I've been working an internship at a job I wanted for the last four months. I really busted my ass and did a ton of gladhanding, I felt really good about my prospects. The internship was lot of fun, I really appreciated the culture of the work place. I've spent the last year and half in school trying to get this job, not another job in the industry somewhere else but specifically this job. This might have been a little dumb of me but I set my goal and perused it with determination. I have done really well in school, holding a 4.0 for the first time in my life. I've pounded through school doing no less than 12 credits every semester with my biggest load being 18 credits. It's about as good a job I can hope to get with an associates degree. I interviewed for the position, I felt like it had gone well. They told me that if I was accepted for the position they would call me on XXX date and that I wouldn't be contacted if I didn't get the position. The day came and went and I heard nothing, nor did I hear anything the next day. I didn't have access to the people who I interviewed with for almost a week (I was back in school full time and they weren't around the days I was working. I felt pretty crushed. The next best job in the field was at Intel but they had already soaked up a third of my class. My classmates had done internships there and had filed up most the openings. It was going to be hard to find anything near as good as I what I was going for. Maybe I had been an idiot. People with a decade of experience and a handful of certs hired on to the position I was trying to get, happily starting at the bottom rung because the pay and benefits are so good. Turns out I got the job and they just fucked up and forgot to notify me. It's going to be pretty life changing. We have been drowning in our kids medical bills. We are paying over 10k a year for insurance that doesn't really help us until we've burned about the same for our deductible. Shit is expensive even after the deductible. We were making it work but it was eroding our savings, it wasn't going to be sustainable year after year. My new insurance is going to be significantly better and cost about $50 a month for the whole family. No huge deductible. It's like my wife, who is providing our current insurance, is getting a $500 dollar a month raise right off the bat. The pay is great, my offer was about five dollars more an hour than I thought it was going to be. I'll get a big raise in nine months if I complete probation. I was supposed to start in January but someone pulled some strings and got me a December start date which does a bunch of things to improve my benefits package. I'm going to have a crazy schedule for 2-5 years but I've often worked crazy schedules. I'd be happy enough to bid into a C shift so I can see my family in the evenings, sleep in the day and work overnight. I'll get to work outside a lot, and get to spend a lot of time on my feet (I can not sit at a desk all day). There is a fair amount of problem solving to be done an equal amount of hard labor. That's all stuff I enjoy. I'm getting older and it's not that hard on your body while still being a physical. I'd be super happy if my kid wasn't sick. My wife and I are facing a reality that we might outlive our child. It's not a given or anything but it's something that we have to face, to prepare for. I have to be happy about the job, you have to be happy about the good things, stay grateful, stay positive. I really need to see a therapist. I haven't had the time with work and school. I haven't felt like I could add one more medical bill. There is a reasonable chance it'll all shake out ok. Kid is stable at the moment but things have got scary very fast a few months ago and the overall the year has been frightening. It's easily been the hardest year of my life with work, school and money have nothing to do with my anxiety.
Can't help with the time but, but a ton of colleges and universities that are training people in social work or therapy offer therapy with those students to both other students and the community at large. My experience is being assigned I don't think you get to date around so it's a bit of the luck of the draw, but one school was a flat $5 per weekly session and the other a sliding scale and as a student I paid the bottom of $15. It's a different program than their student health services therapy folks. One school called it the Psychological Services Center and the other the Psychological Center. Definitely something to look into. Had not great experiences in the first one but wonderful in the second.I really need to see a therapist. I haven't had the time with work and school. I haven't felt like I could add one more medical bill.
really happy seeing this update and some good news from somehow who from my view from afar, deserves it.
