Fri, 03 Jun 2005
Novafoam Mattress Holding Up to the Heat
Memory foam is designed to soften based on your body temperature. I was a bit worried that my Novafoam mattress might start to feel like a waterbed as the weather got hotter. (The Sleep Number salesguy told me as much.) Summer has started here in the valley, and so far, I'm still sleeping comfortably.
Car Insurance
Jonathan, over at MyMoneyBlog, has a couple posts up about car insurance. His most recent is about collision and comprehensive. I dropped these on my 1999 Honda Civic a couple weeks ago. I'm saving $750 a year without it, and it wouldn't cause too much of financial burden if the car were involved in an accident. 21st Century fixed their web site so I was able to change my coverage without talking to Patrick. We dropped it on Denisa's car, which is only worth maybe $3k, a long time ago.
Jonathan's earlier post on liability coverage is interesting to me too. Since I started driving, I've always had the minimum liability coverage required by law. Since I didn't have many assets for someone to come after, this was fine. As I start to build up my net worth, I should definitely increase the amount of my bodily injury and property damage coverage.
I think Jonathan is a sucker to buy uninsured motorist coverage though. His collision insurance will cover his car in an accident, regardless of whether the other party has insurance, and his medical insurance should cover his medical bills. I don't think uninsured motorist coverage covers hit-and-runs either, so it's really a waste of money.
Idiots Lose Money "Investing" in Real Estate
Two of my favorite blogs are Housing Bubble and Housing Crash. Housing Bubble collects articles about the housing bubble in the United States. Housing Crash is mostly Patrick's chronicle of the housing bubble in the San Francisco area, but he also posts articles related to the housing bubble nationwide.
There seem to be an equal number of people who claim that there is no housing bubble as those who warn of it. The former group includes all of the real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and county tax assessors. The higher real estate prices go, the more money they make. The latter group is made of economists who point out that sales prices to rental rates ratio is out of whack, that housing prices and debt service costs have far outgrown household income, and that the residential real estate prices have been driven up by all of the easy money thrown at borrowers (well, easy until those 5/1 ARMs get past the 5 part). See The Coming Crash in the Housing Market : 10 Things You Can Do Now to Protect Your Most Valuable Investment for a thorough discussion.
Las Vegas seems to be leading the nation in the bursting of the bubble. Home builders have started lowering the prices of new homes. It's got to suck to know that your neighbors bought their houses for $100k less than you. Las Vegas has tons of open land to be developed so the surge in home prices was probably largely driven by speculators. Housing Crash points us to the story of some of those speculators.
"They call you and say 'you are so lucky .. this just came across.. it's going to be worth 100k before it closes,'"said Dyan Harmell. "We came with the hopes of buying two houses. We left the first day owning four. Within the next week, owning 6 -- all the way up to 19."
"We were told there were 80 people in the lottery for 15 homes. And lo and behold, every single person we knew got a home in that lottery,"said Pulte home buyer Cathy Wodka.
That's a pretty good marketing ploy. They must be targeting the same people who click on flashing banner ads that tell them they've won a new iPod.
Tips for Buying Real Estate
- If you can't afford to be sitting on a property that's worth less than what you owe on it in five years, don't buy it.
- If your bank account will be depleted by the time you pay closing costs, you can't afford the property.
- If you can't afford a 30-year fixed mortage at these rates, you can't afford the property.
- If you're buying rental property and, with 20% down, current rents won't cover your costs, don't buy it.
I know I wasn't the only idiot who lost a bunch of money a few years ago "investing" in equities. But at least I learned something. Don't buy something because it has gone up in value; it doesn't mean that it is going to keep going up in value indefinitely.
Shorting Real Estate
It looks like we're one step closer to being able to short real estate. There's a company called HedgeStreet (Via The Big Picture) which allows trading futures on housing prices and mortgage rates. It's not quite the same as shorting a house as there's no underlying asset being bought and sold, nor even an option on an underlying asset; rather, it's basically a bet on which way prices (or rates) will go.
The web site is terribly slow so I haven't read all of the details. If it gets significant volume, it may become a valuable tool for predicting future prices, as markets seem to be pretty good at this type of thing.
Thu, 26 May 2005
Wedding Gift Stagnation
It pays to get married young. From my experience, wedding gifts tend to not keep pace with inflation. My friends, Gina and Kat, recently got married. Since they've been living together for a while, they don't really need kitchenware and linens; so, instead, they asked for cash to help pay for their honeymoon. I don't really like the idea of giving cash as a gift. We wanted to give them a gift certificate that they could use while on their honeymoon, which would show at least some thought went into the gift. But we started a bit late in the search for an appropriate venue from which to purchase a gift certificate, and didn't find anything that we were sure that they would appreciate, so we ended up just giving them cash.
