vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
In the US market at least, there is long-term evidence that there's no strong correlation between interest rates and house prices. A less detailed Canadian study found that house prices tended to increase when rates increase.  One possible reason: interest rates can increase when the economy is doing well (needs less help), which is also the time when people feel more confident about buying. The are many reasons why Toronto condo prices may come down (such as oversupply), or may increase (empty nesters downsizing).  But, by itself, a small increase in interest rates appears, based on history, to be unlikely to lead to a substantial drop in prices over a short timescale.
One way to think of net worth is to think if you sold everything you owned, how big of a pile of money would be standing next to you (assuming your net worth is positive). If you started with $100K and then bought a house worth $100K you would have $0 in the bank and a house.   If you sold that house for $100K you would pay the realtor 6% (typically) or $6K leaving you with $94K.    This means the act of buying your house has reduced your net worth by $6K. I asked a related question about how to value your home in your net worth.
Coffee is much popular and cheaper here. I can get a can of coffee for under 100yen (about 1 dollar) if I buy it at the right place, a little more if it's from a vending machine or convenience store. Monster is twice that price, and red bull is 3 times (the size of drinks are smaller too). There are many brands of canned warm and cold coffee.     Many cans are in a bottle shape, and have a screw top lid. Really convenient to carry around.
Being underwater a little is not all that scary, but those who talk of being underwater are typically underwater by quite a lot. The amount of money they owe is large compared to their yearly income. Consider a metaphor. I put you in a hole. Its only 1 foot deep. You're not too concerned. If you want to leave, you can step out of it. Now we look at a deeper hole, 3 feet. Now you're still not too concerned. You can't just walk out, but if you need to get out you can wiggle your way up. 6 feet. Now you start getting nervous. Climbing out is getting trickier and trickier. You may not be able to move in response to a changing enviornment around you, because you're stuck in a hole. Now make the hole 10 feet. Now you can't reach the edges. Now you're in trouble. You have lost all mobility. You can't get out under your own power. Now if something bad happens (such as losing your job or a sudden health issue), you can't move around to solve the problem. This is the issue that arise from underwater mortgages. Say you lose your job because the job market in your area dried up (think Detroit in the big auto manufacturer crash). You need to move. You are legally endebted to a lender for your existing underwater house by more than you can sell it for. You need to pay for the privilege to sell it. You still owe payments on it, so if you just buy a new house (or rent) in the new state, you're paying for twice as much property. You can't just shuffle the underwaterness from your old house to your new house because the new lender has no interest in giving a loan for more than the value of the new home. The only options you have to play with is renting the old house, which many underwater families did, or bankrupcy. If the area you were in is depressed, you may not be able to rent the house for enough to cover your mortgage. This is the fear of being underwater.
I don't think the DRM has anything to do with it. Amazon is cheap and convenient. Finding specific e-book torrents can be a hassle, and causes people a small amount of guilt for not supporting the authors. Not only does Amazon have an incredibly convenient store that's integrated with its hardware, but paying for content is guilt-free. DRM itself doesn't do shit to prevent piracy.   I don't read many books, so I neither buy nor torrent, but this is pretty much how Steam caused me to stop pirating games.
As others have said, this opinion is predicated on an assumption that early in your life you have no need to actually USE the money, so you are able to take advantage of compounding interest (because the money is going to be there for many many years) and you are far more tolerant of loss (because you can simply wait for the markets to recover). This is absolutely true of a pension pot, which is locked away for a great many years. But it is absolutely NOT true of general investments. Someone in the mid-20s to mid-30s is very likely to want to spend that money on, say, buying a house. In which case losing 10% of your deposit 3 months before you start looking for a house could potentially be a disaster. Liekwise, in your mid-40s if your child's school/college fund goes up in smoke that's a big deal. It is a very commonly espoused theory, but I think it is also fundamentally flawed in many scenarios.
We have realized from our experience that rent to own is a scam. They want your money either way.   We are at the buying part, and finding it difficult to find a lender to give us full money the seller is asking us for the the house.  The house we have isn't valued at the same it was two years ago and now we are going to lose the house because we don't have the other $40 thousand they lied about at purchase price.  We will not do this again but coming from bankruptcies in the past is hard as well.
Wanting save enough money to purchase a home is an issue that a lot of people face, regardless of where they live. The most simple answer is to save, save, save. Create a budget so that you are able to track every dollar. After you do so for a few weeks, then you will be able to see exactly how your money is being spent and where you can cut costs. If you need to, pick up a second or third job in your spare time. Then you can contribute your salary from that to your savings. If possible, consider moving in with friends or family - paying them rent of course, but it might be cheaper than renting on your own (you might also consider exchanging house work for rent). Times might be lean when you are saving, but you should remind yourself of what the ultimate goal is.  I am unfamiliar with the government policies in Pakistan, but perhaps there is some kind of housing relief program where you can relocate to temporarily? Your situation is unfortunate and I sympathize with you. Best of luck!
