Dawes's Comments
The Enterprise was not a shuttle orbiter, it was an engineering mockup made from low cost materials to make sure the parts fit - read lots of plywood and styrofoam. And I can see it from the parking lot at work.
Abusive comment hidden.
(Show it anyway.)
5 reasons why he's wrong:
1. My stocks are down 25% since 2000, when I sold most of them to buy my house. My house is up 20%, even in today's economy. Seriously, what stocks are you buying?
2. If my house value goes to zero, I still have a place to live.
3. My house will be paid off 15 years before I retire and my cost for a place to live drops to $200/month for taxes and insurance. That comes to 30 years of rent-free living, a savings of $300k+ over the cost of a run-down rent-controlled apartment half the size of my house over those 30 years, assuming the run-down apartment is still going for today's rent.
4. Rent prices rise with inflation. Fixed rate payments do not. My payment (including escrow) has dropped from 23% of my income to 17% of my income over 8 years. Pretty good considering I refinanced from 30 years to 15, increasing the payment 25%. My last year of payments will be 14% of my income. After that, they go away.
5. In a typical non-big-city apartment, you start off in a bad neighborhood and stay there. I do not miss the neighbor's loud music & screaming girlfriends, walking across the parking lot in the rain, having drunks partying, then shouting, then fighting outside my door, etc, etc, etc. And that was the nicest complex in the city.
1. My stocks are down 25% since 2000, when I sold most of them to buy my house. My house is up 20%, even in today's economy. Seriously, what stocks are you buying?
2. If my house value goes to zero, I still have a place to live.
3. My house will be paid off 15 years before I retire and my cost for a place to live drops to $200/month for taxes and insurance. That comes to 30 years of rent-free living, a savings of $300k+ over the cost of a run-down rent-controlled apartment half the size of my house over those 30 years, assuming the run-down apartment is still going for today's rent.
4. Rent prices rise with inflation. Fixed rate payments do not. My payment (including escrow) has dropped from 23% of my income to 17% of my income over 8 years. Pretty good considering I refinanced from 30 years to 15, increasing the payment 25%. My last year of payments will be 14% of my income. After that, they go away.
5. In a typical non-big-city apartment, you start off in a bad neighborhood and stay there. I do not miss the neighbor's loud music & screaming girlfriends, walking across the parking lot in the rain, having drunks partying, then shouting, then fighting outside my door, etc, etc, etc. And that was the nicest complex in the city.
Abusive comment hidden.
(Show it anyway.)
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-034-DFRC.html