from a recent yahoo article

About the housing crisis, I especially like the comment about wives pressuring... there must be a great amount of economic decision making out there that seems irrational by any means, unless the pressures of partners are taken into account. It seems the naive view had been that men were showy first as competition for mates, and then as competition between men. But in an age of divorce, the competition for mates never ends... it is very hard, and maybe the most important part of marriage, to find someone you can trust, and with whom you are able enough to face facts with.


Taken from yahoo without consent... if this is illegal (it may be) please someone say something. Fair use is thin ice.

A native Midwesterner, Mr. Killelea worked in Chicago in the mid 1990s before moving to Silicon Valley in 1997 to take a job at Sun Microsystems Inc. He was excited about the $77,000 starting salary -- a 55% increase from his previous job -- until he discovered how much housing cost in California. He and his wife, Leah, rented for a few years in Palo Alto before deciding that they might find cheaper housing in Berkeley.

"We spent several months looking at open houses and bidding on properties," Mr. Killelea recalls. "We bid over the asking price, but never enough to win. On the last one, they were asking $395,000 and we bid $500,000. We got a call afterward, asking us if we wanted to raise our bid. We said, 'No.' We thought that was enough. It turned out that the house sold for $530,000."

After losing that Berkeley home, Mr. Killelea told his wife they were calling off the home-buying search. She says she wasn't thrilled. But they moved to a new rental -- their fourth in five years -- and nestled their two children into an upstairs bedroom with bunk beds.

Even though prices have come down a bit in parts of California, Mr. Killelea vows to resist the pressure to buy. Recently he mused on his Web site about why more people don't follow his example. "I get the feeling many wives are pressuring the husbands to buy," he wrote. "I know it's not politically correct to say so, but I think a lot of irrational purchases are driven by female nesting instincts."

Mr. Killelea says his wife has been "very understanding" about his refusal to buy at today's prices: "She can do the math, too."

But Ms. Killelea seems more open to the idea of homeownership. "We haven't really talked yet about when we'd want to start looking again," she says. "I think we're going to need to discuss that."