The Central Banks sets various rate for lending to Banks and Paying interest to Banks on excess funds. Apart from these the Central Banks also sets various other ratios that either create more liquidity or remove liquidity from Market.  The CPI is just one input to the Central Bank to determine rate, is not the only deciding criteria. The CPI does not take into account the house price or the cost of renting in the basket of goods.  One of the reasons could be that CPI contains basic essentials and also the fact that it should be easily mesurable over the period of time. For example Retail Price of a particular item is easily mesurable. The rent is not easily mesurable.
I switched from Quicken for Mac to Moneydance, and have not regretted it.   I see only one weakness in MD compared with Quicken: its reporting is not very good.  Your information is all there and well organized, but sometimes it's hard work to extract it in a convenient form. Of course a lot depends on what you need from the application, but I strongly recommend you take a look at MD before deciding.
Used in our day to day activities is going out the house and get something more important that our family desires. But since the economy is not achieving a lot today, thinking about the top dividend stocks is essential. One component that ought to be looked at is the charge.   If you're accustomed with buying what you see without even going through the package price, you must modify the way you live your life. Persistence is very necessary for you to be able to find the top dividend stocks. When possible, you should get a less costly alternative on the costly items you utilized to purchase. Be persistent and also save money!
"Its so funny how people complain about the price of food - the price of food in the US (for the quality) is so far and away better than the food you get in other countries. Outside of large areas in developing countries you can't get fresh food at all - or if you do its off the back of a truck and the food is full of bugs and looks emaciated.    The problem with Amazon entering the food market is that food is a penny-margin business. Walmart makes but a few cents on food sales - this is because the market for food is so large and is nearly perfectly competitive. If a tomato seller says ""im raising the price of my tomatoes 1c"", then Walmart will simply find another competitor to sell at -1c lower.  The only way Amazon will be able to break into the market is by doing the two things they are doing now:   1. Buy a company that brings to market the same shit as everyone else but with a product differentiation (organic). This way they can front load the already expensive per ticket sales to hide step 2.   2. Make shopping more convenient. With the margins being so low - the cost of buying food at Amazon (at first) will be insanely expensive. Think wholefoods with a surcharge."
"It doesn't make a lot of sense to buy a house/condo and rent it out now. On the other hand, I think finishing your basement and then renting it out is an excellent idea.  The ROR is excellent as long as you can deal with the ""strangers"" in the basement, have the extra driveway space and negative association with renting out your basement. HTH"
Spring is here and the need of self-storage has increased more than ever before. There are valid reasons for the increase in demand of self-storage space and there is nothing much you can do about it. Whether you are looking for a self-storage in Sutton Coldfield or in Erdington, you would surely face some stiff competition in renting a self-storage unit.
&gt;What may have been a clever idea in its infancy has grown into a blob which is destructive to the growth-creating and consensus-building prospects of free market capitalism  I wonder how many IPOs this guy has underwritten. I wonder how often he shorts right before earnings to try to make a quick buck.  Hedge funds are all speculation. This guy is completely full of shit. He acts like he is doing some holy duty of balancing the market but all he fucking does is move money around when it's convenient in hopes for rapid returns.
The big problem with your argument is the 10% per year figure, because in the long term (especially if adjusted for inflation) the prices have not been going up nearly that fast. Here is a site with some nice graphs for prices over the last 40 years, and it's pretty clear to see that pretty much just what you were talking about happened, prices outpaced the ability of people to pay, which progressively locked out more and more first time buyers, and eventually that breaks the cycle, pops the bubble, and the prices adjust. There is always of course the choice to NOT buy a house, and just rent, or if you had the feeling that you are near the top of a bubble, SELL and go back to renting.  It's interesting to note that in general, rental rates did not increase at nearly the same pace as the prices in the recent bubble. (which of course made it harder for anyone who bought 'investment' properties in the recent 8 years or so to cover their payments via rental revenue.)
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Putting money into your Amazon gift card balance is also a very convenient option, but I like these recurring Red Cross and Wikipedia ideas also.
Isn't most of today's shopping all about convenience? Isn't the Amazon go concept much more convenient for a shopper than the current situation? Do you not think they will implement that into all Whole Foods stores?   People change where they buy their products based on price changes and convenience all the time.
