Hi Aatish! I enjoyed it quite a bit. The fibers on the bottom of the leaf may not be significant -- perhaps they are vestigial and only the upper ones provide an advantage.
Alternatively, heavy rain and wind can flip leaves upside down, blow plants over, and splash dirt and water up onto the underside of the leaves, so maybe it is an advantage for the whole leaf to shed water.
Sweet. Hi! This is an odd place to bump into you. :)
I agree with your thoughts that this could be a consequence of coating the top surface in the waxy needles. However, I think it's actually somewhat unusual for a leaf to be superhydrophobic on the top and bottom, so I was wondering if there was some specific advantage to this leaf. Also, the needles on the under-side seemed far more dense than those on top, which was interesting.
Nor can you customize rented property to suit your needs more precisely. Want to run ethernet to every room? convert one room into a gym, or a recording studio? Add more space? Not your property, so not your call. Nor can you guarantee that a rental property will continue to be available at a cost you can afford for a long time. Your landlord may elect not to offer a lease renewal. And if you have kids in school, or just strong local connections, or a sweet commute you want to preserve, that's not a disruption you want someone else to be able to impose on you.
Or, if rents in your area go up, your landlord might ask you for hundreds more per month in rent when it's time to renew your contract.
I was renting a place for $950/month starting in 2011, then for 2012 it went up to $1,050, then for 2013 the landlord wanted $1,350/month to renew. Meanwhile home prices were still low (30% of inventory still short sales in my area) and mortgage interest rates were under 4%. No-brainer. I now pay less in principal and interest than I paid in rent, for a much larger, nicer house compared to the apartment I lived in. And my mortgage payment is never going to go up. (My property tax bill might go up, but that just means my investment is appreciating.)
I've seen these types of customizations worked out with /some/ rental property owners, depending on lease terms. Akin to commercial 'tenant improvements'.
>Your landlord may elect not to offer a lease renewal.
Funny you say that: I'm strongly considering buying, and my landlord elected to not offer a "heat pump renewal" when the A/C went out. Hello window units, goodbye rental hell. Rental markets are not all alike, and this one's not too healthy.
This argument only makes sense when home prices stay flat or go up, which isn't always the case. I'd rather be "flushing my money away" each month than get stuck tens of thousands of dollars underwater on a mortgage.
Except you are not necessarily "building equity". House prices can decline and at the same time you do have to put money into the building in the form of renovations to maintain its current substance. What is even worse is that buying a house on a mortage with say a 10 or 20% down payment means three things:
1) The majority of your net worth is probably in that building so you're badly diversified across asset classes,
3) You are massively leveraged on that one position.
2) You are holding an extremely illiquid investment that could take months or even years to sell. This will probably be worst when when you want to sell the most.
All three of those are marks of a questionable investment.
You're flushing money every month with the interest on a mortgage + taxes + maintenance. You just have to hope that this is less than the amount you'd be paying in rent. (assuming property prices stay flat)
Property prices never stay flat because of inflation.
This matters because the payments on a fixed-rate mortgage do stay flat; they don't adjust with inflation.
I just refinanced to 4.5%. Long-run inflation is 3% so my actual cost to borrow is 1.5%. With the mortgage deduction it is just over 1.1%--nearly free money, in other words.
It's true that I pay property taxes. In my jurisdiction they are just over 1%, so now my actual cost to own is maybe about 2.2%.
Maintenance is a bit of a red herring...most straight maintenance is inexpensive (cleaning, painting) or optional (fancy landscaping).
Most expensive "maintenance" is actually improvements. For example last year I replaced both my A/C unit and furnace. It was a substantial cash outlay, but the new units are far more performant and efficient than the old ones. If I stay in the house another 5 years I will completely recoup that investment in lower monthly energy payments. And if I don't, the modern new appliances will allow me to set a higher asking price in a sale.
LOL the political reported rate is what the .gov is willing to provide in COLA increases. It has nothing to do with actual costs. You're budgeting based on made up numbers provided for someone elses "pay" rate increases.
Look at say... gas prices. Double in a decade. Thats about 7% per year. Or the price of food, or medical insurance, or tuition, or price of cars, etc. Think of what real people actually spend money on.
You can get better numbers from shadowstats. Somewhere toward the low end of 6% to 10% is about right. We'll call it 7% long term average.
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.
Lets say J6P gets a 3% pay raise but the cost of everything else increased by 7%, for a generation or so. That means the money left over after food, car, etc aka the rent either directly for land or indirectly for money to buy land, will drop by about 4% per year. For awhile you can mask that by lowering interest rates, but once you reach "basically zero" like now, problems develop.
