All systems appear to be go for closing on House #2 tomorrow afternoon. No real hitches, other than a potential last-minute snag with the seller’s plans of doing a mail-in closing, but that got ironed out this morning.

Still no action as far as selling House #1, which is leading to a bit of anxiety but nothing too bad. I still feel like we listed it a bit high, so I wasn’t expecting offers to immediately come rolling in, and it’s only been on the market for 3 weeks or so.

While I can’t say that the prospect of closing on House #2 and leaping in, sleeves rolled up, exactly fills me with enthusiasm, neither does it provoke much dread. I’d obviously be much happier and enthused if I’d already sold House #1 and booked a profit (and had much more cash lying around to immediately sink into repairs for House #2), House #2 has a lot of potential, and it’d be long gone by now if I waited to buy it.

Part of me has liked having free weekends the last 2-3 weeks, and I’ll definitely miss that, as far as spending all my free time working on House #2, but them’s the breaks. The deals available to me at this point aren’t juicy enough to hire everything out, so there’s not a lot of profit there unless I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and stay busy.

Nice to see the 50 point cut by the Fed and the uptick in the markets, but I think it remains to be seen how much any of it boosts the real estate markets. It’s pretty amazing how quickly we’ve gone from a gushing state of ever-flowing liquidity to bone dry salt basins of illiquidity, which is really going to be what determines the fate of real estate in the short term.

Maybe it’s my inner Grinch, but the sudden rush for legislation providing mortgage relief seems pretty short-sighted and ultimately more damaging than helpful. I’m not sure how many band-aids can be slapped on the pretty glaring open wound that is the inability for the average American citizen to save money, and that very same citizen’s abnormal love for all the trappings that credit cards can buy. Negative national savings rates are eventually going to bite us in the ass, and the longer you forestall the inevitable chomp, the more it’s going to hurt.

Then again, I’m not facing foreclosure on my home, so it’s pretty easy for me to pop off with statements such as that. So who really knows. We just don’t have a lot of historic precedents that heavy-handed manipulations of free-market economies work out very well in the long run, and it seems like a lot of heavy hands have been in play of late.