Quote:
Originally Posted by epitome
I live in South Florida, one of the areas that was supposed to be hardest hit. From the news, I expected that the area had imploded between my last visit and actually moving.
For the most part, nothing changed.
Yeah, there are vacant houses, but that is because everybody upgraded to brand new houses and then people that shouldn't have qualified, moved into the houses people moved out of. Then they lost them and went back to rentals. There was always excess inventory ... housing starts in the 2000's were insane. Some of that excess is being bought by investors at a fraction of the value pre-foreclosure and are turning them into rentals that the same people who got booted can now afford.
Of course retail will suffer. Everybody was refinancing on the inflated values of their houses and spending it buying new shit.
That cash cow died and so did a lot of the retail supporting it.
It's not doom and gloom. It is a correction. We built too much shit, spent too much money and now we have to recover from that.
Unemployment is an issue but it's less than 1 out of 5 unemployed. While bad, it's not devastating and not something that cannot be fixed.
|
I'm in the Fort Myers area which was hit really bad. Obama came here in 09 as we were having some serious issues.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-11/p..._s=PM:POLITICS
I lost my mainstream job for a little bit as clients disappeared last summer. Took an unemployment check for two, maybe three months while I scrounged up some freelance work. Got off of unemployment as soon as I got a little money in from design projects and eventually was re-hired at my old job once the work started coming back. I am far from rich, but I can't complain. Have a house, couple of pets, car. We live week to week right now but everything gets paid and we have amenities most can not afford in these dire times (ac on 24/7, food, dsl, cell phones, cable, etc).
I haven't made any money doing the affiliate thing yet but I am confident that in time I will. Even if it makes a couple hundred a month or a year, anything really, I would be grateful for it, but we are still managing without it.
The one thing that really sucks is that I don't have any spare money to really work on my sites like I would want to. My two legal tubes, for example, are using Nubiles script. I don't have the money for Mech or multiple licenses of a different script at the moment, and don't want to rely on Nubiles as they skim traffic, they have encoded code that's difficult to work with, etc. For now, I won't build any more tubes and started working on blogs (which, from what I hear, are probably more profitable anyway) and cam w/l's. In time, if any money comes in, I will spend it on upgrading the network, getting off of HostGator and onto a dedicated server, purchasing some traffic, etc. You can live well even on a very tight budget, as long as you are willing to sacrifice on certain things until you can afford them. Who knows, maybe one day, my girlfriend and I will be out on a jet making "suck it" poses as well lol but if it doesn't work out that way it's ok. As long as I have food, roof over my head, and an internet connection I will be good!
^^ PLEASE! Do not take this as crying, complaining, etc. Just sharing my thoughts on this. I am a happy person that's grateful for what I have. I wish for more at times but who doesn't? lol.