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The house I was born in sold for $4000

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Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#111

Post by declan »

robotresearcher wrote: post #101
declan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a single-family house on the San Francisco peninsula which I bought three years ago (and spent the summer of 2010 remodeling it and the summer of 2011 landscaping it). What others have said elsewhere in this thread is true: owning a home limits your flexibility in terms of moving for another job. It ties up a lot of your assets, for most people, in a decaying pile of lumber that needs maintenance and upkeep and…

| And mortgage interest is tax deductible. In some jurisdictions. Not Canada.

Quite right. What's interesting is that the Canadian homeownership rate is similar to that of the U.S., last I checked, even despite the different tax treatments.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#112

Post by waterlesscloud »

sliverstorm wrote: post #85
nitrogen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see tech workers breaking out the saws and sandpaper and building quality neighborhoods in their spare time... Why not? Building physical things for yourself can be just as satisfying as building virtual things for others.

Because as much as engineers tend to think they are experts in all fields, they aren't actually. So take a bunch of working professionals who just came home from an 8-hour day, and see how much quality skilled labor in fields they don't know anything about you can get. I mean, I like building things, yes. I make small tables, I replace parts on my car. But I can't really hope to raise a decent house, even if I had 20…

You only need a couple of trained architects to oversee the whole deal.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#113

Post by manglav »

acgourley wrote: post #93
istorical wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need for someone to buy a few thousand acres and let people build structures. You could move to several 250,000+ population cities in the Midwest and there are already startup communities, incubators, and coworking spaces. I live in Omaha and went to school in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is getting gigabit internet soon from CenturyLink, Kansas City has Google Fiber. I worked at an incubator in Lincoln for the summ…

Just a datapoint that I (as a healthy young adult) live on 18k. It's a comfortable life in a beautiful neighborhood near UC Berkeley. You could do better if you moved into an oakland apartment or bart-enabled suburb.

tangent: can I email you? I'm moving to SF in September and trying to conserve my funds, and it seems you know the area quite well. I'd be happy to buy you a drink in exchange for your time.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#114

Post by xyzzy123 »

cmbaus wrote: post #41
simonsarris wrote: post #37

(This is more of a response to several of the comments posted so far.) I'd like to come to the defense of low-cost living but also acknowledge that (expensive) city living has its obvious pluses that people already in SV might be taking for granted. I created a low-cost living situation while living in a big (old/pretty) house in New Hampshire by renting out all of the rooms to friends. My rent is "free" and utilitie…

I think I've seen your posts on this topic here before. I actually lived in a shared housing situation in a large victorian mansion in Epping, NH in my 20s. I really enjoyed it. I wanted to do the same thing when I moved to Tahoe as the owner, but couldn't afford a house big enough to make it work out. If I was in my 20s and working in an area as engineer with a reasonable cost of living, I would seriously consider t…

Where I come from, it's so common we have a word for it: flatting.

Almost everybody lives in flats for at least the first few years after leaving home, and often much longer.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#115

Post by rdl »

dfc wrote: post #107
rdl wrote: post #31

I'd really like to see a low-tax, low regulation part of the US (WA, NV, TX, or TN) where someone buys a few thousand acres and lets people build "temporary" structures (with power/fiber/wifi/etc.) for living and solo-working, combined with some more permanent structures for offices, meetings, socialization, etc. Essentially like a 2-5 year Burning Man encampment campus for various startup projects. If someone's "per…

Where are you going to get staff for the great medical care facilities? I'm dating a girl who just graduated from medical school and I can't imagine any of her friends wanting to move next to shantytown. Do you think the burning man-esque campus would work over a 2-5 year time period with burning man level of sewage treatment facilities?

Be within a medevac flight of Seattle or Austin.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#116

Post by rdl »

blader wrote: post #110
fearless wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything that is not somehow VC-istan's fault?

There are lots, but none in michaelochurch's life apparently.

Please figure out a way to connect the rise of Islamist insurgencies with VC-istan somehow :)

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#117

Post by xyzzy123 »

acgourley wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that communal living is not new (it has all the benefits you describe) but there hasn't been more of it recently. Historically this has been a common way for artists to get by and practice their skills. Given how much programming and design is artistic in nature I'm surprised there aren't more such communes these days.

