it’s 4:30 a.m. and I’m not sure I’ve been asleep tonight. For us, it’s about how we are going to save this ship from sinking.

It’s been this slow and inexorable drain of our net worth that either we can’t or won’t make quit.

We bought the house we live in when the market was crazy.

At one point, houses here were selling over night. It was a short point.

Last week we got a postcard in the mail. One of the largest houses in the neighborhood sold for over a million dollars. So yesterday the realtor met with us. He had viewed our house from the outside, and prepared a set of sales documents.

I was stunned at the figure he presented. And I am aware of how prices have slid here, but for some silly reason I was expecting we would be different. Our house would still be worth “more”.

So he pulled out the rest of the paperwork. He had prepared 6 estimates, and once he saw the interior, he pulled out the highest one.

If the house were to sell at that price – asking price in a time when $100,000 below asking in this area is not uncommon – if ... then we would essentially walk away with a few thousand dollars in our pocket. We would have lost about $150,000, and the value would have slipped $350,000 off its high.

The reality, and why I am awake and not asleep, is that is the best case scenario.

The crazy part is, we would then move back to the beach. I would quit my job, and we would be able to hold onto the remainder of our savings. If we don’t sell this house we live in, and the beach house doesn’t sell, we will end up with zero savings and lose both houses.

You would think we would just bite the bullet and sell. And believe me, we have been trying to do just that. The killer part is, the banks have not been funding loans until very recently. It may be that now that the government has stepped up and offered them some protection, we stand a chance again.

But, I’m not feeling it. The hope. Instead, it feels like we’ll be hanging on by our fingernails until a few more years have gone by, and if we have to walk away, we will walk away, and live on retirement income at the house in Hawaii, where odd as it may sound, it is affordable to do that.

So you have my sympathy. It is extremely costly to live here, in all the ways there are.