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He said mortgages were a good investment, not houses. In terms of EV they're pretty high up the list, especially compared to the alternatives (buying the house outright or renting).

Nothing always goes up, but over time real estate does pretty well. Plus the tax deduction on the interest rate, and the fact that the APR is lower than what you could get with the money if invested well in other stuff make mortgages so well-worth it that even people who could buy outright almost always take them.
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I think I need to resolve more arguments with "This is not a matter that is subject to reasonable dispute."
plus it's tax advantaged

I've never really liked that reasoning. Let's assume that someone is in the 30% tax bracket (paying 30% on all qualified income). Let's say this person makes $100,000/yr. They pay $30,000/yr in taxes.

Let's say they also have a $100,000 mortgage at 5% APY. They're paying $5,000/yr in interest. That interest is deducted from their income of $100,000 leaving $95,000 taxable income. Assuming they didn't move down a bracket, they're paying $28,500/yr instead of $30,000/yr, saving them $1500/yr in taxes. Remember though that they're paying $5,000 in interest. It doesn't make financial sense in that respect.

They are paying $3500 more per year than if they paid off their mortgage.

It's seems like a way for people to live in nicer houses (or have more of them) and get a "deal" or "discount" on taxes, though in the end they are paying more.

This doesn't take into account housing prices, cash flow issues, or alternative investments. The rational I've seen in people who could pay off their houses but decide not to is either:

A: I can use this as leverage and sell later when the price is higher, making me money (risky, if the market drops)

B: I can use the money that I could use to pay off my mortgage to invest in other things (also risky, given the nature of any investments)

or C: It's a tax deduction (which from my math doesn't make sense. Maybe someone can show me a situation where the math works out better by keeping the mortgage)
If you find one that will loan it out below what I can get from a CD and somehow make the interest tax deductible, please call me.
Lingo is so important.

I was at a lecture once given by a top Australian political PR/Lobbyist. He recounted running the battle over some environmental policy that the National Farmers Federation (NFF) was opposing.

Fascinating stuff.

One of the central components was 'owning' a handful key phrases. They wanted 'sustainable' (as in economically sustainable communities).'Custodianship' (the farmers as opposed to collective) to be associated with them. He showed the progression of the use of these in the media over the campaign period.

There was a 180 degree turn. All those words completely changed sides & completely changed meanings. The public attitudes (eg for/against sustainability) didn't.

I wonder what RSS adoption would have been if the it had a better lingo to begin with.
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Serving your country by enlisting in the military is not a very popular topic especially in the SF bay area.

It's a big commitment, active or reserve. My only advice to you is that if you do this you do it for the right reasons and think of the benefits that you do accrue as bonuses, but don't expect them.

Talk with a coast guard recruiter and find out exactly what you are or are not eligible for. If you do sign a contract make sure you read it multiple times and that whatever you discussed with your recruiter is listed on that contract right there and then.

Edit: Coast guard boot camp is pretty demanding -- more so than Navy or Army. Unlike Marine boot camp, I've heard it focuses more on practical skillsets than just strict discipline and marksmenship. If you enjoy maritime activities, you will definitely find the challenge rewarding.
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That's not even remotely true. The interest rate for a mortgage right now is a few % points below what the stock market has returned, on average, over the last 50 years. That's not even counting the tax deduction for the interest.

A mortgage is basically borrowing money with which to make more money. Your mortgage payment on a place is generally not much more than your rent payment would be, and it's tax deductible and, over time, builds equity.

You can't save with the same commitment while paying rent because you have to pay rent.
Wating for RamazeCamp

:)
I agree that "RSS" is not an intuitive name, but the article is making this into a bigger issue than it is. After all they are only changing the link. :)
I'll show you the situation. If your mortgage is at 6% (I think mine is just below that) and you're in the 30% bracket (I am around there) you're effectively saving 1.8% in deductions (30% of the 6%) and therefore paying 4.2% interest right? A C.D. now pays over 5.25%.

So to clarify the math, you borrow $200k, pay $12k in interest, but get to deduct it and therefore save $3.6k, thus really paying $8.4k in interest (or 4.2% of the $200k).

Therefore if you mortgage the house (as opposed to buying it outright) and buy into a CD at 5.25% you're effectively gaining 1.05% interest for free. You're making about $2k a year. Also you're increasing your credit score, which saves you a lot of money in the long run.

In your above scenario the guy was saving 30% of 5% (1.5%, or 1500) which would put him at 3.5%. He'd be borderline retarded to pay for the house outright.

Much more intelligent (especially for someone my age, who has a good 30 years to worry about retirement, thus reducing the volatility) is to put that $200k into the market, which will probably average somewhere between 7-10% in that time. Suddenly that $200k mortgage turns into a shit ton of money in my retirement account.