Maybe broadcast tools (like craigslist) and reputation tools (like social networks) make it a lot easier for people to spontaneously organize shared living situations. This makes it so easy to join or form 4-5 person cells to share a house that it takes out the demand for a larger and more formal commune. Maybe.

I'm finding these posts kind of surreal, I had no idea shared living was NOT the default in many places.

I posted down a bit re: flatting, but in NZ it's a very common living arrangement for people in their 20s. The standard progression is:

parents -> flatting -> house

The way it goes is, first ask all your friends if they knew of a room going, failing that, see if you can find some friends to organise a lease with ("founding" a flat).

As a last resort, you crack open the newspaper to the "flatmates wanted" section and troop around houses. This has been replaced by various web sites but they're not really social - they just replaced the newspaper.

I think this is where you might have room to innovate - even in established markets like the NZ, the UK and Australia. Being able to cyberstalk your prospective flatmates a little would be really handy and could save a lot of unneccesary travel.

Usually there's a mini interview where the flatmates figure out if they can live with you, and you see if you could live with them. This can lead to some hilarious situations which serve to underline how utterly different people can be.

One sticking point is that the most successful flats never have to advertise rooms. There will always be a friend of a friend who is willing to move in.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#118

Post by lojack »

rdl wrote: post #31

I'd really like to see a low-tax, low regulation part of the US (WA, NV, TX, or TN) where someone buys a few thousand acres and lets people build "temporary" structures (with power/fiber/wifi/etc.) for living and solo-working, combined with some more permanent structures for offices, meetings, socialization, etc. Essentially like a 2-5 year Burning Man encampment campus for various startup projects. If someone's "per…

You'd be surprised with how easy this is to do without making any major changes to ones lifestyle. A bit over a year ago I quit my relatively high paying job with $1k in savings, moved to the midwest, and I've been living comfortably on around $15k/yr (I'm taking the luxury of removing my student loan payments from the equation). I don't own a car, live in an inexpensive house thats shared with a few other entrepreneurs in a similar situation, I stay reasonably frugal, and share many expenses.

We all work out of an incubator that provides us with free office space (wouldn't significantly affect our numbers if we had to pay).

Bootstrapping in the midwest has worked quite well for me, but there's certainly disadvantages. For one, a lot of the local investment capital is old money. Old money that is extremely conservative with their investments. If we ended up receiving capital, we'd likely be forced to move to a more expensive city largely because of proximity to the investor and more importantly for skilled labor. The good developers all tend to flock to SF or NYC where the pay is high. They still exist in the midwest, but you really need to hunt to find them.

I'm an advocate for the midwest, there's challenges, some of which your concept may alleviate, but IMO it's perfect for bootstrapping a small team.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#119

Post by dennisgorelik »

scarmig wrote: post #87
nilkn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the second question, buying a house rather than renting it generally increases your options by about a hundredfold -- many, many more houses are available for sale than for rent. And while property tax can be painful, it's generally substantially cheaper than what you'd pay in rent on the equivalent property. So you get to save a lot more of your income, or at least apply it to paying down your mortgage. It also…

Financially, though, the fair comparison is whether the capital invested in a house generates more rental income (from yourself) than what the capital would make in equity, after accounting for property taxes, insurance, and upkeep. Most calculations I see suggest it's pretty much a toss up at that point, and which you choose should depend on factors like preference for mobility or stability.

It actually depends on location. Buy/Rent ratio is much higher in Bay Area and NYC than in Arizona/Texas/Florida/Kansas/...

So in Bay Area it's generally better to rent, while in mid-America it's better to own.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#120

Post by lostlogin »

biot wrote: post #106
baby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to google it, might be useful for others: 2900 miles = 4667km 3100 miles = 4988km

It could have read 2900 gribloops vs 3100 gribloops and, not knowing anything about gribloops other than it's a measure of distance between cities, the expected conclusion is the same: the two pairs of cities are roughly the same distance apart. Ergo, converting the units presents no additional information.

It put things into a frame I understand though.
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