oh i'd be into those cheesy taters, precious. Is that little flakes of breading on top of it?? Even JD Vance would halve one of his ozempics for that
it's a nana special of crushed potato chips with melted butter sprinkled on top
I've told this to multiple people but still can't work out an emotionally tolerable handle on the situation. I am only alive because the very rare and life saving open heart procedure I had as an 11 year old was paid for by a program called Children's Special Healthcare of Michigan. As child/ adolescent would be star of the GOP, I argued against socialized medicine on the basis of 'cost' while my own family would have been at best, bankrupted and homeless trying to pay for my procedure, or I would have died in an emergency room of a preventable infarction. For the entirety of my life, when this program has come up for reconsideration for funding in the Michigan legislature, Michigan Republicans have voted to try to defund it. They don't campaign on it because it would sound ugly, but candidates my parents voted for, supported removing the program that saved my life. They still do. I have wept salt tears several times since the election because this program and others like it are not likely to survive the coming purges. The number of preventable deaths among a community I am deeply connected to is going to rise and I feel helpless to do anything about it. Particularly because among the parents of sick children, there are still republicans arguing that they SHOULD be bankrupted by their children's medical expenses. That their child SHOULD die if they can't afford to pay for a life saving surgery or medication. I don't know how to deal with this. I've deeply offended several people I've known almost the entirety of my life for being rude to people who say their own child's healthcare should be paid for but not those people's kids because they are brown. For being rude to antivaxxers who are trying to spread their misinformation in a community that is protected from dangerous infections BY vaccines and masking precautions. I'm heartsick, and grieving already. My new therapist who I had only seen a handful of times was recently put on life support and is expected to pass away soon if she hasn't already, I haven't heard an update in a over a week. My disability got renewed again without fuss, which is good. Been fighting with the spouse which is bad. Going to couples therapy which is good. I fucking hate this time of year. If I could just be put into a chemically induced coma until December 26th I'd go full jordan peterson russian detox in a heartbeat.
My uncle committed suicide his first holiday back from Harvard. He did it on Christmas day, decades before I was born, launching an already-cursed family into a holiday tradition of drunken recriminations. Things started to suck around my house a couple weeks before Halloween and were pretty well fukt through President's Day. But my third year in college I ended up alone at my uncle's house with a girlfriend and two mutual friends. I whipped out a chicken at the last minute and attempted to build a Thanksgiving from leftovers, basically. It was a smashing success and it was fun. It allowed me to reclaim the holiday for myself; I had the added advantage of a Thanksgiving with Chicken Pox where I was abandoned alone all day at the age of twelve which, to my surprise, was my best Thanksgiving up to that point. Being able to disconnect "me" from "my history" allowed me to build Thanksgiving around myself. New Year's followed a few years later. Christmas took the longest and there are still ghosts? But the more "me time" you can lean into, the easier it will be to assemble an environment that nurtures rather than drains. I have nothing but perspective. But then, "an emotionally tolerable handle" is basically perspective. The future is more important than the past. Where you were, where they were, what they did, what went wrong, it's all important? but it's beyond your abilities to change. If you were to Dave into your own life what would change? How would a stranger regard your situation if he didn't have all the backstory? You can't change what you can't touch. These aren't people you hate, these aren't people you're abandoning or else you'd have moved on by now. They're people who matter to you and if you want a bridge, you have to build it. You feel differently than they do. The goal should be to get them open to your perspective, not strike a blow for your imaginary friends. They're not bad people, they just don't share your priorities. Conservatives care a lot more about their tribe than they do about their country. Same as it ever was. "Country" is a liberal abstraction perpetuated by globalism; "tribe" is anyone who prays to the same god as you. It's not that they lack compassion, it's that they want it delivered on their lines, not yours. The hard work has always been and shall always be expanding the tribe. This has been harder among the conservatives lately because the liberals aren't even willing to agree on fundamentals like boys and girls. And trust me, they wanna vent. You might discover that by doing a lot of listening and a little talking? You'll get to watch someone dismantle the litter box hoax for themselves through a gentle application of common sense. This too shall pass. Liberal policies are preferred by Americans across the political spectrum but Americans vote tribal nonetheless. Ultimately? everyone has to chase votes. A plurality of Americans gave a shit about the border, for better or worse, so every Democrat went hard right on immigration. A plurality of Americans give a shit about abortion, so every Republican in a competitive district had to pretend they had nothing to do with its overturning. Not gonna lie - it's gonna be ugly. We're going to lose a lot. But in general, "americans who lose a lot" tend to vote socialist. This is the ebb and flow of history and while I think the ebb is going to be unlike anything we've seen since Reconstruction, a flow will inevitably follow. Take care of you. And let others take care of you. They wouldn't engage you in spiteful shouting matches if they didn't care.