Also, there's the fact that the mortgage costs only slightly more than renting a similar place (if homes as nice as mine were available for rent, which they generally aren't here) yet in 30 years I have a free and clear home I can sell.

In summation, mortgages FTW. That's why very wealthy people who could afford not to still damn near always get them.
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I was an active duty (fulltime) air force officer, and am now in the USAF reserves. I say do it. Some thoughts:

1 -- Typical time commitment is 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks per year; no matter how fast your startup is moving, you can swing that. It's probably a healthy break.

2 -- Diversity is good for computer geeks. Life -- esp a startup -- takes a range of skills. Life in any of the armed forces will help build your character and experience.

3 -- Your enjoyment will be closely tied to your reserve duty station. There are absolutely places that will suck the life out of you, but there are also places where you will feel like you are in a movie. I am very lucky to have made contacts during my active duty years that got me a great reserve position. Take the long view. If you're not happy with your first assignment, talk to people and work the system to move.

4 -- health insurance for reservists is usually not effective outside your duty time (1 weekend/month, 2 weeks/year) note this is a political football; several years ago there was limited coverage for any reservist that did not have health coverage elsewhere. I'm not certain of the current status, and the coast guard is certainly a bit different than the other services.

5 -- the pay helps. it's not a lot, but nor is it chump change -- esp if you get the officer slot.

anyhow, my two cents. good luck.

edit -- reading more of the comments: don't be too scared by the threat of deployment. (1) I'm slotted in the system as a computer engineer, and engineers don't get deployed. 10 total years in, and never even the threat of time overseas -- and that's during the wars. (2) deployment builds character, and is reasonably safe given how many people we have over there. you recall the study from a couple years ago? you're more likely to get murdered living in DC or Chicago than as a soldier in Iraq.
Thanks for your reply. I am very interested in maritime activities. One project I did a while back involved nautical electronics and I was supremely envious of the people who actually got to go out to sea for testing.

By the way, here is the article where I learned about the Patriot Express loan:

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/49297/
If it's an investment property the tax advantages are very nice. Deductions for interest, depreciation, insurance and maintenance can seriously add up. Add rent to that and the yearly cost compared to the medium-long term capital gains turns out to be quite nice.

Of course it depends on the state of the market, but if it's a long term investment, and you don't buy out in hicksville, that shouldn't be to much of an issue.

As for owning and occupying a home you're paying a mortgage on... well that's more of a lifestyle choice. I would agree that it's not really the best investment.

Note that I live in Australia, so much of this may not apply to other regions.
i believe you're referring to a comment that says "kick watchdog."

most videogame hardware contains watchdog circuitry. every so often, the software has to notify the watchdog hardware that it's still alive. if the hardware doesn't get the notification within the time allotted, it assumes the software is hung and reboots.
Since I don't have money to waste on hardware I don't need; working 'in the cloud' has been a godsend. I feel like we have finally gotten to the point where we can bootstrap web services extremely inexpensively.

I do have some reservations about data privacy, but a quality provider calms those.

Jer
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Well that goes to the definition of rich.
I'd say it is (or should be) at least partially to do with the psychology.
I think the most important point was:

"You don't get rich by being nice."

This is seldom said but often true.
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It seems like the startup community is overly excited about mobile development. After I saw TapTapTap release their sales figures I was unimpressed: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/appstore-developer-tapt...

TapTapTap got 50k in profits in the first month. Granted that seems pretty good on the surface, but isn't taptaptap one of the biggest sellers?

I don't think the mobile development market is going to be big enough for everyone that is trying to get into it. I also worry that the Android market is going to be vastly smaller than the iPhone's.
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I just got out of the Navy as an enlisted Deck Seaman and my brother is an officer and my business partner. My younger brother is also enlisted in the Coast Guard right now.

Let me say that it's possible to run a small, single person business while in the military, I did consulting/programming jobs while I was in and it was decent work. I would work while I was off duty and when I was out to sea and not on watch or during working hours. This took a lot out of me but I felt it to be worth it.

Before I continue I must say that I'm proud of my service and what I did and the military is a good fit for some people.

Let me give you my perspective about the Navy/Coast Guard. It's not fun, fun is rare and always involves a port. I like boats/ships/ocean and saw some cool things out there but it wasn't worth it for me. You spend your time split between watch, maintenance and other work. Coast Guard ships are particularly bad because most are so old, my younger brother's had holes in the starboard fuel tank, fires, parts breaking, terrible living space, etc. (One note about the fire on a ship, it will cause enormous damage and possibly kill crew members and is no joke.)

