Buying

The first time Adam Wallis wanted a Wii, he sat outside for 12 hours on a bitterly cold Sunday in November while he waited for a Target in Glen Burnie to open its doors. The finger- and feet-numbing experience was worth it. The 23-year-old Abingdon resident and his two brothers each snagged a Wii, which had just been released, at $250 apiece - only to turn around and sell the extremely coveted Nintendo video-game machine on eBay for a tidy $600 profit. Little did he know that eight months later, he and his wife, Stephanie, would be itching to own their own Wii and finding it difficult to get their hands on the hot, hot, hot console.

Recently, I was watching the Discovery Channel's Walking with Cavemen and discovered that earliest man perished, at least in part, because he was too small-brained to find a way to properly shelter himself. So it's not just me, my own small brain happily thought. People have been having trouble finding housing for the past million years. This should be good news to all of you out there who are going through what I just did this spring: buying a house for the first time. If your experience is anything like mine was, new home-seeker, you're wondering at least weekly -- more likely, daily -- "Why am I doing this again?"

Buy low, sell high. Naturally. But much easier said than done. So how about buying high? Simpler, even if it goes against the conventional wisdom. But sometimes, with a little care, it can be profitable. Some experts see evidence that stocks reaching 52-week highs aren't necessarily primed for a fall, and, in fact, often continue to advance in the following months. Analysts caution that willy-nilly buying of shares at 52-week highs isn't a smart idea. But with some research into company fundamentals, careful selection of stocks can pay off. Investor attitudes are at the heart of this phenomenon, research suggests.

There's nothing like a housing slump to challenge the notion that buying a house is smarter than renting. Even in a rising market, there are times when shelling out monthly rent can make more sense than a mortgage payment. Add the anxiety generated by a down market, and all bets are off. "When you live in a house whose value goes down over the short term and you have a small down payment, then you can get stuck," noted Holden Lewis, who follows mortgage issues for Bankrate.com. At the very least, you could end up paying more to own than you would to rent.

Joan Everett had seen horse No. 86 run, so she knew he was fast. She'd seen X-rays and a veterinarian's report, so she knew he was healthy. She'd seen his family tree and knew his stock -- brother to 109 winning racehorses, with a Kentucky Derby winner as a great-grandfather.But Everett couldn't quite explain what made her decide that this particular 2-year-old colt with no racing experience was worth $41,000."He looked like a racehorse," said Everett, who, as of yesterday at 1 p.m., owned 18 horses.

BellSouth Corp., the South's dominant local telephone company, said yesterday that it has picked Linthicum-based Ciena Corp. to supply network equipment.Ciena makes gear that allows phone lines to handle more calls and Internet messages. The value of the one-year deal was not disclosed.The Ciena equipment already has been tested by Atlanta-based BellSouth. It was deployed in five Southern states beginning in January.Ciena spokesman Denny Bilter said his company and BellSouth decided to wait for the "appropriate time" to announce the contract.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- AutoNation Inc., the world's largest auto retailer, is buying 16 dealerships in five states for about $200 million, increasing its presence in what it sees as high-growth markets.AutoNation is buying seven dealerships from the York Automotive Group in Southern California. It also is acquiring Shamrock Ford in Dublin, Calif.; Phil Smith Toyota in South Florida; Courtesy Ford in Littleton, Colo.; and Steakley Chevrolet and Subaru in Dallas.In the Seattle area, AutoNation is buying the Maria Smith Automotive Group, which has four dealerships.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton and the Air Force defended the F-22 Raptor fighter plane yesterday amid growing signs that the House of Representatives is poised to make a dramatic cut in the $62.7 billion program.The House is scheduled to take up a $267 billion defense spending bill today that includes no money for further purchases of the F-22, which is being developed by Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp.The Air Force and contractors have warned that cutting $1.8 billion requested for buying six of the planes next year will amount to a death sentence for the program.

MRIS listings to add Dorchester, Talbot counties next monthReal estate listing information for Dorchester and Talbot counties will be included in the Metropolitan Regional Information System Inc. (MRIS) beginning in June, the Rockville firm announced.Kent, Queen Anne's and Caroline counties are already online with MRIS. The Mid-Shore MLS Inc. will end its current service in June to become part of the MRIS network, which is the multiple-listing service for the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors.

Anyone in the home-buying mode may be a little spooked after hearing about the families that recently moved out of their new Howard County homes because high levels of explosive methane gas were detected in the basements.Could it happen elsewhere? Who's responsible in this type of situation? How can you protect yourself?Sure, most buyers know they should have a home inspector check for things such as bad plumbing and faulty wiring, but methane? Are there other environmental hazards lurking in and around a home?