Of course there's nobody selling houses because everybody and their mother is renting them out and using Airbnb to make every room or floor into another source of income. And when large corporations are doing the same, nobody is selling, then who is buying? Well whoever can afford it as prices go up and as urban areas grow. Meanwhile interest rates are high and possibly going higher making it difficult for anybody to get in without large amounts of cash. Who will have this cash? People who make money on their current real estate, who are currently renting them out, and want to buy more to rent out.
"I had an inkling that is what you meant.  I am no lawyer (or historian), but it seems a convenient warping of the 14th amendment, i.e., a corporation clearly is as human as a(n ex-)slave.    Sadly, so often you find that racism has been the lever used to enable policy inflicted suffering.  It also serves to keep people from ever objectively discussing and resolving the root issues.  ""Don't try to play the race card...""  Um, but the history..."
"I would split the savings as you may need some of it quickly for an emergency. At least 1/2 should be very liquid, such as cash or MMA/Checking.  From there, look at longer term CDs, from 30 day to 180 day, depending upon your situation.  Don't be surprised if by the time you've saved the money up, your desire for the car will have waned.  How many years will it take to save up enough?  2? 5? 10?  You may want to review your current work position instead, so you'll make more and hopefully save more towards what you do want. Important: Be prepared for the speed bumps of life. My landlord sold the house I was renting out from under me, as I was on a month-to-month contract.  I had to have a full second deposit at the ready to put down when renting elsewhere, as well as the moving expenses. Luckily, I had done what my tax attorney had said, which is ""Create a cushion of liquid assets which can cover at least three months of your entire outgoing expenses.""   The Mormon philosophy is to carry at least one year's worth of supplies (food, water, materials) at all times in your home, for any contingency. Not Mormon, not religious, but willing to listen to others' opinions. As always, YMMV.  Your Mileage May Vary."
"Buying lotteries tickets makes you the fish not the fisher. Just like casinos or drugs. If you like, you can call buying tickets an ""investment"" or better yet, a donation in the lottery's owner wealth. No real investor is dumb enough to get into a business where 99.9999999% of the ""investors"" lose EVERYTHING they invested. Besides, a real investments means BIG money. You can call it so if you are ready to sell your house and buy tickets of all those money, but still, the risk is so high that it's not worth it."
"House prices do not go up. Land prices in countries with growing economies tend to go up. The price of the house on the land generally depreciates as it wears out. Houses require money; they are called money pits for a reason. You have to replace HVAC periodically, roofs, repairs, rot, foundation problems, leaks, electrical repair; and all of that just reduces the rate at which the house (not the land) loses value. To maintain value (of the house proper), you need to regularly rebuild parts of the house. People expect different things in Kitchens, bathrooms, dining rooms, doors, bedrooms today than they do in the past, and wear on flooring and fixtures accumulate over time. The price of land and is going to be highly determined by the current interest rates. Interest rates are currently near zero; if they go up by even a few percent, we can expect land prices to stop growing and start shrinking, even if the economy continues to grow. So the assumption that land+house prices go up is predicated on the last 35 years of constant rigorous economic growth mixed with interest rate decreases. This is a common illusion, that people assume the recent economic past is somehow the way things are ""naturally"". But we cannot decrease interest rates further, and rigorous economic growth is far from guaranteed. This is because people price land based on their carrying cost; the cost you have to spend out of your income to have ownership of it. And that is a function of interest rates. Throw in no longer expecting land values to constantly grow and second-order effects that boost land value also go away. Depending on the juristiction, a mortgage is a hugely leveraged investment. It is akin to taking 10,000$, borrowing 40,000$ and buying stock. If the stock goes up, you make almost 5x as much money; if it goes down, you lose 5x as much. And you owe a constant stream of money to service the debt on top of that. If you want to be risk free, work out how you'd deal with the value of your house dropping by 50% together with losing your job, getting a job paying half as much after a period of 6 months unemployment.
&gt;Landlords vs slumlords - somehow I doubt if the author lives in a real slum with a landlord that provides substandard housing. Why call a landlord a derogatory name for providing you a place to live&gt;?  Because my apartment needed 5 repairs in the first four months of renting.  Because my landlord claims to be a nonprofit university (MIT owns large portions of Cambridge) when it's time to pay property taxes but increased the rent 27% over the rent from 3 years ago when they rented the apartment to me.  Because renting out housing stock as old as this by doing the minimal necessary repairs to get it back on the market every year is basically just economic rent-seeking on the value of living in this city.
