Ignoring the entirety of the rest of this story, I desperately want to know why:
"Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side." was so notable.
"The victim did it to themselves" is a famously bulletproof defense. I don't know why people don't try it more often.
This is the typical tall tale that used to travel in every neighborhood as a warning, especially to scare kids from doing some things. Kids eat up these stories. Probably doesn't work that much in the age of phones and "pics (shorts?) or it never happened".
Unfortunately, we’ve reached the era where pics and shorts are very much no longer proof. In a few minutes you could generate video of that exact scenario.
I have to say that China will probably be a major force in reducing carbon emissions. Yes, China burns a lot of coal; but they also produce and deploy a lot of solar, wind, and soon nuclear energy. Someone else said it better: future will run on China’s batteries.
Prepayment penalties are illegal for the vast majority of loans that consumers can get in the US, which makes it a no-brainer to refinance any time the payment saving exceeds the cost of writing a new loan.
The Trump admin has floated the idea of allowing prepayment penalties in home mortgages, BTW.
Crap, I was wrong. Bill Ackman is trying to convince Bessent to do it. So while it may happen, it isn’t coming from inside the admin.
One argument is that it could allow for lower rates, BTW. (This is true, it very well could).
And also, if it happened it would be for newly issued mortgages. Existing mortgages have language in the contract that you couldn’t just unilaterally change
The same way callable bonds command a higher interest rate than non-callable do. If the bond holder can just decide that tomorrow it’s cheaper for them to pay off the bond vs pay me the coupon on it, it’s worth less to me as a buyer. I lose if interest rates go lower (bond is paid early) or higher (I am now holding a bond worth less than a newly issued one).
If you look through the bond market you will sometimes see bonds issued by the same company or agency both as callable and non-callable, the callable bonds are usually .5-1% lower even when issued on the same date.
Your lender definitely wants to get paid back, but they don’t necessarily want to get paid back right now. Because then they have a pile of money and they need to find something to do with it.
Consumers have a tendency to pay loans back early when the bank doesn’t have any more profitable alternatives. Consumers also have a tendency to NOT pay loans back early when the bank does have more profitable alternatives.
But you know that the first situation is worse for the bank than the second situation. So they do account for this, to a degree, when they give you a loan. In theory they would be willing to give you a lower interest rate if you gave up your prepayment option. In theory. In reality? Who knows.
Sounds right but another big factor is to get some predictability.
Demand for mortgage varies over time, regulations change. It's a long term product, banks like to know with high certainty that when someone signs up it will be X earned over a period, not maybe X minus we don't know over an unknown period.
They are in the business of capital efficiency. Lack of control makes capital less efficient, or at least more expensive to keep efficient.
Overpayments (in the UK) are often not allowed, when they are, the borrower needs to arrange it when the loan is taken, and for a fee.
Refinancing is a right, but the fine prints told borrowers at what penalty.
The biggest item on SALT is the real estate taxes and mortgage interest expense. A household has only one address - and thus it makes sense to have tax deduction for just one real estate/ mortgage interest expense. As such it makes sense to share the SALT cap - just like sharing the home.
(also the fact that biggest beneficiaries of SALT are states either high housing costs and these states tend to be Democrat leaning states made it easy for Trump to cap the SALT deduction in his 2018 tax cuts)
The thought being it's okay to steal from married households because they intentionally set themselves up for lower per partner overhead? Why don't we charge single taxpayers with roommates on the same schedule?
By living in a single house, a married couple demands less housing, which reduces the cost of housing against a fixed supply. Why are we taxing the people making housing cheaper under the guise of "affordable housing"? Shouldn't we treat affordable housing taxes like the carpool lane and reduce the burden of those that are reducing the burden on the constrained supply?
I looked at your other posts in this thread. The lifestyle you describe is not the average US based developer lifestyle. You must live in a very selective circle. Because I only know one developer who owned his plane-that Canadian guy who literally coded the first version of S3, became irreplaceable so AWS let him move to Oregon and he was commuting by plane. And I only know one developer who owned horses-he actually made his money by buying a whole bunch of land in Kirkland in the 90s. These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
I know developers who have motor bikes and a Porsche or BMW or, recently, Teslas that sometimes they take to the race track. But this lifestyle is common for EU devs as well.
I am not sure why everyone keeps bringing up the average though.
You have to decide whether it makes sense for you to be somewhere, based on how much you can expect to make and what your quality of life will be.
What the average person makes does not matter except in an abstract sense that equitable societies are better in general (which is absolutely true).
> You must live in a very selective circle.
> These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.
People can be very careful about keeping professional life separate. There is a boat owners club in a marina I frequent, the vast majority of the members (out of about 200) are techies, it's a common hobby.
I know several that have a pilot license but only one who bought a plane, it's somewhat convenient to just rent every few months.
What I meant to say is that the lifestyle of the average US dev is not that much better than the lifestyle of the average EU dev. From the examples you gave I only recognized the racing and boating lifestyles - both of which are accessible to EU devs. The planes and horses… not so much.
Now think of a more specific category - big tech employees with 5+ years of experience.
There are a bunch more expensive hobbies, about half of the developers I know (personally outside of work environments) have one or more.
Planes came up because I am getting started with the training for it, horses because my friend has a farm with horses twenty minutes from a major city.
In the US rich people have been separating themselves from the rest for a while now (gated communities is just the first stage of separation. Rich people would rather take a short flight than be stuck in traffic among the hoi polloi. Rich people are constantly surrounded by bodyguards)
So rich people do not care about the decaying infrastructure around them.
I think the US will end up like Brazil: rich people go from sky scrapers to sky scraper via helicopters, while the favelas surround the skyscrapers. The poor are kept in check in the favelas with the help of a brutal police force. BTW: Brazil is a democracy.
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