It was a time warp, for sure, but I couldn't decide if I was hurtling back to the past or off into the future. I was wandering through the Louis Vuitton store that opened last week at Towson Town Center, a jewel box of a shop in the mall's "luxury wing" that was quiet as a museum on this particular weekday morning. Museum, indeed. During what seems like the permafrost of this recession, I wonder if someday we'll go to museums to see the kinds of luxuries we used to buy, or at least imagined buying.

My friend Betsy says it's official: It is now hip to be broke, and I think she is right. It is cool to talk about what a bath your 401(k) has taken and how your job is hanging by a thread. The topics that our parents would never discuss - how much money we make and how much we spend - are now standard cocktail party chatter. I never thought there would be a subject that would push our children out of the center of all conversation, but I was wrong. This recession - they are calling it the Great Recession now - has done it. We used to complain that we couldn't get our kids on the phone.

The selling of Washington's new, improved rescue package contains more hype than a Billy Mays Mighty Putty infomercial, but the plan just may save the country. At least this week. "The measures are not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it," President Bush said in the White House Rose Garden yesterday. A more Orwellian piece of doublespeak hasn't been heard since aviators talked about saving Vietnamese towns by destroying them. The Treasury Department's "voluntary" capital-infusion program was forced on Citigroup, Bank of America and the rest at the end of a howitzer.

Maryland communities will get more than $46 million to buy and fix foreclosed homes, a signal that the federal government sees risks of abandonment and blight even in the nation's highest-income state. The funds, announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, were part of $3.9 billion set aside for "neighborhood stabilization" by the housing rescue law passed in July. Congress wanted each state to get about $20 million at minimum, with more going to areas with higher shares of foreclosures, mortgage delinquencies and risky loans.

This week, Momof2 is looking for advice on how to keep grandparents "from going completely overboard with expensive, elaborate, space-consuming gifts that don't reflect our parenting values." She writes that even though she has given her kids' grandparents specific suggestions for modest gifts, they've ended up giving costly presents that don't fit in her house. This is a tough one, but Jan Faull, a Seattle parent educator and author of several parenting books, addressed it well in an article published on Healthykids.

Buying a home is generally considered a good way to spend money, but is a declining real estate market the right time to buy? How about markets where long-term prices have risen slower than average? What if prices had a big run-up and haven't fallen much? Those are the wrong questions because they focus on changes in prices, say Gary Smith and Margaret Smith, authors of a new book, Houseonomics: Why Owning a Home is Still a Great Investment. Buying a home can be a smart move, even if prices stay flat over a long period, say the husband-and-wife team who, respectively, are an economics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

The economic downturn is putting a new twist on spring cleaning. Tamme Wisinski discovered how much unnecessary stuff she had amassed after losing her job in January. Looking to raise some money, the 36-year-old Chicagoan began going through her closets, discovering clothes and books and jewelry that she says she "went nuts purchasing" before she found out that her company was shutting down. She is selling the goods online at Craigslist, marking her first foray into the secondhand marketplace.

Warren E. Buffett has urged investors to lower their expectations during this queasy economic year. That's not exactly what they want to hear from Buffett, whose $62 billion net worth and excellent long-term track record tend to infect his admirers with overwrought expectations. They'd prefer to learn more about his success buying shares of Chinese oil company PetroChina in 2002 and 2003 for $488 million and selling them last fall for $4 billion. "A lot of people think Warren Buffett simply buys and holds, but he doesn't necessarily," said Peter Bruno, editor and publisher of The Warren Buffett Holdings Newsletter in Boca Raton, Fla. "The fact that he sold his shares in PetroChina last October at such a high price shows he does get out of stocks."

Today, buying a home might feel a lot like buying stocks: You'd prefer to wait until the market finally bottoms out. The only problem is getting the timing right. The price of existing single-family homes in 20 major metropolitan areas has declined every month since September, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index. Nationally, home prices were down 8.9 percent last year. That would seem to argue in favor of a wait-and-see strategy. But even in a buyer's market, real estate is a case-specific transaction.

There's nothing like a housing slump to challenge the notion that buying a house is smarter than renting. Even in a rising market, there are times when shelling out monthly rent can make more sense than a mortgage payment. Add the anxiety generated by a down market, and all bets are off. "When you live in a house whose value goes down over the short term and you have a small down payment, then you can get stuck," noted Holden Lewis, who follows mortgage issues for Bankrate.com. At the very least, you could end up paying more to own than you would to rent.