I was one of 3 people on my ship with any higher education in a technical field, many officers outside the academies are majors that don't have good hiring prospects. Because of the lack of "engineers" (not meaning in the same way the Navy does), many officers are below par in terms of leadership, planning, logical abilities. That means the people you work with are dumb, unimaginative, and boring and could get you killed. (I came close a few times because of these type of officers)

If you go enlisted your life will be run by your Chief which 90% of the time are not good leaders and not fun to work for. You would be under a 1st, 2nd and 3rd class petty officers who range in age of 19-40. These are hit and miss. My LPO/2nd class was great and will work with him any time. My former 1st class was an idiot and got fired from his job because he was so bad. My 3rd classes were 19-21 and acted as 19-21 years do, except they are your boss and you can't tell them to go fuck themselves.

As for location, it's possible you stay in the Bay. If you go active then you'll be shipped anywhere including the gulf. (I just got back from there and don't let anyone tell you there are no ships there, there are some and they always get the short end of the stick.)

When you join you'll go to boot camp or OCS depending on if you go enlisted or officer. Boot camp sucks, it's not what you think it is. OCS is 3x as hard as Boot Camp.

Benefits are overrated, I do get the new GI Bill which is awesome but don't get to use it until Fall '09 when it starts. I'll be done with school by then and so it doesn't help me at all. I'm not sure the benefits you get in the reserve other then I know it's not worth it to join just for them, you need to have a real reason.

My email is in my profile if you want to ask any other questions.
Work it out. Play with unknown factors (future rent, interest & house prices) and see what you come up with.

Mostly it's about even.

But just as you say a lot of human elements come into play. People choosing a rental or a purchase choose radically different properties so usually saying 'I would be paying this rent' is meaningless since you would be living somewhere completely different paying different rent. And saying 'I would be saving X' is also meaningless because you probably wouldn't be.

I think these usually outweigh the pure financials. many people purchase houses that would have never saved a dime. But of course, that's beatable.
> Your mortgage payment on a place is generally not much more than your rent payment would be

This is not true in most of the formerly booming real estate markets in the U.S. My coworker just bought a condo for $500K in Boston. At 6%, his interest payments are $30K/year, or $2500/month. My friends are renting a similar place for $2200/month.

I've heard it's worse in California, eg. people paying $3500/month in mortgage payments for houses that rent for $2000 or so. The recent Businessweek article on Merced mentioned homes with $3400/month that the owners walked away from, then out-of-state speculators bought it at a foreclosure auction and are now renting it back to the original owners for $1200/month.

> The interest rate for a mortgage right now is a few % points below what the stock market has returned, on average, over the last 50 years.

First rule of finance: any truly risk-free profit opportunities will be arbitraged away as soon as large numbers of people become aware of them.

That's exactly what happened in the 1990s. People suddenly realized that the stock market, on average, returned higher rates than a 30-year mortgage, so they took out mortgages and invested it in the stock market. As a result, the stock market quadrupled between 1995 and 2000. Then they pulled it out of the stock market and back into real estate between between 2001 and 2005.

It's highly unlikely that stock market returns over the next 50 years will match those of the previous 50 years, even with the cratering of the real-estate market.
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Some people hurt for cash and are frugal no matter how rich they are. This helps them get rich.
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If you use only one hand you can catch the fly (alive) inside your hand (need some training) then you open the window and let it go.
How come this contest doesn't have the standard legal rules "only in 48 US states" and "at least 18 years of age"? Every contest I see has those, though I'm curious why.
It's an interesting topic, but he missed some.

1. Cargo cultists, especially when managers.

The typical case involves statements like, "What design pattern are you using?" and "we need to document everywhere we use a design pattern" and the dreaded, "Your code doesn't have enough design patterns".

2. Bikesheds.

The bikeshed problem can lead to ridiculous and endless meetings devoted to the color of icons, or the background shading of icons, etc. I once sat through a meeting in which NINE people dicussed the color of an icon for 30 minutes. Rough labor cost: 1000 dollars [1]. Worse is the fact that bikeshedders think they are contributing, when they are actually wasting money.

3. Titles.

There is a non-trivial chance that your company's "Senior software architect" is a worse programmer than you were at age 18. Not necessarily a problem until he gets it into his head that skills are derived from titles.

[1] Math was wrong on the first run. I calculated the full-length meeting at 3000 dollars. BTW, the icon stayed blue. Light blue.
The tax deduction on mortgage interest just means you cut the interest rate by the tax bracket, eg. if you're in a 33% tax bracket and have a 6% mortgage, the effective interest rate is 4%. Makes the math easy.
Hey! How did you know i had a 1998 TV?

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Most economists still believe it will be above 7%. Thus a fixed rate mortgage now would still be worth it.

