some notes from a July 15 Andrew Tobias column:

HOW TO THINK ABOUT DEBT

You want to owe as little as possible, especially adjustable-rate debt (because it’s hard to see how at some point inflation will not get reflected in higher interest rates).

The one big exception is a good long-term fixed rate mortgage. This is a great deal, because the lender is on the hook to you for 20 years (say), at 5%, whereas you are on the hook to the lender, typically, not at all – you can pay off the debt any time you want. So in case we had nutty inflation for a while, the $200,000 you had borrowed at 6%, which was a stretch at the time, would seem ever less daunting with each passing year.

Yeah, with 90 banks identified by the FDIC as failing, who's gonna buy my mortgage from my privately owned regional bank surviving from before the Great Depression? I did see today that a bank that issued a HELOC to a friend has gone under.