I don't think you know who you are talking to. I build houses for a living. I'm a guy that works with his hands. I hire hundreds of people who work with their hands for a living.  Do I assume the worst of the guys that work with me? Absolutely not. There are plenty that do great work and are a joy to work with. However, there are plenty who are not. One of my workers bought a giant truck while dodging child support for the 4 children he has with 3 different women. Should he own a house? Is he capable of consistently making the payments while maintaining it? If he didn't get paid on Friday he left the job because he couldn't afford his bills. When he was overpaid on a Friday he blew $400 partying over the weekend and was right back to broke by the next Friday.  It's a pretty silly argument to suggest that everyone is capable of owning a house. A house is a statement of value in society. It takes hundreds of people thousands of hours to build. That work culminates into a finished product that is paid off over a long period of time. If you are untrustworthy and cannot handle finances, you can't afford a house. If you do not provide the value to society that is comparable to the house you want, you can't afford a house.  That being said, the initial argument is as bogus as yours. I have a 2 bed 1 bath apartment for rent for $500 right now inside 610 loop in Houston TX. It's 10-15 minutes from downtown.
I'm glad that you feel like being fair and equitable to your party. Other answerers are, of course, correct that being fair and equitable to your girlfriend is not in your best interests but that's not what you're trying to do here and I commend you for it. There is nothing that stops you drawing up a simple legal contract giving your girlfriend a share of the value of your house in return for her payments. Just get it signed and witnessed and checked over by a legal representative. You can include reasonable terms for the money to be paid back if you separate - perhaps when you sell the property or within two years of the breakup - that don't put you in immediate danger of losing the property. Just make clear that this contract is between you and her for a sum of money linked to the value of your house; it does not establish any legal claim on your house itself. A reasonable level for her to claim the property would be one half of the change in equity between when you start joint paying and when you separate - should that happen.
Also, does anyone know of any books on doing this sort of thing, i.e. renting out half of your home to a tenant and living in the ret? Head down to your local library. Mine has a state guide for renters and another one for landlords. There will likely be a lot of Nolo Press books around there too.  You can also research the property tax on a lot; many counties run an arcGIS server that will tell you who owns a given property, what the assessed value is and the total tax bill, etc.
"Others have already explained why lotteries have negative expected value, so in that sense it is never wise to buy a lottery ticket.  I will provide an alternative view, that it is not always unwise to buy a lottery ticket even though the expected value of the lottery ticket is lower than its cost (i.e. a loss). The question is what you mean with ""wise"" A (not completely unlikely) scenario is one where your life (financially) suck, and even if you saved the cost of the ticket (instead of buying it) your life would still suck. Even if you saved the cost for a ticket every week for 10 years, your live would not be essentially better. You could maybe afford a TV, or a new car in 40 years, but if you were to quantify the happiness of your life it would still be essentially crappy. But winning the lottery would significantly improve your life and make you happy. So in this scenario there are two choices, either save the money for 0% chance of a happy life, or spend it on a ticket for a (extremely) small chance of a good life. Yes, the expected value of saving the money is higher than when buying the ticket, but ""expected happiness"" is higher when buying the ticket (non-zero).  This is clearly an extreme example, but variants of this might apply (the essence is that your valuation of the money is non-linear, 1 million will make you more than 1000 times as happy as 1000.)"
"Insurance companies on average make money by selling insurance, which means you lose money on average by dealing with them. The insurance is not gambling where the house always wins. This expression is literal in gambling, because that's how they set the odds. Insurance isn't necessarily similar. Example. Suppose there's 10% chance that $10,000 the boat sinks due to a defect. So, on average your loss is going to be $1,000. The variability of your loss measured as its standard deviation is $2,846. The variability of loss is a measure of risk. Now, let's look at two $10,000 boats. There's 1% chance that they both sink, and 18% chance that only one of them sinks. So, the expected loss is, unsurprisingly, $2,000. However, the variability of expected loss is $3,842, not quite twice the risk (variability) of a single boat accident. If you imagine that instead of a couple of boats the insurance has 100 boats, the variability of their loss (hence their risk) will increase only by a factor of 10, not 100 compared to a single boat. This means that their risk in relative terms is smaller than yours, the individual insurer's. What I tried to show was that it is possible to both of you and the insurer to benefit from the arrangement. It doesn't mean that it happens in every case, but generally it does. That's why in actuarial science there's a term fair price. UPDATE I was trying to avoid talking about utility here, because it's an involved subject, but you're dragging the discussion in this direction :) You're right that expected value cannot explain the insurance. The reason is that there's another concept that's necessary in addition to the objective measures such as expected value and risk: I mean the utility function or risk-aversion. So, in short you need to maximize expected utility, not the expected payout. Here's a toy example with the same boat. Assume that insurance is $150, and they pay the entire boat's value in case of accident, i.e. $10,000.