Construction has historically been a big industry in Sacramento (except in the peak of the recession) in addition to the service sector.

He found that these individuals had achieved their life goal, and felt empty, that they had peaked in life.

We should be at an unsupportable peak at that time. 

I was thinking of just paying the 10% penalty and tax, as I see stocks back at the same dangerous peaks hit in 2000 and 2008 (go to Yahoo and map the Dow going way back in time to now, and consider if we are in good or bad economic conditions).

Combine those with diligent saving and making good investment choices (hard) can get you to a nest egg on the order of 10-20 times your peak annual earnings.  

New issuance in non agency mortgages is still very limited so the main culprit (in my opinion) of what drove the housing market bananas back then is absent today - we do have cheap money and quantitative easing which is helping drive the current home price appreciation - in my opinion, we won't nearly the same run up and we are still significantly below the peaks....having said that, most economists predict about 5% appreciation next yr and the yr after - and many feel that a correction may occur in the semi-near future (2-4yrs?)

If we get to a point where the price of gold and silver is mentioned every hour in every mainstream media outlet (bye bye dollar) then we just may lose the fed again.

Bye.

I try to answer ANY questions I receive by e-mail or phone if I have knowledge of the subject.

PSEG uses some voodoo nonsense to calculate peak demand from the non-demand meter readings.