While I agree with this attitude towards obscure acronyms, SICP is widely known among those who voluntary enter a site called Hacker News, and it's easily searchable too.
While there is some "leverage" in mortgage, you actually need to pay the whole sum, and with interest too, so taking a $200k loan means you pay usually something like $250k for it in the end, and this means you have to make $50k profit to not lose. And houses age too. If the location is superb you can justify it as an investment, otherwise it's pure nonsense in every way. Thinking normal housing as an investment is one of those reasons why we can't have nice things.
If I take a leveraged position on a stock via margin trading and the stock goes to $0 (or, more realistically, it dips in value enough that I get a margin call) then I owe the whole balance, not just what I put up as capital. This is true of literally any leverage. And on top of that, I pay a margin rate in the form of an interest payment based on the amount of money I have outstanding beyond my capital. Sounds familiar, right? Because it's exactly identical. The only difference between a mortgage and a margin interest payment is that a mortage is amoritized across the term and is a fixed period, whereas margin interest is indefinite and acts more like a HELOC (i.e., you only pay interest on the amount that you have outstanding... and that amount can vary over time).
I absolutely hate the idea that "paying X in interest means that's money you have to earn in addition to make it worthwhile". No, it's not. It's money you are paying to free up extra capital elsewhere that can be invested more efficiently. Unless you're spending well beyond your means (which, admittedly, some people do), then paying interest on a mortgage payment should mean making much much more elsewhere by investing money you would have spent on buying a house in cash.
You HAVE to pay back your debt if you want to pocket all your profits. If your down payment is 25k and you buy 250k house, you need to borrow 225k for your "leverage". Now you get lucky and years later, AFTER you have paid 25k + 225k + interest + fees which amounts to at least 300k, prices have gone up and you can sell that house for 400k. Nice you think! I will make 375k profit just by investing 25k! NO, that's not how "leverage" works at all. At that point you have paid at least 300k to get 400k which makes not that great considering it's been 20 years or so.
The logic you are using is flawed beyond all reasoning to be honest. People who are in a position to both pay back their mortgages AND invest heavily elsewhere are already rich.
You don't make 375k in profit off a 25k investment (in your example) if you sell a house for 400k. You would make 125k in profit using your numbers (minus fees, interest, etc). It's exactly how leverage works, and the equivalent in margin trading is 100% identical. The only difference with a mortgage is that you slowly deleverage yourself over time as a consequence of paying off the loan (principal that goes to value of the loan).
As an example, if you sold a house 5 years into owning it, at current interest rates, you would only have paid down approximately 6% of the 30 year loan, so the 'leverage' of a 20% down loan would still be ~4.8:1.
What you're skipping in this equation is that the amount of leverage drops every month when you make your payment. The average leverage is a lot lower than the starting leverage. That's what makes a mortgage pretty different from a leveraged trade.
> Unless you're spending well beyond your means (which, admittedly, some people do), then paying interest on a mortgage payment should mean making much much more elsewhere by investing money you would have spent on buying a house in cash.
There's no free lunch. Often, investments will get you a better return than your interest fees. Often they won't. And "much much more" is downright wrong.
In today's 7% interest rates, yeah it's potentially a wash. In the era of 3-4% rates, it's free money. 'much much more' is absolutely correct at 3-4%, which a lot of people currently have mortgages at today.
This. I'm sure there are lots of things I don't like about Singapore, but the fact that doing and especially dealing drugs is kinda hard and may have death penalty level consequences is a non-issue for me. Cultures that promote drug usage are disgusting and once the drugs comes into your neighborhood there is no way to just ignore it if you care about your safety. I wouldn't care too much if it was just some guys using drugs for fun and that was the end of it, but drugs destroy whole communities and I hate it.
Sounds like you haven't met those nice druggies just yet. I don't live in the USA and the law here is extremely lenient for druggies. Yet, pretty much every newspaper I read has some drug related crime in it. Robberies, mindless violence, extortion, murders, damage to properties, lovely stuff. I hate them with passion, and applaud Singaporeans for dealing with the scum appropriately.
Like I said, I would not care if druggies were decent people who just wanted to get high sometimes. However, unfortunately that is not how it works in the reality. They are the worst kind of people and I have zero sympathy for them after all the shit I've seen them do.
I tried German, but everything seemed to be lowercase even though the words.js on github seems to be fine regarding the special German capitalization.