I didn't know that about your childhood. Thanks for sharing. > I've deeply offended several people I've known almost the entirety of my life for being rude to people who say their own child's healthcare should be paid for but not those people's kids because they are brown. For being rude to antivaxxers who are trying to spread their misinformation in a community that is protected from dangerous infections BY vaccines and masking precautions. Have you had any success in changing anyone's mind? I could use some pointers for climate skeptics down here.
Those are excellent thoughts. So excellent I'm surprised I'd forgotten them. Thanks for the reminder.
There isn't some 'one size fits all' fix. People, regardless of their science literacy, like easy answers and explaining climate change is all but that. You can (and should) still find reasons why people doubt, and even though you'll often find shit that boils down to "teachers spent years calling me an idiot for expressing individual thought, but had nothing but praise for those regurgitators (who are now those so-called 'experts')" it's still worthwhile to recognize their reasons first and not expect change overnight. Some will ponder an argument like "if you're so opposed to citing sources, why are you regurgitating this podcast? can't you explain it in your words?" others will think you've been indoctrinated beyond hope. You could very well be the first person who listens to them, and some people are so accustomed to being dismissed they won't even accept you could be genuine. So, yeah, pick your battles and treat them as people rather than stereotypes. That's so pointlessly general I'm gonna high-five my maths degree. Me? I thought the above about humanities verbatim, because here I was, a 14-year-old with buncha stories published in a national magazine and some old bag kept telling me I must not have a soul for not liking a book where literal trees had more character development than all the *gonists combined. I didn't need to be traumatized to change opinion, just experience positive feedback and interact with, you know, people who don't immediately equate "I didn't think of this" or "I didn't think of it that way" with "it must be wrong. "
You're absolutely right. On reflection, I think part of the problem is that the kind of disagreements I'm referring lately to have been in passing, and so there hasn't been as much of an opportunity for proper engagement and discussion of the kind you're referring to.
Yeah. I find it's also a significant amount of emotional energy needed to try.
Good to hear from you, thanks for checking in, OB. I hope reality astonishes and gets much better for you between now and the new year. from stage left: and so it shall be! from stage right: and so it shall be! edit: dang I was tired when I posted, i had initially put "right stage" and "left stage". i am a little upset that no one called me out, surely there are some (one..?) ex-theater kids on here to call out my ex-drumline ignorance. Yeah we prolly all gotta take care of ourselves a little better if we're going to pull this off (I do, at least). "This" being anything clearly good or right, at a large scale or... nah I guess it'll be more like every scale. Any collective action. Anything at all worth doing. Do one's own oxygen mask first etc., yes yes. I have been trying to find out if they will allow like small lutes or whatnot in The Camps for over two years now. Really shit customer service so far, not sure what to do, but some a capella work is a safe bet, either way. Be well, OB, we'll see ya around :)
this is unrelated to that massive windstorm we got?? all good with yall on that front, at least?
The windstorm blew a deck chair over. All the tall trees on the property are in an area where they would have fallen on the neighbor. Fortunately the neighbor is awesome... and fortunately several other storms caused all the fellable trees to fall on his house in years previous. In fact, one of the trees that fell sat there so long that the neighbor told the guys I bought the house from that he'd put a lien against it if they didn't do something about it prior to sale. I called him prior to the storm and said "I think we're good, and if we're not, I'll get to it in a hurry" and he said "yeah dude everything that could fall has fallen." 72 hours after taking possession of the house I put together a dossier on the family, gave all our contact info and bribed the four closest neighbors with $100 gift certificates to a beloved local restaurant. I'm in regular text convos with one family, another has two kids my kid's age and a third is a collector and conoisseur of wierd-shit deep-cut exotics. I walked over there and won his heart by not freaking out about the Ferrari Mondial but oohing and aaahing over a Benelli 750 Sei and engaging him in a half-hour conversation about his impending Marcos GT. At the house we currently live in the storm was good for three green bins worth of fallen branches and 30 seconds of power outage.
that's a fuck around and find out move, that is hilarious. not the tree falling part, but... good to hear! wasn't sure how bad it got further north. eastside got in a pretty bad state, had some friends without power for a week, minus the one who ended up using his tesla to power certain things in his apartment.In fact, one of the trees that fell sat there so long that the neighbor told the guys I bought the house from that he'd put a lien against it if they didn't do something about it prior to sale.
