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Imagine you were considering your options on a $350,000 traditional home loan. Assuming you have a FICO score of 725 (US average⁽¹⁾), your interest rate might be 6.259% for a 30-year fixed mortgage⁽²⁾. At the end of 30 years, you’ll own your home outright for a total cost of about $776K–that’s $427K in interest⁽³⁾.

By contrast, a 15-year loan will net you a lower interest rate of about 6.011%. Your monthly payments will be a little bit more, but you will own the home in half the time for a total cost of about $532K–only $182K in interest.

Assuming a paltry average annual appreciation rate of 10% (US average since 1980 has been 11.28%⁽⁴⁾), your house would be worth 417% it’s original value after 15 years. That $350K house would sell for about $1.5 million. Assuming you sold it and put the cash towards a bigger home costing $1.85M, taking out a new $350K loan to cover the remainder, you would only pay another $182K in interest in the second 15 years. Sell that house after another 15 years of 10% appreciation and you bank $7.7 million dollars. By comparison, the original house would sell for $6.1M in 30 years.

The net effect of the two fifteen year mortgages is living in a much better home for half the time and only paying a grand total of $364,000 in interest while neting about $1.6M more in value after 30 years. That’s quite a difference! You might be wondering why anybody would opt for a 30 year home loan.

On the other hand, you might have figured out that the 30 year $350K mortgage with its lower payments might be the most you can afford each month; that in order to make that same payment amount on a 15 year loan, you can only borrow $255K⁽⁵⁾.

Well, that stinks. In the Seattle area, that’s 14.5% fewer houses in your price range and 20% less square footage in those you can afford (worse still if you want the same number of rooms)⁽⁶⁾. However, it’s not all bad news. If you’re willing to go the 15/15 route, your second home would be worth $434K in today’s housing dollars⁽⁷⁾, giving you 41% more selection and 22% more space than the 30 year home.

So what’s a buyer to do?

I suggest you start any home buying process by getting a pre-approval for a 15 year loan (higher payments, shorter term). Then, shop the market and see if you can find anything that will fit your needs for the foreseeable future. If you find a house you can call home, snatch it up and start building more equity at a faster pace. If you exhaust the market and can’t find the amount of house you need on your 15-year budget, go back to your loan agent and have them recalculate your pre-approval for a 30 year loan and resume your search.

If must choose the traditional 30 year loan, there is no need to fret. Your needs and budget simply lie in the margin between price ranges of these two loan types. Most of the home buyers out there fall into this range and the seem to be quite happy with it.

If you find you can fill your needs in a 15 year loan, congratulations; you are able to live well within your means and you will eventually reap considerable benefits from your good budgeteering.

References
#1 wikipedia.com – FICO info
#2 myfico.com – FICO/loan rate calculator
#3 moneychimp.com – Compound interest calculator
#4 ofheo.gov – US historical housing appreciation data
#5 equifax.com – Financial calculators
#6 redfin.com – House value mapping
#7 bls.gov – US historical inflation data

We live in a world where people are increasingly finding writing more than one paragraph to be a physically painful experience. These days, you are probably less likely to find stationary in your desk drawer than at any time since the great depression. I certainly don’t own any stationary. The closest thing I come to proper letter writing paper is a yellow notepad and several pads of graph paper.

Enter incompetech.com’s Plain Paper Grapher. You can choose from a variety of very useful lined paper generators; all sorts from graph to dots, logarithmic to polar graph paper, music notation to traditional simple lined paper and much more!

All of the paper generators have a variety of options to make your graph or lined sheet experience the best you’ve ever had. Once you’ve set the parameters, the tool quickly generates a pristine PDF for you to use once or print off a whole notebook with. All this and no ads on the final product!

This is a very good idea and it is very well executed. Kudos, incompetech.com!

Search Google for real estate. As of a recent Google update, you should see Google’s newest search integration feature. (If not, try refreshing. This appears to be in a testing phase right now.)

This new feature seems to go head-to-head with the most basic of features (mapping properties for sale) offered by real estate mapping guru site zillow.com and to a lesser degree redfin.com.

Don’t want spammers emailing you through your website’s contact link? The answer is simple: Forget email. Give the internet your phone number.

There are a number of services available which provide a cheap or free voicemail box with a number based in just about any major city. I’ve used k7.net to create my own voicemail/fax line that feeds straight into my email box.

If you’d like to reach me, feel free to give me a call any time, 24×7 at 206.666.3187. If you ever lose the number, don’t worry. You can find it on the front page of my website.

According to their website, TRI-CELL ENTERPRISES is a leading distributor of high quality electronics geared toward the true audiophile market. They have an interesting range of very high-end electronics and accessories for those with the most exquisite musical tastes.

Okay, fine. Let’s look at some of their products:

High-end Amplifiers:

Seems reasonable. Probably could use a power cleaner to go with it.

 
Quality subs

Nice, nice. Very nice.

 
Top-notch turntables

I have heard that vinyl is one of the best means of reproducing audio. Or something.

 
Magical cones that magically make your music better via means of magic

Wait, what?

 
50LB, 3 Motor, Full Suspension System Mounted Turntable

Okay, now they’re getting out of hand.

 
Cable Supports

Cable lifts/dampeners? Are the shock waves of the Persian cat crossing your sound dampening shag rug really that detrimental to your Journey LP?

 
The “Analog Disk” and “HRS Nimbus” will rescue you from harmful analog interference.

Placing checkers on top of your records and under the feet of your turntable is just so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?

 
Shakti Electromagnetic Stabilizer

If only I got a nickel for every time I wished I had a hunk of very expensive metal to place on top of each of my electronic components in order to dampen the electromagnetic interference…

 
SpJ and La Luce CS Centoventi


I understand that having a heavy turntable makes for better playback, what with inertial stability and all. However, a 100lb Plexiglass, steel edge weighted turntable is nearly as much overkill as a diesel engine smoothie machine.

 
So, seriously… This site displays a decent array of wholly reasonable products, but there is a disturbingly large number of mindless audio toys that seem to be more snake oil than sound-worthy. Can anyone dispel my misgivings on products such as the Shakti, or perhaps just confirm that the most hard-core audiophiles really are this dumb?

I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.

Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/

Add it to your calendar:

CAPSoff has embarked on a crusade to eliminate the Caps Lock key from standard keyboards. I have used applications such as Toggler for Windows for years to automatically control the Caps Lock key, but the idea of eliminating it altogether seems fairly reasonable. It is true that it causes more headaches than it prevents for most people.

If not eliminated, I would strongly advocate popular operating systems adding an option to delay toggling the Caps Lock key on until it is held for a few seconds. Several applications already include a “smart caps” feature that automatically turns off caps if you begin a sentence holding down the shift key and then type several more letters without it, as you would if you didn’t mean to turn on caps. Enabling these features system wide would prevent the most common problem of inadvertent caps typing.

Another solution would be to remove the Caps Lock key and make a new convention of pressing both shift keys at the same time to trigger lock-shift. It may seem obscure, but Ctrl+Alt+Del was also obscure to you at one time as well.

See: http://capsoff.blogspot.com/

Jon Bell, a fancypants web designer I work with, has designed a quality web game called GroupThink. In short, it is a collaborative game about creating amusing/creative/insightful sentences one word at a time.

“Be yourself, trust yourself, and don’t wear perfume.”
–Groupthink