My good friends:
A propos of Halloween being just around the corner, our financial markets have become this season’s scariest goblin. Watching investments evaporate into thin air is a frightening prospect; wondering if they will ever re-capture more than a fraction of their original value an even more troublesome prospect. But that’s the risk associated with certain paper assets. In their worse-case scenario as an investment risk they have the potential of being worth scarcely more than the paper they’re printed on.
Not so with hard assets, such as gold, silver and real estate. While the value of these precious commodities is certainly given to market fluctuations, it’s impossible for their tangible touch-and-feel qualities to simply vanish overnight.
As challenging as the real estate market has been over the past few years, your home remains an asset that can never be made worthless by callous acts of corporate greed or blind mismanagement. Regardless of its up-or-down value on any given day you have the inestimable pleasure of enjoying it through good markets and bad. To borrow from an oft-quoted ad campaign that has worked its way into the pantheon of pop culture: What you pay for a home is one thing, what you eventually sell it for another; the joy and comfort you derive from it along the way….priceless.

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