This is the new place? So was the water actually coming from guttering / piping / leaks etc or was it surface runoff getting trapped under the house?
Bloody hell. Sounds expensive. Hope the damage wasn't too extensive.
HVAC - $70k Plumbing - $110k & counting Electrical - $80k & counting Remodel - $25k & counting My perspective was that I stole this house. it's potentially worth multiple millions more than I paid for it. My perspective is that I'm earning this house. Nobody else found the heritage. Nobody else recognized the potential. Nobody else had any ideas to fix the problems. Nobody else has any insight into realizing what this house should be. The builder is a presence in that house. I've come to regard him as a friendly ghost, and I try to keep him in mind when I change things. What would he think of the changes? It's pretty much my version of feng shui and honoring the architectural legacy of the property. And the happiest perspective is that my friendly ghost went "hey, so long as you're completely rebuilding that non-room into the centerpiece of the house, maybe you should do something about the galvanized pipe you didn't know about." There's foundation on four sides of that room. There's no access to it. It's non-pressure-treated lumber on top of partially-demolished concrete patio, no vapor barrier, no insulation. I'm having to go up'n'over with electrical, plumbing and data (and maybe central vac; still undecided) because we had no access to that space; since it's all gotta come out anyway I'm totally revising that. The question is how to build in access in the future. That lack of access turned out to be a blessing, really. That pipe started leaking Friday or Saturday. The water seeped into the ground and flowed downhill, under the garage, under one patio, under a sequoia, down a foundation and into the shop where I spent the week mopping it out with towels. By the time my impromptu pond had filled up enough for the scrap wood to bonk and bump against the joists in the current from the very impressive leak I, had started to rationalize that it wasn't an uncapped clean-out flowing with rainwater and it wasn't a cracked spout drain. But the lack of moisture anywhere in the house also allowed the leak to go for six days because I thought it was a quirk of the house. If it had sprung anywhere but there it would have destroyed subfloors throughout the house. As it is I've got a single room's worth of floor to redo, and it's the floor that I should do anyway because it isn't legal, it isn't energy-efficient and it isn't convenient to all the other shit I need to do.
I've been unmedicated for the last six weeks, and although my energy level is all over the place, nothing feels as 'alien' as it did before. Interacting with people isn't grating on my nerves. My hearing isn't overloaded all the time. Random anxieties feel like outside thoughts that can be dismissed instead of taking over like they used to. And seasonal disorder is the real deal; I'm drowsy and yawning all the time without a trace of antidepressants in my body, despite having tweaked every screen to flood my eyes with extra blue light. 'Hazy' is a good word. This is a temporary, motivated to both check my heart etc while meds-less and gauge mental changes, gonna go back to quetiapine in a couple of weeks, but it's been truly an eye-opening experience.
Man I would be such a bad psych right now. "So it sounds like you feel hopeful. What else is wrong with your moods lately?"
Gotta love when the holiday starts with your mom looking at you and just saying "I'm done caring about you." Why is it I came home again? On the bright side I got to eat a lot of good local food and am leaving Friday and not staying through the weekend so that's nice. Hope all y'all are doing well and I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving (if you celebrate) and otherwise have a fabulous and normal week!
yikes…you think there will be future trips home, is that more of a “see other family” thing at this point? what kind of local food are we talking?
It's def see other family. Grandmother is 88. I'll probably not do many visits home after she dies. Especially if moving internationally ever happens. As far as local food goes, Wawa, soft pretzels, Amish food, and a local breakfast burrito that just can't be beat.
prospect of buying a house seems hopeless. rates are high. prices are high. i make a plenty good salary, and have enough savings for a down payment and to still have a decent rainy day fun, but don’t have any family help on this one which is how most people my age are buying houses these days. either that or FAANG stock that they’ve sold after selling off years of their life. math isn’t really mathing for me and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger bummer without a good solution ive been able to find outside of just…waiting for something to break in the market…?
Think of all the DINKs you'd kill to donk if it meant owning real estate. It's like I was rewarded financially for finding love pretty early, on top of all the other benefits. Feels a little bad. Guilt. Anyway here's why building more houses near mine, specifically, cannot be permitted, despite it obviously aligning with my stated principles. See I'm a YIMBY, for sure, but not in my backyard, you know? hey wait a sec
yeah...my partner just finished up a masters so...currently a SINK turning into a DINK??? YIMBY = y'all in my backward (get out)Think of all the DINKs you'd kill to donk if it meant owning real estate.
