Things I'm not allowed to do anymore
dadhacker.com
dadhacker.com
EDIT: I've been fired from a marketing firm for forgetting to remove my test word 'Poopy' from a Fortune500 company's web-site (running on WebLogic, yikes). No one knew the word was there for like a week since 'Poopy' was not an actual product it only showed up in their glossary. A week later I told my boss after releasing the next update and removing the test word: she flipped out, told the client, and fired me that following Monday because word got around their (the client's) IT department resulting in someone digging up a cached copy of their web-site's glossary and passing it on to someone higher up the corporate ladder. I'm an idiot for using such a vulgar test word but I had no business working there (in a marketing firm), let alone no business editing 14,000-20,000 lines of XML. (seriously, there were about 3-4 XML files that long) In retrospect though, I'm glad it happened because now (then) I finally had a reason to learn Mercurial (or why version-control is important and how branching could have saved my ass) :P
One of the reasons I had kids early was to do that. I didn't want to be one of those old parents who has already "grown up" and lost all touch with fun.
Let me guess, you think having a mortgage keeps you thinking independently and on your toes, too?
It's amazing the conclusions people will arrive at to rationalize their fucked up thinking.
Having a mortgage is pretty much the most efficient way to save money for the future. But I've no idea why that's related to having kids.
And what's fucked up about having kids young in life? It makes a ton of sense when you think about it.
The problem is usually silly people borrowing far more than they can afford, and lenders trying to push people into borrowing more than they can afford. But that's not a problem with mortgages per se.
Renting is ok if you like throwing money away, or need to move often.
PS: The cost of renting tends to balance with the costs of buying a home (including transaction and maintenance costs etc) such that it's rare for one to win out over the other in a healthy housing market. I do spend a lot of money living in this area, but I also invest a lot more money than I could if I was trying to buy in the area even with a long commute. Even with the huge drop in housing costs buying in this area is extremely expensive in large part due to the number of people renting their houses / condo's.
There are a lot of other factors that make a difference though, especially related to personal financial discipline, over-buying and tax incentives. Any of those can push things one way or the other.
If you're paying over 5% for a mortgage you're doing something seriously wrong. Hell - if you're paying more than 2% you've been had.
And the other tiny point is that at the end of your mortgage, you own the house and can cash it in. If you have the option to buy, buying is always the sane choice.
In the long run owning your house may or may not work out to be more profitable than keeping the difference between rent and mortgage payments (plus maintenance plus taxes plus other fees) but it's not always the case.
This is especially true if the gap between the mortgage payment (plus costs and fees) and rent is well invested. At the moment countering the low cost of borrowing is the fact that equities are also very cheap. Every pound invested in the FTSE 250 in mid 2009 was a great buy, more than compensating for the low mortgage rate.
In the end buying vs renting is mostly a personal decision rather than an economic one.
EDIT: Graph of the UK base rate back to '97 - most people pay 2-4% above the interbank rate listed here. http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/graphs-base-rate-uk.php
Firstly, there often isn't a gap, or it's negative - mortgage payments are less than rental payments.
Secondly, you'd be hard pressed to find a better paying investment than property.
House prices always increase in the long term. It's an investment. You buy a property, then a few years later can sell it for quite a bit more than you paid. As long as it's a property that is attractive people will always want it.
Personally I find the economics extremely clear cut. Mortgage payments here are comparable to rental payments, if not lower. So you can either give the money to a landlord and get nothing in return, or you can give it to a bank, pay off the balance (Long terms savings), and benefit when house prices increase if you sell it. Or of course just wait until mortgage is over and then live there rent free for the rest of your life.
I've never understood why the economics are even debated online like this :/
You are failing to account for the capital built up in the property which is only returning 5% (on average), whilst it could be earning a (historical) average of 12% elsewhere. (The average index fund growth.)
You are also failing to account for maintenance costs, which are not cheap on a property of any size. Specific to the UK market you are also not calculating stamp duty and capital gains tax, which are either property specific or harder to minimize on property.
The reason that the economics are debated on-line is because:
- Rentals have hidden advantages (opportunity cost of invested capital).
- Housing has unhidden advantages (capital growth of the property).
- It's much harder to screw up a family-home-property based investment scheme.
Which means that people invariably don't correctly account for all of the variables.
If property investing were that clear cut then investment capital would buy up property until house prices had risen and rents had been depressed to remove the advantage! Markets seek an equilibrium.
EDIT: I should probably point out that I have in front of me the yield data for four cities at the moment and the average return on capital for all of them is 4.8% - you personally may have found a better deal, but that's just an anomaly. I'd probably buy something if I had children, but it has nothing to do with the value of the investment.
Yes but with a mortgage you're effectively investing someone elses money (the banks). You get to invest a large amount of money into a pretty good return investment, with hardly any outlay from yourself.
If you were renting and putting the (maybe £100 a month max) difference into some investment, you'd make next to nothing on that. But with a mortgage, you're 'investing' the banks money as well as your own.
I've only bought 2 houses in my life (3rd one soon), but both were financially very good. Even in the current market.
