In my Detroit-area neighborhood, there are almost no homes for sale. Out of more than 1,000 homes in a two-mile area there are probably only a half-dozen on the market.

Yes, you read that right. Downtrodden Detroit, Michigan, where real estate set new records for declines has neighborhoods where you can hardly buy a house because they've all been sold.

Seeing this makes me feel better about being a homeowner, even though the market value of my home has fallen. It gives me confidence in the opinion that I have long held -- that owning a home is smart.

A survey this week from Move.com suggested that home sales are up everywhere. According to the survey, nearly 10% of consumers nationwide say they plan to buy a home in the next two years, with 5.4 % planning to purchase in the next 12 months. Buyers say they are motivated by these factors:

The best technique for selling life insurance is known in the trade as "driving the hearse up to the door."

When the salesperson drives the hearse up to the door, he describes at length all the horrible things that can happen if the family hasn't bought enough life insurance and leaves widows and orphans to starve.

I just bought my airline ticket for my friend's 100th birthday party, which she's anticipating with considerable excitement. Life has been quiet since she gave up competitive ballroom dancing at 85. Planning a party spices things up.

The oil wells that my friend's husband left her have kept her lifestyle comfortable – until the last couple of years when she developed a need for 24-hour care after the car she was riding in was broadsided.

Even a couple of active oil wells don't gush enough money to cover all the expenses of extreme aging. My friend and her children, who are old enough to be contemplating their own retirements, can see the day when it is all going to run out. If mom's still around – and the doc says she very well could be – longevity is going to be an expensive problem.

The reward for working 35 years at a modestly paying job in the public sector has long been security and the promise of a pension that nearly equaled and occasionally exceeded what a worker was receiving when he accepted his gold watch. And in most cases, these pension promises were indexed for inflation so they'd grow as the worker aged.

These pension liabilities don't have to be accounted for like they are in the corporate world. No putting on the balance sheet what actuaries believe the municipalities, school boards, etc., will need to meet these pension obligations so that taxpayers can understand what they've committed to and workers can judge the odds that they'll get what they're owed.

Maybe I'm just paying more attention since I'm closing in on retirement age, but it does seem like every day I read a new list of places that somebody thinks would make ideal spots for people contemplating relocation after hanging them up.

U.S. News & World Report released its picks in its October issue. When I read the list, I had to laugh. The 10 cities named there might be perfectly lovely places, but none of them is my idea of a retirement haven. For instance, one of them is Columbus, Ohio. I spent four years in Columbus, Ohio (Go Bucks). Unless it's changed a lot, it's cold and gritty.

The U.S. Census Bureau threw more fuel on the health insurance reform fire Monday when it released its statistics on which states have the most uninsured people.

Only 4.1% of people in Massachusetts don't have health insurance, making it the most-insured state, thanks, at least in part, to a law passed two years ago that requires residents to buy health insurance.

"Massachusetts is a microcosm of what the Democrats want to do on a national level," Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, told CNNMoney.com

Money magazine in its September issue, lists four steps to "Worry-Free Retirement":

1. Know the risks of stocks and bonds
2. Crunch the numbers
3. Worry less by downsizing your plans
4. Control what you can including spending

The advice is laced with what are probably savvy suggestions for making the decision between stocks and bonds, calculating risk and evaluating the value of a pension, no matter how small.

As I read it, I couldn't help thinking about my 85-year-old mother-in-law, a recent widow. She and her late husband, a former draftsman, lived in retirement for 20 years – on his pension, banking most of their combined Social Security.

Detroit could use a little economic good news. The announcement recently that the Shoppes at Gateway Park still has a pulse and Meijer, the Grand Rapids-based super store chain, will anchor this long-delayed project qualifies as worth cheering about. It should put revenue in the city's empty coffers.

The location is right on the Detroit city line at Eight Mile and Woodward Avenue. It's less than a mile from Palmer Woods -- probably the city's nicest neighborhood -- and just south of Royal Oak, the region's urban-chic restaurant, shopping, and entertainment district. The east-west expressway, Interstate 696, has an exit there, and there are no other large shopping centers in the immediate area.

Sociologists call the scarcity of urban grocery stores vs. the abundance in suburbia "the grocery store gap." It's particularly wide in Detroit, the nation's beleaguered 11th largest city, where there are no chain grocery store outlets within the city limits.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) opined on this phenomenon recently, and then CNNMoney.com followed suit.

Detroit isn't alone. Last year, the Washington Post bemoaned the lack of conventional groceries in both Washington DC and New York City, and mentioned a similar situation in Philadelphia. In New York, the mayor's office appointed a "food policy coordinator" to encourage the opening of more grocery stores.

In Detroit, where the unemployment rate is 22.8%, the school system is considering bankruptcy and 30% of the population gets food stamps, the lack of conventional grocery stores doesn't get a staff position.

Speed traps and I have a long history that owning a radar detector hasn't improved.

I used to have a Fuzzbuster that sat on the dashboard. It never squawked until I could see the cop and his radar gun –– and then it was too late.

Tickets, Fuzzbusters and opportunistic lawyers constitute a cottage industry in many places, but especially in upstate New York, where the state highway patrol on the New York State Thruway are particularly sneaky and arrogant.