Yesterday, at 2 pm, I closed on a condo. I am now a proud homeower; my salary for the next few years will all go to a bank. I am locked into the cycle of debt and houses and saving for my unborn (indeed, unconcieved and unplannned) future childrens' college education.
But you can start sending mail to a more convenient mail address.
Like 1017 Minor Ave. #303, Seattle, WA. 98104
(Does writing a paper mail address on a blog open one to mail spam?)
Oh, and you have no idea how amused I am that there are a lot of hits for "homeower" at Google. There are Homeowers' Associations, Homeowers' Insurance, and all sorts of marvelous services to those of us who have signed paperwork transferring a home from someone elses' bank to our own bank.
I'm having to trim 50-60 comment spam entries, including a recent deluge of personal names that seemed to link to sites that were strings of random alphabetic characters that never recurred.
I have no idea what that was meant to accomplish.
I haven't found an easy script for turning off comments without deleting the ones I have today. But I do know that running MT 2.6 is like running an unpatched Windows NT 3.1 server in the real world: the attackers win.
Pretty soon, I'll be self-hosting from home, and I'll set up a blog. I'm not sure I'm ready to retire MOOP right now, but I'm actively thinking about it.
Sorry about the scarcity of messages. I've just finished posting images from my travels...
Ok, I really need to learn how to turn off comments on old entries -- blog maintenance is taking too much time.
But, oh, the joy! I just got comment spam from someone claiming to be Blog Ethics writing:
Help stop evil word of mouth marketers like BzzAgent.com by supporting the Blog Publishers Association founded by legendary blogger Jason Calacanis.
Read their warning/disclaimer at this site
How weird.
I mentioned that I'm thinking about mortgages. Fortunately, they are a lot less eye-bleedy now that I've started reading up.
(Side note: I reached mutual agreement on a place on Saturday. If there are really, really good reasons why I shouldn't live on First Hill, near the Swedish Hospital2 off Madison, now is the time to tell me.)
One of the things I've realized, though, is that one's mortgage profile really reflects one's political outlook, especially in toda'ys low-interest-rate climate. Pretty much everyone agrees that interest rates will never be much lower than they are today: they will rise. Whether they rise fast or slow, sooner or later, they will wander upwards1. Combine this low price with the recent election, and we have a great testbed for linking politics to economics that the Crooked Timber crowd might be into.
(More below the fold...)
Today, a mortgage agent explained it to me this way: 90% of homeowners refinance or sell within 5 years. And interest rates have stayed below 7.9% for 180 of the last 200 years. And houses appreciate 5% per year. So it really doesn't matter if I sign up for a 5 year ARM or a fixed-rate mortgage: it really doesn't matter. After all, in five years, my mortgage will be a thing of the past, an artifact of my changed work and social life, a memory of my old single life or of my time living in Washington or of my time in a condo.
The last time that mortgage rates were high was the dot-com boom. Before that was the cold war, and the junk-bond crash of the mid-90s. None of those apply today. Not only that, but we have redefined "full employement" from 5% to 4%, and the job market is taking on more jobs. The Fed has done an excellent job of keeping interest rates low, and Europeans and Asians continue to be hungry to buy up American debt. I'll have no trouble selling at a profit in five years, or rates will be low enough to refinance handily.
A cynic might note that all twenty of the years with high interest rates have been in the last 40. That the US trade deficit is at astounding levels, and that today's news has the president proposing another few billion of debt. That the dollar is being propped up by Asian investors, who may stop paying for it. That serious inflation may be in our short-term future and we may not dig ourselves out of it for a decade or more -- after all, this just happened in Japan. In five years, rates may be impossible and everyone will be hunkered down or paying discount prices for expensive houses. And I'll be stuck with a floating mortgage at 10%.
Now, I suppose if one follows the Way of the Elephant, one is likely to believe the first scenario, which lines up well with their party line; if one follows the Path of the Donkey, one is more likely to believe the second. If one believes the first, one is likely to buy an adjustable, short-term mortgage.
So, what does the red/blue financial map look like? Are houses in red Orange County going with ARMs, while condos in blue San Francisco attached to 30 year fixed rate?
Do any sociologists around here have a copy of local economic news, and a decent voting map? There's a confounding variable or two in here ("people who are buying houses", for example), but the raw data should be interesting. I know there have been studies looking at things like "optimism," or "consumer confidence", but I'd like to see how these fairly simple parameters line up against each other.
---
1 Papers that model Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) as less risky are kind of startling to me. An ARM is never going down, after all. It might come back to the same rate, but not much better than that.
2 Hey, if we can have a Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, there can be a Swedish Hospital in Seattle, ok?
I'm working on trying to buy a condo somewhere out here in the Seattle area. Turns out the really interesting bit is financing it.
(Read below. This is mostly trying to straighten out my own thoughts).
Unless I show up with 20% of the house value in hand, I need to somehow get a mortgage for more than 80% of the cost. The old way of handling this was to get a large mortage for, say, 95%. But that triggered something called "Mortgage Insurance" -- essentially, buying a policy against my own default
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, mortgage insurance seems to be gone. You now handle this with a second mortgage at substantially higher rates. This mortgage can be a line of credit, or home equity loan, or a conventional mortgage. (For the second, it appears to be centered around an odd legal fiction: you take out a loan against the down payment on the house... but you then spend that money on a down payment for the house.) Either way, somehow this dodges, for those with adequate credit, the nastiness of mortgage insurance.
So then: Do I want my main mortgage to be fixed, or adjustable, or balloon? Adjustable immediately (which is cheaper) or later (which locks in good rates for five or ten years, but then can jump a huge distance)? Am I risk-loving enough to balloon in ten years (meaning I have to pay off the whole balance then), or should I wait for fifteen?
Am I going to live here for more than two or three years?
Do I want to make a dent against principle (which hardly happens in the first few years anyway), or am I ok with an interest-only mortgage (which means that I make no progress against principle at all?) for a few hundred dollars less a month?
The set of combinations is mind-boggling. And that's before I whip out the spreadsheets: "I need to contribute at least 5% of my own. And I need to have two months' payments set aside in my bank account. And I need to have closing costs. But the seller will pay some of them."
And that's where my head begins to hurt.
A quick look over my blog from the last year shows that I'm presenting myself in interesting ways. The loyal blog reader knows about lots of stuff in my life, from my move from SoCal to Seattle, to my minor obsession with typefaces. They know that I am involved in an open source visualization package, and they know that I travelled to far away places.
Which is why I was startled at how startled I was to be approached at CSCW a few weeks ago. "Hi, I've read your blog."
It was a little weirder than that, actually. The question was, Have you ever had someone who reads your blog come up to you at a conference maybe, and tell you, 'Hi! I've read your blog.'
The answer was no. Until that moment, at which point, it was yes.
And I got this weird, profoundly uncomfortable feeling that I'm still trying to figure out. It's weird: the blog is filled with all sorts of information that I'm fine with being public, and, indeed, I post it because I want it said, and read. And I've been blogging stuff that outsiders might find of interest because I'm ok with blurring part of my social world with part of my technical world.
Then again, I have a vision of who is reading this. I know most of my readers, I think, in person; I have a few who have wandered by at various times. But I suppose a mysterious other (the hypothetical person who buys my blog at auction perhaps?) will know a lot more about me than I am ready for them to know.
Facts, individually, are weak little things. Facts, collectively, make my life well-considered (and, thus, to Socrates, worth living) and well-examined and well --
Well, exposed.