Do you get mental whiplash reading the real estate and financial news day-by-day? In the interest of making a small change or new insight sound more newsworthy, many word spinners pound their message into extremist language. By the time I get to blogging about the last stirring headline, another has probably reversed it.

Having taken a week off, I return to blogging, scouring the headlines and news alerts to see where we might be today. In a stroke of luck, I found an assessment I agreed with in the first article I read. Let me jump right to the quote:

Investors would be wise to ignore everything Wall Street, Washington, bank and real estate industry shills state about the real estate and banking crisis, the economy and the capital markets. By the time they confess the realities, it will be too late for you to do anything about it. In the meantime, their misinformation could cause you to lose a lot of money.

Can we believe the prognosticators about how much worse it's going to get? How long the housing correction will be, how much further home prices (valuations) will fall, how long before loan sharking returns to normal?

I've read it, shuddered, wondered whether I should share the concerns with my family, then realized I'd be unlikely to change my course of action. I suppose I could hang myself today, as a woman in a neighboring town did - a physician, over-leveraged in real estate, facing bankruptcy. Or I could ride it out and believe everything with either get better or not be as bad as predicted.

I can guarantee you optimism will be better for my health and the pleasure of those around me. I'll keep paying down my mortgage, investing as wisely as I know how - including looking for property bargains, as I do weekly - and increasing income and reducing business debt.

Perhaps we should have also ignored Wall Street two years ago before participating in (at least by cheering) hyperinflation of home values and everything that went with that. After all, even those of us who didn't behave stupidly are feeling the fallout. This year's property taxes are based on home values from the run up, and next year's will be even higher at a time when our home values have already dropped by a third from the high estimates and predicted to drop 30% more.