Of course the cost of renting vs buying is different depending where you go.
Matt, thanks for the great post. What's our legal liability if we maim or kill the fly?
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Don't join the military. I did. I was successful there, but I regret it. It was the worst mistake I ever made.

People who are often incompetent, if not downright malevolent, will be making decisions that affect you in profound ways, often in direct contradiction to your own ethics, and despite your own competence.

While that may be true in other fields, when you're in the military, you're stuck with the morons around you.

There are ways to get the kinds of benefits you seek, without getting involved in the kind of shameful nonsense that so often is part and parcel of the current U.S. military.
Well, our lawyer said not to bother basically. We're not randomly selecting a winner (in which case you have to jump through all sorts of legal hoops). It's a skill game with no buy-in.
Down Here (Melbourne) it's a lot more extreme then that. $2200 p/m for a $500k place is >5% return.

Here it's about 3.5%-4% for a normal family house and 4%-5% for a flat.

*Interest rates are about 8%
I don't think its a matter of "hurting for cash." Its the thought that you could lose it all just as easily as gaining it all (or actually much, much easier). And as you get older and accumulate responsibilities, the overhead of families, good schools, retirement, all weigh on you making that thought all the more horrific.

Entrepreneurs are probably much more vulnerable to these kinds of worries, because that's what they worried about (losing it all) on the way up.
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Sweet, I'm sure my friends in Quebec will be very excited.
Its main value is as a fast source of leads, not as a source of authoritative answers.

Do you say this in general or with the specific DRM/Academic context?

Wikipedia, to me, provides fantastic summaries and quite often an authoritative source, as much as I would believe a major news source, sometimes there is more trust in wikipedia.
And thus the problem with IQ tests...

Wealth isn't like that though.
If I have X Peso's (Or Dollars, etc) and you have X + Y then you are richer (for any positive value of Y).

The only 2 limits to comparison that I can see is:
* Liquidity - (ie - Bill Gates can't sell all his MSFT stock without the price crashing significantly)
* Historical Data - How do BillyG/Buffet/Slim compare to Rockefellar and King Soloman?
You forgot to deduct the income tax from the interest generated by the CD.
Ha. Lucky guess.
Should work on your viral component. It sucks but people dont tend to send many invites out of the kindness of their hearts.
Then use chopsticks. Duh.
I have a 6502 decompiler which can turn assembly code into a C-type construct (a code tree). You can also assign English names to memory locations, and even define structures. Then you decompile it with all that English and it makes readable code.

Edit: I wrote it myself and I'm usually at http://www.decompiler.org/ but the website is down, though the Lisp code of the decompiler is fine.
So if I was to sign up (and somehow learn enough about your so-called "football") then you'd ship it 12,643km to me? Cool!

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distanceresult.html?p1...
Isn't this the same as spread spectrum broadcasting?
Hmm, on second thought, we should probably fix that, but if it's you personally then what the hell. Any other Aussie will just be S.O.L.
That's why we're giving a TV to whoever refers the winner. Any other ideas there would be greatly appreciated.
In addition, it seems to me that a lot of middle-class homeowners who use this argument would be just as well off (or very close to it) with the standard deduction.

I've never owned a house. Am I missing something?

EDIT: I live in the Midwest where 2000 sqft in a nice neighborhood is very often less than $200k. This is probably a factor.
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(heavily adapted/paraphrased/quoted from 28 Feb 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Letter by Warren E. Buffett)

The explanation begins with a fundamental truth: With unimportant exceptions, such as foreclosures (in which some of a seller's losses are borne by creditors) the most that a real estate investor, in aggregate, can earn between now and Judgment Day is what the market, in aggregate, earns.

True, by buying and selling clever or lucky, investor A may take more than his share of the pie at the expense of investor B. And, yes, all investors feel richer when prices soar. But an owner can exit only by having someone take his place. If one investor sells high, another must buy high. For owners as a whole, there is simply no magic-- no shower of money from outer space-- that will enable them to extract wealth from their homes beyond that created by the markets themselves.

Indeed, owners must earn less than their markets earn because of "frictional" costs. And that's my point: These costs are now being incurred in amounts that will cause homeowners to earn far less than they historically have.
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people are scared of this thing having viruses ... because the open source and free market of the app market... just saying, linux.
Jeez dude. You make PG's 6% sound like a downright bargain :)
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Oh I see that now. Ive trained myself to be a regular user and refuse to read anything :)

I would make a bigger deal out of your reward plan. Maybe a banner or something and repeat that on every tab.
I think the clearest line between rich and not is whether you have to work to earn a living. In my book, if you're an "earner" at all, you're not rich yet.