Think of all the DINKs you'd kill to donk if it meant owning real estate.
Dang, that is a dank DINKening, a real goof and a gaffe. Laugh and a half! (congratulations, btw, to the both of you, that is quite ze powercopule, jah? I had just forgotten how absurd real estate is up there) You can always buy or build your own mansion down here on the cheapo, just sign here on the line to signify your enthusiasm for living somewhere unburdened by the costs of pesky externalities and sustainability. We're going to have some bomb-ass mansions for a little while and then die horribly! What do you think, you in?
Your strategy to invest in the market is a good one. You might enjoy this podcast, these guys run a bunch of different scenarios and came out that its mostly a wash in outcomes as long as you stay disciplined in you investment. Really great podcast, on other topics as well. Would recommend a listen, it might cheer you up that your approach is equally valid.
queuing this up for the next commute to and from the office! thanks for sharing, never heard of that podcast.
My first flip comment is "GenX grabbed the bottom rung of the property ladder and pulled it up with them." The going rent for the current place is $3k a month and it's a damn starter home in a not-great neighborhood. My less-flip comment is "property ownership is, historically and geographically speaking, an anomaly." That doesn't make it better; it means that the guys who grabbed the last rung are enshrining their economic superiority. My least-flip comment is "but it's all policy-driven." 2008 was about the financialization of home ownership; 2022-on is about the financialization of rentier home ownership. Rent controls, first-time homebuyer incentives, urbanization programs, there's several ways to bend the arc, it's just that this incoming administration won't do any of them. I'll say this. For everyone "waiting for something to break" the next four years are going to be a torture test in countless ways.
holy crap hubski did not want me to reply to you, the comment box kept disappearing. yeah, right? the troubling part is housing is really, really expensive right now as someone who has to front it with a partner and no family help, right? but then rent prices also keep increasing and creeping higher and higher which is like...well, if i bought a house...at least i'd be building equity? so currently in the "fuck it imma just throw my savings into maxing out retirement funds and putting the rest into index funds" mode which...i guess isn't the worst option?My least-flip comment is "but it's all policy-driven." 2008 was about the financialization of home ownership; 2022-on is about the financialization of rentier home ownership. Rent controls, first-time homebuyer incentives, urbanization programs, there's several ways to bend the arc, it's just that this incoming administration won't do any of them.
My first rogue thought is things are so fucked ATM that your move might be to buy a shitty duplex and rent out half of it. Business finance has so torqued that SBA(7a)s are better than conventional loans; you can't buy an apartment building with an SBA(7a) but you could buy a live/work space. you didn't know you wanted to make snowboards on the side, did you? My second rogue thought is that the paradigm is probably shifting. Much of Europe doesn't own and never did, it's not a part of how they live but then, they have a social safety net. Houses in Japan only last 30 years because Japanese cities were victims to fire, earthquakes and hurricanes so why get wrapped up around something that Curtiss LeMay is going to reduce to ashes anyway? Commercial leases in France are nothing like commercial leases in the US; they can kick you out whenever they want and you pretty much have to front the entire lease period as cash (no wonder the Cartiers sold the plants some pearls). I don't know what that looks like short term or long term but it will persist in being advantageous to own real estate. My third rogue thought is Zillow ate absolute shit trying to flip houses which is really funny because (1) fuck Zillow (2) no seriously, fuck Zillow (3) so much for your Zestimate bitchez. This only matters because all the single-family homes being snatched up by REITs are every bit as algo-fed as Zillow's bullshit. The system is due for a kick in the nuts. An investing anecdote: I've been using a thing called Autopilot because, thanks to my checkered financial past, I manage seven or eight scattered 401(k)s, SEPs, Simples and other random funds above and beyond my pension. I threw some money at Warren Buffett back when TD Ameritrade still existed, and then Schwab ate them, and that took forever, and Autopilot didn't work with Schwab. Then Autopilot worked with Schwab and I had to clear out what I had to readapt to what I didn't and in the process of doing that I took a long, hard look at everything I owned and you know what? Everything is doing well. This is one of those eras where you have to be a dipshit to lose money. Most people think it's because they're clever but fuck you NVidia has a three trillion dollar valuation even though they're out here saying dumb shit like we must strap a hundred thousand GPUs together to eliminate six-fingered memes and the market claps like a fuckin' walrus at Sea World. BUT Paying a percentage to a robot that can ape Warren Buffet or Nancy Pelosi or whoever 24 hours after they execute their trades? is doing REALLY well. Don't hate the playa hate the game, and the game is rigged, and I think there's a lot more protection for financial shenanigans in the stock market than there is in single family homes. Something like 5% of the country owns stock but everyone within US borders wants a roof over their heads. I don't care how malfeasant you are, the low-hanging fruit is housing not finance and if the Justice Department is already going after rental orcs, Trump ain't gonna fuk widdat without a reason.
