This is a Great Time to be a Consumer… with Cash

–>While shopping for some gifts on a budget, my daughter came across incredible deals at a high-end store.  She came home with two gorgeous messenger bags orginally priced at $75, marked down, and down again, then then unloaded for $10 each.
–>Several regional auto dealers are offering a BOGO –Buy One, Get One free.  This is a sales strategy I’m used to seeing for bread.  Or frozen dinners.  But on automobiles?!
–>Using online discounters and sticking with local Innkeepers we priced out a weeklong tropical vacation near the equator for less than it would have cost us for a few days at Disney World.
–>Mortgage rates are at an all-time low…and banks are willing to refinance existing mortgages for a simple, flat fee versus high fees and a new round of unnecessary paperwork.
–>I read the other day of a real estate agent in Florida who is filling chartered buses with future snow birds and taking them on tours of gated communities where the houses started at $250K a few years ago, sold for $150K last year, and are now being snatched up for $50K today by people looking for a second home – and who were prudent enough to stay out of the speculators’ pricing wars.
–>If you are remodeling, landscaping, or want any repair work done, contractors are available to come out and provide a bid on a same-day basis, and will tell you they can start the job in a few days, rather than in a few weeks/months.
–>Stocks and other investments that even the naysayers agree are solid, dependable brands that will rebound are selling for low single-digit multiples of their earnings per share.
–>My wife’s desktop computer died in the midst of the tax season  & we had to replace it, fast. The new one has 3X the RAM, 5X the memory, all the bells and whistles… and cost only a few hundred bucks – less than the monitor alone would have cost just a couple years ago.
Everything is on sale.  Everything.
Of course, if you have no cash flow, it does not matter.  But if you are consumer with cash, this can be a very happy time for you.
I’m just sayin’….

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