Finally the mortgage interest deduction doesn't work like that. If you pay more interest to the bank than the standard deduction fraction then you don't have to pay income tax on the fraction above that. Basically you need low income, high interest payments, and then all you save is taxes on the portion above the standard level. You're still out the same money, just not out the income tax on a small sliver of the total interest over a certain limit. I've paid enough of my mortgage off that I no longer get a mortgage interest deduction. Oh, I could file it anyway, but I'd have to pay more in taxes than just taking the std deduction. Eventually you reach AMT range and then things get weird.
If you want to rely on some random website for your financial data, that is certainly your right, but I don't think we could have much of a conversation about it.
The problem with 7% annual inflation rates is very few people can maintain those pay increases, every year, for an entire 30 year mortgage... So eventually you end up house poor.
Actually you end up inflation poor, not house poor. Your house payment stays mostly fixed. In your scenario of much higher inflation than reported, rents are also likely going up. In such a case the renter will be worse off than the home owner.
No, renting is paying to put a roof over your head. In the same way that some people rent or lease cars, because it's a better financial relationship for them than owning.
And in a lot of places, rent can actually be quite a bit cheaper than interest + taxes + whatever other costs borne by the owner. This was especially true at the height of the bubble. I was paying 6% interest on a place that would have rented for about what the interest alone cost me. So I was paying as much as rent would have cost in interest, plus taxes, plus condo fees, plus losing out on the ability to earn interest on the money I had put in for the down payment.
On the other hand, I'm now paying ~3.4% interest on a place that would rent for, again, about 6% of the purchase price per year. Even including other costs, I'm coming out decently ahead.
Of course there are other reasons to own rather than rent (or vice versa) aside from just which costs more, like stability, or freedom to move. But it is not a slam dunk easy decision as to which option costs less, even after accounting for the potential equity you build when owning with a mortgage.
+1. I live in an extremely rural community where you can afford to buy a 3 bedroom home for under $100k. If you can put 20% down on a 15 year loan and pay it off in 12 years, then yes, buying is much better than renting. If you're 25 years old, from the age of 37 to retirement you've just earned almost 30 years of free living (with the exception of taxes, utilities, etc.).
At the expense of permanantly undermining your earning power and raising other living expenses by committing to live in an extremely rural community. There's a reason those houses are so cheap.
Actually if you read the article he argues otherwise. Don't fall into the banks mentality.
> If a buyer puts 10% down and the house goes down 10%, he has lost 100% of his money on paper. If he has to sell due to job loss or a mortgage rate adjustment, he lost 100% in the real world.
It's easy to think that, but no. The materials will degrade and the data will become unreadable sooner than you think, probably on the order of 10s of years, depending on the manufacturing quality.
Handling delivery of packages is sill a major annoyance of online shopping. I love Amazon but consumer-side logistics could use some serious improvement. The drive to reduce shipping prices as much as possible has definite downsides.
- Items consistently damaged/stolen during shipment.
- Delivery of incorrect items/wrong address.
- No place to leave packages during the day if you live in an apartment with no doorman.
- Impossible to schedule delivery, especially before the first delivery attempt. It is unwise to order things while
traveling.
- Carriers lie about delivery attempts and times.
- Distribution center for package pick up is 10 miles away and only open M-F 9-5.
I've incurred some of these. The UPS or FedEx guy (or sometimes both) is at my house almost every day. We order a lot of stuff from Amazon, just general merchandise (Amazon Prime makes this a no-brainer), plus I order a lot of things for work.
Rarely are things lost or damaged in shipment. It has happened, but so infrequently I can't remember the last time.
The pre-signing for shipments is mostly solved, especially if you frequently deal with the same merchants. I'll put in the order notes to not require signature and call or email if this cannot be done. When ordering things from Apple, the send you a release form to sign in advance.
Having a place to leave packages could be a problem for people in apartments I imaging, I don't have that issue.
I've also had the carriers claim to attempt a delivery when they didn't (FedEx holiday fill-in person). For me, this isn't a big deal, I have security cameras covering all areas of my property (a unique case, I'm aware). The one time that happened the driver got to make a special trip back out to deliver my package a 7:30PM...
Idea: a site designed to build and maintain a trusted local network of people who are at home or work all day, and who will receive packages for you, for a small commission.
This isn't really fair. In Chrome DNS has practically been replaced by google search, and it's great.
Instead of typing yelp.com (or was it yelp.net? www.yelp.biz? http://www.yelp.info?) I can just type "yelp" and get where I'm going without having to remember the exact url and without getting an annoying error page if I make a typo. I suspect for many users even in other browsers the search box gets much more use than the URL box.
