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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nextrade! who wrote (8776)	2/8/2003 8:40:37 PM
From: John Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

nextrade,re:"housing sector facing tough 2003". It's a myth. USA cannot afford it. The FED will bail it out. There is simply NO CHOICE. The bubble will continue just like all other bubble, except this one is sponsored by a legite gov entity. If there is no bubble yet, then there will be one. Just like the dot-con, tech-wreck, nobody knows it until after the fact.

To: nextrade! who wrote (8776)	2/9/2003 2:53:55 PM
From: nextrade!	Respond to of 306849

Everyone's got money but me? Think again Does everyone really have this much money? seattletimes.nwsource.com Burns the Younger asks this as we drive along Turtle Creek in Dallas. He is comparing his 1994 Ford Explorer, with more than 100,000 miles on it, to the sea of shiny new vehicles that surrounds us. To paraphrase the late Sen. Everett Dirksen: "A Mercedes here, a Lexus there, plus a Beemer and Porsche or two — and pretty soon you're talking real luxury." How can all this money be? he wonders. How can everyone have this much money? The answer is: They don't. It just seems that way. Our perceptions are built so that we generally see others as having money while we don't. If you've ever had such feelings, this column is for you. It's some factual grounding on the distribution of income in America. According to the Internal Revenue Service, you were in the top 1 percent of all personal tax returns in 2000 if your adjusted gross income was $313,469 or more. That's pretty thin air, even for two-earner families. You were in the top 5 percent if your income was at least $128,336, the top 10 percent at $92,144 or more, the top 25 percent at $55,225 or more, and the top 50 percent at $27,682 or more. The top 25 percent, by the way, collected 67 percent of all income and paid 84 percent of all income taxes. Before these figures mesmerize you, remember that you have some control over the adjusted gross income that appears on your tax return. You can reduce it by making large contributions to a 401(k), SEP-IRA or other tax-deferred savings program. You can also reduce it if your employer has a section 125 plan that allows you to take medical-insurance contributions, medical expenses or child-care expenses off the top. Most high incomes would not exist without the two-earner family. We know this because only about 6 percent of all workers top the Social Security wage-base maximum. That's $87,000 this year, up from $84,900 last year. Nationally, we can expect only one car in 20 to be a luxury car. So if you find yourself surrounded by luxury cars, you're in a pocket of luxury — one of those places where people with high incomes tend to congregate, such as Turtle Creek in Dallas. As you might expect, high incomes tend to congregate in big cities. The caviar is fresher there. Census figures for instance, tell us that while the national median income was $42,228 in 2001, it was $50,697 outside of central cities (in the suburbs) but fell to $33,601 outside of metropolitan areas. Bottom line: We're a rich country. Most of us feel compelled to do our measuring in places that represent the top 5 percent or 1 percent, not the whole. Expand your measure, and lots of people are doing better than they think, not worse. You may be one of them. Questions about personal finance and investments may be sent to Scott Burns at The Dallas Morning News, P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, TX 75265; by fax at 214-977-8776; or by e-mail at scott@scottburns.com Questions of general interest will be answered in future columns. Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company