ive been looking very casually at duplexes and triplexes recently and the odds and ends on market and definitely feel like im missing something. in the < $1.5 million range in seattle, on redfin, there’s: - twenty four homes listed total of which - five homes listed less than 30 days of the remaining nineteen - eighteen have been listed for more than 90 days - ten have been listed for more than 180 days im assuming something is pretty fucked with the houses, zoning, or they’re just way, way overpriced for what they are (i have no idea what im doing)
A lot of houses went pending in December, not sure why. Rates going up? Prices going down? December is usually dead so surprising to see some of the long duration inventory clear. The multi family market is f-ed , the smart forks are exiting duplexes, triplexes and airbb as treasuries pay essentialy the same amount without the associated pain in the A. That’s why so many converted duplexes show up. Who in their right mind would buy a 1.2m house and share it with a tenant for 2k a month out of a 7-8k total payment. Seems hardly worth the effort.
Let's math it First rental I found on Craigslist is $2100/mo. That gets you 1100sqft in Shoreline. Duplex it's in is $900k on Zillow. Put $180k on it at current rates and you're looking at $5500/mo - or $3400/mo once you knock the rental off. As a rental you can depreciate the structure on a 15-year tax schedule which is probably good for $10k/yr so that knocks another $800 or so off the price; you're at $2600/mo. That mortgage payment allows you to borrow about $300k - which would be a 700sqft condo except no it's not because everything in that price range also comes with $700/mo in HOAs. So. If you can scrape together a down-payment on a duplex, you can get your payment down below what is even possible in the current real estate market. And if you did that in 1993, like the first rental I found on Craigslist, your mortgage got paid off last year anyway. or maybe it didn't, it might have gotten rolled into some ridiculous rate back in 2000 or 2010 or something. But sure, go buy some treasuries. Nothing quite like six figures of t-bills when the incoming president has gone bankrupt four times.
You aren’t doing the rest of the math. That duplex has maintenance, taxes and lost occupancy during rental transition. Once you factor in all the shit you missed you end up with either a break even or more likely cash flow negative position. At that’ point all you are just gambling on continued appreciation of the property, and hoping you can make up the 10% in transaction costs. In the past that’s been a decent bet but who knows. Current interest rates and demographic are working against you at some point affordability might come to bite. Or it might not and more people will just have to cram into tighter spaces. If you were to just rent that 2200$ unit you would save 2-3k a month and you could invest that instead. Overall the risk of investing the savings in diversified equities is lower than that of buying into a single housing asset, but of course there are no guarantees.
