The housing market is still, by most measures, crap.  The good news is that it’s looking more and more likely that we’re at a bottom.  Sunny days are here again.  Or something like that.  If you have money, of course, the sunny days really never left.

And that leads me to the first step in buying a foreclosed home.  Have money.  Lots of it.  I don’t know if the foreclosure market is always like this or if its current incarnation is just a function of the really horrible housing market combined with a disastrous financial sector.  Whatever the reason, most foreclosures require you to pay with cash.  If you have the cash, though, you can pick up a foreclosed house for well below current market values.

If this seems like a perversion of economic motivations that favors a class of people that doesn’t really need any favors, well it is.  Welcome to the second gilded age in America.

We have a middle class that would have enough money to buy the foreclosed houses and need to buy the foreclosed houses if they could only get easily affordable loans (which the banks won’t let them) and if they were able to use loans to buy the foreclosed homes (which, again, the banks won’t let them).  So, in the next few years, what we will see is a bunch of rich people buying homes they don’t need to supplement incomes that are plenty big already.  And the beat goes on.

If you are sensing some ambivalence on my part about buying a foreclosed home, you are observant.  But just like the Cylons, I have a plan.  Stay tuned.