I think the standard wedding gift price is $100. To me, this amount is neither too rich nor too poor. But this is the same amount that I've been giving since 1998 when my friends started getting married. (If you've received a wedding gift valued at less than $100 from me, sorry, I might have been low on funds at the time. Sometimes people don't design their gift registry to optimize the gift value per gift-giver. I wouldn't want to give a $70 frying pan with three washclothes, for example. When picking out items for a gift registry, one should come up with appropriate bundles of items that come close to $100 in value. That said, I've never set up a gift registry. I think it's more tacky than asking for cash. The last time I went through a catalog listing things I wanted someone to buy me was when I listed just about every toy on the market for Christmas, 1984.)
My point was that, in terms of gifts received, you would have been better off getting married in 1998 than in 2005. Unless, of course, you asked for computer hardware or consumer electronics for your wedding, in which case a dollar goes a lot further today. This observation isn't solely based on my generosity (or cheapness) in gift giving. About a year after Denisa and I got married, we had a reception in Slovakia so we could share the joy of our matrimony with her family and friends; and so the Krizan (Denisa's maiden name) family could get a return on the investments they made in the marriages of various cousins. The investments turned out to not be very profitible in real terms though. It seems SKK 5000 is the standard Slovak wedding gift from family members. (This was about $100 when Denisa and I met, but due to the falling dollar was closer to $200 when we got it.) But this is the same amount as Denisa's parents gave the cousins 10 years earlier. Slovakia had double digit inflation for a while which means 5000 Sk isn't nearly what it used to be. While wedding gifts aren't being devalued quite as quickly in the US (unless you're planning an international honeymoon), you're better off getting married sooner rather than later.
What should those considering marriage and those considering attending a marriage keep in mind for the future? If inflation stays low, there's not likely to be a revaluation of the wedding gift anytime soon. A few people might bump up their gifts to be $100 plus tax, but the next big gift amount is probably not until $200. If inflation picks up, gifting might move up to this level ahead of inflation. Those looking to get married would probably be better off during a recessionary period though. It is unlikely that there is much downside in the gift level so a fall in consumer prices would increase their gift values in real terms. Alternatively, a stronger dollar may increase the amount of linens from China that a dollar purchases (and prevent an undergarment war).
Sun, 15 May 2005
iPodder With XMMS
I've added XMMS support to the iPodder Debian package using PyXMMS.
I'm just starting to learn Python. The only thing I'd written in Python previously is a script to remove large attachments in email messages and store them in a database, replacing them with a link in the message to retrieve the attachment over http. This task was made much simpler than it would have been in other languages because of the Python email module. I'm very impressed with the large library of Python classes available.
iPodder Debian Package
After my experiment in packaging JavaHMO, I decided
to try to package iPodder. The results are
encouraging. I haven't figured out how to use all of the
debhelper tools yet, but dpkg -b seems to do the job
adequately well while I'm learning.
The iPodder package is in my repository, which you can add to your
sources.list:deb http://packages.pinkhamster.net/ unstable main
Since wxWidgets 2.5.3 appears to have been removed from sid, I've copied it
from snapshot.debian.net into my
repository to satisfy iPodder's dependencies.
Sat, 14 May 2005
JavaHMO Debian Package
JavaHMO is an application that allows you to use the Tivo Home Media Option to access music and photos stored on your Java-supported computer (Linux is a good choice) via your Tivo. I previously created a Debian init script for JavaHMO. Dave posted a comment on that page saying that he was having problems getting JavaHMO to start. It looks like the init script doesn't work with newer version of JavaHMO.
So I've started working on a more proper Debian package for JavaHMO. Rather than simply using alien to convert the RPM, I've tried to make it more of a proper Debian package. I've removed all the capital letters from directory and file names, so the config directory is /etc/javahmo rather than /etc/javaHMO, for example. It also creates the javahmo user and sets up the init script links.
I'm quite new to Debian packaging, and I haven't made it through the whole Policy Manual yet. Suggestions for improvements to the package are welcome.
Installation Instructions
You'll need to have a JVM installed. I recommend using make-jpkg with Sun's JRE.
Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://packages.pinkhamster.net/ unstable main
and run apt-get install javahmo. The JavaHMO configuration file,
/etc/javahmo/configure.xml, is writable by group
javahmo. Add any users who should be able to configure JavaHMO to
this group. Run jhmo gui to start up the gui configuration tool
and enable the plugins that you would like to use.
Fri, 13 May 2005
One Broken Condom
I don't actually know the circumstances leading to conception, but I am now an
uncle. At one week, Klarka is starting to become a cute little thing.
Her eyes are huge!
Sun, 08 May 2005
Commercials That Make You Think
Commercials that make you think are always good. Here's an example.