You're right, I'm not - because unlike you, I've actually been a landlord. "Lost occupancy" is a month every two or three years around here. "Maintenance" is a thousand a year tops. If you're going to get that stupid about it you're smart if you give a rental agency first's month's on every new tenant for the eviction protection alone. Doesn't change the fact that the equation goes from "700sqft condo for $3400/mo" to "1100sqft in a mult-tenant for $2600/mo" through the liberal application of downpayments. But here's the basic problem - you listened to a podcast. I had tenants for ten years. Am I happy I didn't have tenants during COVID? Yer damn skippy. But none of your podcasts brought that up either. "Affordability might come to bite" is Suze Orman-speak for "I'm the one giving the advice here" - we're talking Seattle, where the population has increased by 50% in 20 years, the only metropolitan area with not one trillion-dollar company but TWO, the place where the hoi polloi whiplashed from "why are you building so much parking around light rail" to "why didn't you build more parking around light rail" in exactly one weekend. The neighbors across the street sold. A REIT bought their place and immediately listed it as a rental for the monthly mortgage rate. The rental agent told me they had 130 applications; made sense because the neighborhood was impassable for an entire goddamn weekend. This in the zip code that had 70% of new senior housing NATIONWIDE in 2018 and who moved in? retirees. What "affordability" are we talking about here? Because I have employees commuting from Marysville. I have employees commuting from Lake Stevens. I have employees commuting from Tulalip. These are things I know, which you're dismissing because of things you've heard. "Things you've heard" is how Zillow ate shit - as discussed above. No need to know anything in particular when you can just learn things in general! If you were to rent the duplex for $2200 vs buy it and rent half of it for a net of $2600 you're right - you've got an extra $400 a month to go play the ponies with. That's a whopping $4800/yr! Of course you aren't getting $15k off your taxes in mortgage interest deduction - it's the biggest white-family sop in the entire tax code and while it doesn't always apply, it's not nuthin'. But more importantly, when you muck about in "diversified equities" these are the guys on the other side of the trade: We're in one of those stupid markets where everyone is making money so everyone thinks they're smart. They're not - they're making less money than the monsters because unless you've got a server colocated with NYSE in a dark pool you're just order flow. It's all you've ever been, it's all you'll ever be. Sure - pick stuff correctly and you'll come out ahead but you will never come out as ahead as Goldman. And for Goldman to come out more ahead you have to come out behind and they will absolutely make that happen. And yet. You persist in presuming I'm the guy who doesn't know what he's talking about. Why is that?You aren’t doing the rest of the math.
If you were to just rent that 2200$ unit you would save 2-3k a month and you could invest that instead.
Yeah I was noticing some of that re: December too. Was wondering if it could be bonus / vesting / etc. related timing around here.
THING 1: nobody wants to be a landlord except people with enough money to buy an apartment building and in general, those are all REITs at this point. THING 2: most people can barely scrape together enough money to buy a place to live, let alone a place for others to live. The Warren Adler quote I love - "A man tells the world who he is four ways: his house, his wife, his car and his shoes" - is not favorable towards a d00d who shakes down his neighbors for money rather than blow his entire wad on a more-impressive single family home. THING 3: In general the people who bought duplexes for income were the strivers with small families who were trying to put down roots. Nobody under 40 wants to put down roots anymore. THING 4: If you're a REIT, you get better performance out of multi-family than you do out of individual homes. Check INVH vs Blackstone. THING 5: multi-family is pretty wretched right now because of rates. here's an apartment with a cap rate lower than current commercial mortgage rates. It's the only one listed right now in a 50 mile radius from me. I'm not saying there's a world full of bargains out there. I'm saying that you aren't competing with as many people as you think. I own an architecturally-significant mansion on two thirds of an acre within the greater metro designed by two Wikipedia architects. I paid a third what it's worth because the pricetag was outside of conforming loan territory, because nobody knew the heritage and because your average flipper didn't see anything but a weird footprint and deferred maintenance. So across five months and twelve open houses, mine was the only offer they got (and it was 20 percent less than their ask). Now granted. I first started looking at the real estate market in 2006. I've been keeping my powder dry for nearly two decades. And I'm in a world'o'hurt right now; water has been off for two weeks and the renovations seem endless. But objectively speaking I got a photon torpedo into the exhaust vent of the Death Star. It's going to be an incredible house that would be miles out of my budget if I had to buy it finished. I guess what I'm saying is that maybe you aren't missing something. Maybe everyone else is. MAYBE.
lol ive been thinking about the pelosi tracker and autopilot thing! im in schwab, fidelity, and some cds with goldman (oops)…so that could be a nice way tie everything together yeah somehow a friend bought a new build in madrona area where their first floor is zoned for mixed use? so shit i could go make snowboards over there, too? fun fact, they had to sue the builder for not laying the water bill before they closed on the place
A guy at the rec center I go to to work out literally just threatened to fight me because I told him they would close the sauna for a few days if people leave wet paper towel on the thermostat. I have never heard a thicker more forced Italian American accent in my life. Took all my willpower to keep the peace and not ask him how long has he been an associate of Mr. Soprano. Happy holidays y'all