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On Wed, 21 Apr 2021 17:57:04 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 21 Apr 2021 13:59:07 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 3:14:19 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Wed, 21 Apr 2021 09:36:14 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 8:19:08 AM UTC-4, G Ross wrote:
wrote:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2021 09:40:02 -0500, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 4/19/2021 2:48 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:14:15 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 9:36:03 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sun, 18 Apr 2021 17:07:05 -0700, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

Came across a lovely word describing all the materials you find
along the way, aka "salvage", thinggummies, doohickeys, junk, 'parts',
yard sale score, "it was just sitting there with a 'Free' sign", I
could use that for something some day - "Obtainium".

Now I'm wondering if there is an antonym, for when you have too
much obtainium and are downsizing. It's still good for something, but
you have no room for it, anymore.
Dumpster
We're going to be moving, it will be smaller, some of it can find
new homes, other is just too "specialized" as to be easily "rehomed".
SMBO is wondering why we have such a big house (3600ft^2) but I remind
her that she wants a formal dining room, a large kitchen and master
bedroom, and space for a lot of tools. We really don't need five
bedrooms but one is over the garage so doesn't really count.

Basements are hard to come by here. Hell, everything is hard to come
by now. A realtor told her that there were only 27 homes worth buying
in a neighboring county (don't know about ours). Three homes went up
for sale in our neighborhood and were sold before the sign was
planted.

My son is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. Bottom line is that if you don't
put in a full asking price, cash offer with no contingencies your offer won't
make the cut. Much of it is Covid related. Most people just don't want to
sell at this time. He said that the normal 6 months worth of inventory is
down to about 2 weeks. I'm hearing the same thing about my area.

It's at least partially covid related. The other motivator is money
at less than 2%. To your point, Clark Howard on his podcast said the
60% of home sales were over the Internet. Sight unseen. That's up
from 50% last year and 40% from the year before. The buyer's attitude
is that if they don't like the house, they'll just turn around and
sell it.

Interest rates are favorable but are being offset in the home prices
going up, way up, on a twice a week basis from new home builders.
My wife and I went into contract with a builder in September of last
year. 2 weeks later the builder canceled the contract because he could
not get materials at a price point to afford him the profit margin he
wanted. The builder literally canceled all contract builds and is only
selling spec homes. Those spec homes are going up 20% in price from the
beginning of the build to completion, 3/4 months.

Over 30 years, three or four (or six) percent adds up to some real
money. I see all sorts of new builds going well before completion.
Many are sold before breaking ground. I'm sure it's not only
materials going up faster than the homes can be built but there has to
be a shortage of subs and subs are having trouble finding the trades.

We probably could have fought this in a back logged court system but we
were not willing to risk less than what we were expecting, construction
quality wise.

Or a delay until the next century.

And yet the houses in our are cannot be built fast enough. I see a
housing crash, similar to the one in 2008, on the horizon. Once the
government stops sending every one stimulus checks that building boom
may slow.

Oh, so do I but I think it's going to be far harder. This time maybe
not so much for the buyer as the lender. At 2% interest now, lenders
are going to be in a squeeze if/when interest rates go to 5% or (maybe
far) above.

I had more or less the same attitude when I bought this house in 2011.
I needed someplace to live. I was working as a contractor at the time
with some promise of permanent employment. The market in 2011 more
than sucked and I bought a foreclosure so in the worst case I thought
I'd lose less on the house than I would on the $1500/mo x 12months
that I was paying for rent, if anything. My wife was still living in
the old house because she needed to continue at her old job (that
insurance thing).

About the same here but we built in late 2010 and moved in Dec. 24,
2010. Our house appreciated in value about 50% thru September of last
year, almost 10 years. In the last 5~6 months its value has gone up to
about 60% more than what we paid.

Ours is up almost 150% from what we paid (we actually bought in early
2011).

Think about taxes. Our old house was valued at $130 thousand in 2019,
and $189 thousand in 2020 with taxes going up comparably. I filed a
protest and got it down to
$140,000. This is just county taxes.

--
G Ross

Mixed blessings.

Less taxes paid, fewer services available. I know that services aren't always
provided/used on a equitable basis, but it would tough to complain about
those roads that aren't getting fixed at the same time people are protesting
their assessment.
OTOH, schools aren't teaching anything useful yet cost 2/3rds of the
taxes paid.

Right, so let's protest our assessments so we can lower our school taxes too,
further degrading the quality of our educational system. Then we can complain
about how terrible our educational system is and bitch about how little we are
getting for our tax dollars.

Exactly. There is nothing *to* fund but we're being charged
*enormously* for that nothing. Protest either/both sides.

It's OK, my daughter and her partner will just dig deeper into their pockets to buy
basic supplies for their students. Then they can load the supplies into their cars
and drive to school on the crappy roads that didn't get repaired because we all
protested our assessments to lower our county taxes.

It has nothing to do with supplies or anything else tangible. There
is no interest in teaching kids anything. The purpose of "education"
is to enrich unions (not teachers) and indoctrinate (not teach)
children. Answer me this - why is civics no longer taught, when
"Heather has Two Mommies" is? Or, how our mathematics scores are
among the lowest in the western world, and getting worse. Speaking of
"western world", why is that such an evil thing in education today.

When I was living in Vermont, the state education site (since buried)
had statistics for the state education system. The student to
"classroom teacher" ratio was 15:1. Not unreasonable. But there was
also one "non-classroom TEACHER" for every two classroom teacher. That
makes the teacher/student ratio more like 7.5:1. Then, for every two
"teachers" there was also a teacher's aid. Now it's more like 3-5:1.
That's just teachers. It doesn't include administration. Now, tell me
again how that's "not enough money" to teach our little darlings.

Yeah, our education taxes are too low.

Oh, then there are the teacher's retirement plans. A good friend of
my wife gets 100% of her salary after 25 years. How many retirement
plans still exist?

Full disclosu I'm collecting a retirement but about 30% of my
salary after 30+ years. Hover, I started working there 45+ years ago
and no longer exists and hasn't for 30 years. They've also eliminated
the health insurance part of the retirement. In general, teachers
still have full benefits.

Again, tell me how our taxes are too low and how important it is for
the kiddies to be educated. They sure don't seem to be the ones
benefiting from our taxes.

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