How long do the economists you listen to say it generally takes for an increase in the money supply to affect prices? The Fed has been engaging in expansionary monetary policy for several years now, but we've seen no significant movement of core inflation or the broader inflation measures like the MIT index I mentioned earlier in the thread.

Please show me a source for the 50% food/gas/clothing spike over the least three years -- that's a lot higher than the numbers I've seen. One can cherry-pick the noisy food and gas prices over a short timespan, but once you zoom out, even those are relatively stable. I've never seen anything suggesting a 50% rise over 3 years in those

At this point, with 10% unemployment, some short-term inflation is a good thing. You'll get no argument from me that a big inflation shock later on would be a drag on a functioning economy, but our economy is not functioning, and needs some juice right now. Expansionary monetary policy can provide some of that.

As for my own situation, we're definitely not going to park any more money in our house than we need to, but we'll at least need to get to 80% loan-to-value to avoid mortgage insurance. If the house appraises high, we'll be able to take some money out, if it appraises low, we'll have to put some in. But you're right that there's no good reason for us to pay a whole lot of the loan down right now, and we probably won't.

Repair-wise, we decided that for now, we're going to just do the walkway and the retaining wall. Values in the neighborhood seem to have gone up quite a bit, so this might help us out a lot if we get a good number from the appraisal.