Sometimes out of boredom I read my old entries. This one made me chuckle a bit. Some of my predictions are spot-on. One in particular though is woefully wrong!

"While the apartment we have lined up is okay, the rental market is very tight down there and rather than throw out a big rent each month to an apartment that we only like a little, we could pay a mortgage on a decent house in a good neighborhood for the same price. So unless the housing market tanks, we'd come out way ahead financially, not to mention it'd be nice to have more room for Jibblies and future kitties to run around. And I'd have free reign to do domestic things like paint, garden, and whatnot." - Me, August 5, 2006

Sigh. According to Zillow.com (a totally cool way to pry into the financial details of others!), our house has gone down in value $7,500 in the past month! Until that happened, our house was still worth what we paid for it (since we got a good deal on it at the time of purchase). The market will turn around eventually, but it will probably take close to five years at least for a full recovery. At the moment I'm thinking it will probably make sense to stay put for a little while after I get my degree. A few options, in order of descending desirability, would be: try to find a job in the area, move and rent out the house, or me move by myself for a short-term postdoc/teaching appointment out of the area while Ryan stays at the house.

Other than home values, we are lucky that the only other way the recession has impacted us is the value of Ryan's 401K. That isn't a big concern since we have decades for the market to recover. Well, that and the interest rate on our online savings sucks, but that only costs us a few hundred dollars a year.

We're very fortunate that Ryan's company is in good shape and even if things went downhill, he has enough seniority and above-average performance ratings to avoid moderate layoffs. For me, school is a good place to be, but once I finish the job market is going to be awful. Competition for ecology spots has always been brutal, and I know many universities (including Penn) are under hiring freezes. I don't expect the situation to be much better by the time I graduate. It's good to know that we can get by on Ryan's income alone if necessary. Of course there's always substitute teaching, but that would be pretty insane to be a Ph.D sub.

So! You never know what the future will hold, so get out there and stock your basement full of cat food!