ever enslave me with money and credit again. But it seems I'm an outlier:

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