Replies to post #18770 on General Stock Ideas

[gfp927z]

Bigworld, >> live in collar counties outside major cities <<


That makes sense for people who can work from home and are still employed, but there are a ton of small business owners who have been severely flattened by Covid, along with their employees. Small businesses represent the majority of US jobs and GDP, so it seems weird that there are still so many people prosperous enough to be aggressively buying expensive houses.

It seems like the demand around here is across the board, from condos to estate homes and everything in between. I noticed that homes built back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s take longer to sell, with buyers favoring the newer stuff. But it's amazing, a property comes on the market and you'll see it sell the same day, or within a couple days.

I just have a condo (almost 30 years), but am thinking that the safest place to invest (rather than stock/bonds) might be in more real estate, either another condo to rent out, or a bigger primary residence. Owning rental property has advantages, but a lot of disadvantages, especially now with the moratorium on evictions. Commercial real estate looks lousy, and buying raw land seems risky. Relocating to a rural area with a better climate seems like a great idea, but requires leaving family and friends behind. From the Phila suburbs the ocean is ~1 hour away, so another idea is to get a condo down there as a vacation place, and maybe rent it out for parts of the summer.

Not sure what the best plan is, but real estate seems safer than having too much riding in stocks/bonds. There's also gold, but in addition to the price suppression, it's doubtful that gold will have any monetary role in the post-reset world. The time to own it will be in the lead-up period to the reset crisis (ie now), but if they can do the transition gradually using SDRs, there might not be an acute crisis, and gold may just languish. Silver could be the better bet due to its industrial uses, solar panels, etc. With gold, as Rickards says, it's only good for one thing -- as money or as backing for money. But it's not going to be money, and it's unlikely to be backing for money either, not in the increasingly digital/cashless world. So I guess that leaves real estate..