J. Michael Andresen

I am achingly close to accomplishing one of my life goals! I am marrying the love of my life in just under a month now. I may have had some false starts, but Katie was certainly worth the wait! I love being with her and being a part of her. I'm so happy to be spending the rest of my life with her, and I'm very excited to be celebrating our marriage in front of 200 of our friends and family in just four weeks! More on that later. This post is about my life goals. I started my list fifteen years ago after reading a magazine article on an airplane. The article suggested that keeping an up-to-date list of goals was a good way to keep some perspective on life. It seemed like a neat idea to me, so I started right away. Although I could have populated my list with things like "finish college" or "land safely," I wanted my goals to be longer term and involve significant effort toward something that I might not normally take. I started with three goals and added more...

In advance of my nuptials, I need to divest myself of some real estate. It's a bit sad that I moved to Minnesota and needed to buy my house at the same time the Federal Reserve dropped the prime lending rate to 1% to battle inflation and unemployment. The very low interest rates tempted the banking industry to experiment with an idea they thought might make them money in the circumstances: extend mortgage credit to sub-prime borrowers. Banks thought they could charge interest rates high enough to cover the probable default rate for borrowers with poor credit ratings. These poor credit risks were out there buying houses when I was buying mine, pushing up demand and pushing up prices with it. The great banking experiment failed miserably. The banks had greatly miscalculated. The banking industry is awash with defaulted loans, and the housing industry is awash with foreclosures. This is a doubly bad situation for me now, since (a) the demand for houses had dropped drastically since th...