Anyway, cool stuff. I once learned some latin by coding a simple program in C for terminal usage, basically just asking what is this word called, the wordlist file was specified as a command line argument. It was great and highly effective to memorize small chunks of words at a time. I still remember all those complex terms, so at least for me this type of learning works. This looks promising.
Generally in agriculture (and other domains too) when you maximize output the quality suffers. And tomatoes are no exception. Growing your own or finding a small hobby grower and greatly appreciating their efforts are your best bets for having actual tasty stuff. Tomatoes are no longer true luxury food but tasty tomatoes are.
In my experience those people don't even talk about ink, it's all about paper. They must think that you get just a few sheets of paper for a single tree or something like that, when in reality you get like 10 000 sheets of paper for one averagish tree. And those trees are not rare or anything like that, and the process of making paper is nowhere near as bad as electronics industry. Using paper is as ecological as it gets.
And meanwhile the actual cleaners are rarely paid even $15/hr in many places. I always hire one or two person companies if I just can find them since then it's at least honest business and not yet another hustle to get rich by using slave labour. Not just for cleaning which I only rarely outsource but for everything.
$250 sounds like a lot of cleaning, multiple hours of cleaning by one person for sure, of course depending on your location. But that really gotta be some mansion or your customers are really the absolute worst if that's always required. Meanwhile my friend who does this stuff changes the sheets and towels and wipes the tables together with some light vacuuming and that's basically it, only a few times per year he does a more thorough cleaning. And he does it by himself since he has reasoned that he wants to check the apartment personally every time it's used anyway and he can carry those operations at the same time since it takes something like half an hour to do so.
>You live in the same crumbling leaking house that half your extended family has lived in for over a century, marry who you are told to marry, learn only what the local preacher tells you to learn-- and nothing else.
My grandparents were what you would call peasants too. They liked that simple life, and they could fix the leaks in the house, and they loved each others deeply. They learned a lot of practical stuff during their lives, and in many days they travelled more than 7 kilometers by foot, later when bicycles became common the travel possibilities were enormous, life generally happened in a circle with diameter of about 50 kilometers. It's hard to imagine how their lives would have been actually better if someone taught them quantum physics and there would have been infinite consumable content and endless doomscrolling available at all times.
The experiences differ wildly, and life could definitely suck back then, especially if you were a peasant, but it could be just fine, even excellent. And that's exactly how it is these days for the modern day peasants too. I would say that the quality of life of your average amazon-worker is no better than those old time peasants. Modern medicin is the only real perk that comes to my mind, anything other is on similar level or even worse. People back then were not idiots at all.
My grandmother was born and died in the same house at age 95. She never had a job and only 8 years of public school. She worked on family owned fields, foraged forest for mushrooms and berries.
Her handwriting was like of a machine, beautiful, she left over hundred of letters and diary entries behind.
She knew what to plant and when, she knew what berries and mushrooms are growing where almost to the exact hour. She loved her kids and grandkids and made sure each of them received an education that she so much wanted for herself. But 2nd world War happened when she was 14.
I, on the other hand, an ex-amazonian, do not feel in any way superior. She had determination, organization and calmness in her life, and I feel I'm in a constant chase, even though I earn more in a month, than she earned in a year. I pay a lot of money, so that my kids can eat healthy. I still feel I can not provide the healthy lifestyle for my kids, that she has provided for my father.
>I still feel I can not provide the healthy lifestyle for my kids, that she has provided for my father.
I don’t know what you mean by healthy, but I would guess what you feel is simply due to you knowing you could be doing better for your kids than your grandmother thought she could do for your father.
You know there’s sophisticated healthcare and medicine available, but you don’t know if you have secured access to it, and you are in the gray area where you could be in position to secure it.
Or you know there are significant advantages to sewing your kids into the right social circles, and with the right movies, you could achieve that.
So you cannot settle knowing that you could have done more (given your desire to give your kids the maximum support).
However, with your monthly income, you could easily limit your kids’ luxuries in many aspects to what your grandmother gave your dad. But you probably will not be happy with that.
Most likely food and exercise related. Feel like guy above you is basically alter ego me. In most cases sophisticated healthcare and medicine is more about fixing problems than staying healthy imo.
Am also ex-Amazon. Made good money there, which I am grateful for, but definitely didn't emerge healthier.
