I don't have much room in my 1 bedroom codo to store food, water, etc. Anyone have any thoughts on buying a house soon? Is it possible prices will drop drastically after 2000?

-- debbie g schrider (debbie.g.schrider@boeing.com), July 23, 1998

Answers

Will you have the money to pay for it after 2000? Will you have a job? Do you have the cash to buy it now? Are you wanting to purchase in the city or country? What if you need to relocate, will you be able to sell quickly? No one really knows what is going to happen or what the real estate market is going to be like. Perhaps you can rent a storage unit close to your home with 24-hour access so you can store food and water there. If you are able to leave where you are at now, and if you feel you are not going to be safe there due to civil unrest, then maybe you should find something safer. I know someone who rents two storage units right next to each other! He lives in one of them and has his food, etc. stored in the other! Now that's a thought if your in a tight pinch.

-- Barb-Douglas (bardou@yahoo.com), July 23, 1998.

Storing food away from your home is almost as brilliant as putting money in a bird house! Do you people think before you post?

-- Larry Gustafson (HUH!@getreal.com), July 23, 1998.

Hey, works for me. Have been broken into (a draw back to living in the country), and put our valuables here and there in our bird houses and they were there when we returned. Beats the frig. any day! P.S. Also stored some in our phony sewer line! The didn't get anything of any value, they left empty handed!

-- Barb-Douglas (bardou@yahoo.com), July 24, 1998.

Debbie, I haven't verified this, but I think you could probably store enough food for a week in a large (10-gallon?) bucket. One or two would fit easily in a closet; toss a board over them and you can put everything that the buckets displace on top of that.

Water - one of the best purchases I ever made was two 5-gallon collapseable jugs. We fill 'em up whenever we're under a winter storm warning (we don't have lots of room either, so we fill them in the bathtub & leave them there until needed). When they're not being used, we collapse 'em and into the closet they go. The good thing about water, you can wait until the 11th hour to lay up a supply.

Fuel (heat & cooking) is a bit more complicated. We're lucky enough to have our own 400-gallon propane tank & a gas stove. You might want to look into a two-burner camp stove. Sterno takes longer to cook, but is more compact -- you might throw a few cans into the food buckets.

As far as buying a house, if we're in for more than a bump in the road, you might have trouble making payments on a house (that may well depreciate a lot).

-- Larry Kollar (lekollar@nyx.net), July 24, 1998.

Debbie,

If you are sufficiently concerned about y2k to move, do it now. It takes time to move and prepare well. Property you might want will be harder to get later than now probably. Large urban centers are going to be the worst places to be.

Good Luck,

Will

-- Will Huett (Willhuett@usa.net), July 24, 1998.

If you cannot work to pay for your house, then it is likely most other people will not be able to pay either. There is no way the banks will forclose on hoards of people. Then investors could pick up houses for 2 cents on the dollar with the banks being stuck for the difference. Then and honest bunch of government regulators would force them to liquidate.

Even if the banks did foreclose, foreclosure takes 1-1/2 years in my area in the best of times. I believe the backlog from a massive default would take years to clear up - so long that Y2k would be history.

-- Danny (dlefever@emeraldis.com), July 28, 1998.