(Here's a source for the 12% figure - http://www.finfacts.ie/stockperf.htm )
The money your borrow from a bank can (depending on relative cost) close or open the gap. If average return is 5% and the average cost of borrowing is 2% (over 20 years) then you would make an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. However if the average mortgage rate is 8% then you would lose an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. Capital growth will also add something - over the last 20 years it was about 100k per 100k invested/borrowed.
2% and 8% are both well within the historical mortgage rate trends. Renting helps reduce your exposure to this, whilst increasing your exposure elsewhere.
All calculations are pre-inflation.
Startups also massively increase your stress and likely decrease happiness for most, but we still do them.
Backward rationalizations can be used to change your future ways of thinking. In other words, if you feel that the stress of having a child will be well worth it, then you'll tell yourself that over and over while you're stressed. It will become true to you and the perception and emotions of a stress event changes.
This kind of reverse thinking is how we grow. Touch a hot stove, burn yourself, and cry about it. Next time you won't want to touch the hot stove because it hurt last time. If you did a study of people who touched hot stoves just after the fact, I'm sure you'd find that touching a hot stove reduces happiness and increases stress levels. However if you wait long enough, this lesson of stoves==hot results in decades of NOT touching hot stoves and NOT getting burned by them. A study of that should reveal that by touching a hot stove once, you've gained a lifetime absence (aside from accidents) of the stress and unhappiness associated with touching a hot stove. Suddenly the one time you burned yourself seems to have been worth the pain.
No. Having kids is a strenuous process that takes 18+ years.
Agreed, and since I had my kid later, I'm still goofy and playful. I think if he was years gone I'd be guarding my lawn with razor wire and proximity sensors.j
Children give you the chance to appreciate childhood.
I see what you're saying... I didn't mean that old parent wouldn't be fun, but it's likely to be a different type of fun. One that may be alien to kids.
We have several stages of our lives and I thing overlapping with your kids makes it so you can enjoy more of the same things together.
Of course, I'm not sure what's gonna happen with all that as they get older. :-( Maybe I'll really become an old man then.
I'll try to do that! In my experience, having a kid 2 years ago has been the most motivating event in term of self-accomplishment, bootstrapping projects, and moving toward a (much) better quality of life.
Of course education is a hard topic some days, but most of the time I just feel very lucky to be living this.
And no - I'm not rationalising my mortgage: living (currently) in Paris, we've been very careful to keep a rent instead of mortgage, and to live with just enough surface and in a quite cheap area of the city (this could apply with a mortgage as well).
This has allowed us to save a lot, and we're now moving to the country-side, able to buy a house without any mortgage, working remotely and bootstrapping projects in a cheap area of France.
So I'd say each one can find its own way. It can be (really) uncomfortable, but apart from cultural pressure, nothing can force you to choose a given path, in my opinion.
That said, being a parent forces you to grow up - but not in the ways you may expect. You can still have fun, be playful, pull pranks, etc. That stuff doesn't have to change if that's who you are. The biggest change, I think, is learning to handle unpleasant events that you cannot control and do not have a choice to ignore. When the baby fills his diaper, you have to change it even if it smells especially bad. When he throws a tantrum, you have to deal with it. When he hurts himself, you have to help him. When he makes mistakes, you have to teach him. The list goes on and on. Many of those things are hard in some way (often due to timing, the interruption, the stress of no sleep, etc) - BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM. Prior to having a child, most people simply avoid or find ways to reduce their involvement in things that might be unpleasant, difficult, undesirable, disruptive, etc. You have no choice when you become a parent but to deal with those situations and you will become better for it.
Well, it turns out that leaving setSignature("sausage") in your code can really get you into some trouble. Especially when you consider that European companies are legally bound to include certain company information in their signatures.
OTOH it turned out that this was the mailing that received the most replies ever, most of them pretty cheerful.
Sharpies are fun. People take the "permanent" label much too seriously. At work we have picture badges, at one point I was drawing mustaches on other peoples badges and watching them freak out.
Alcohol will erase Sharpies as long as the surface is non-porous. (as they say in manuals, try in an inconspicuous place first ;-).
One of my victims ran over to the computer room after I clued him in on the alcohol trick. (This was quite a while ago when we had tape drives and there were squeeze bottles of alcohol laying around for cleaning tape heads.) He grabbed the first bottle, squirted his badge, rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he sniffed the liquid and realized he had grabbed a bottle of water instead of alcohol. Bonus.
Thanks for the laughs. Congratulations on being irreplaceable enough to be able to build such a list. From the sound of things, the list will grow, too.
http://www.amazon.com/17-Things-Not-Allowed-Anymore/dp/03758...
We have it and it's mildly funny, there is one line that makes our kids erupt into hysterical laughter everytime.
129. The Microsoft ® “Dancing Paperclip” is not authorized to countermand any orders.
:)
* Don't eat the dirt
* Don't piss on the chief's tent (when he's home)
* Don't sleep under the horse.
* The brown pills are not specifically good.
Completely and totally off topic, but the first time I read that I laughed so hard I was crying.
Grow up.