@anon81580706 you seem to be ignoring the point that has been made: this policy was never in effect. Trump cancelled a policy that was just created and never went into effect. He is maintaining the status quo.
@Kate, Okay, I was mistaken about the possibility of qualifying for a private mortgage with a 20% down payment. I’m not sure what amount of mortgage you are looking to qualify for, but $90 seems really high for someone who can’t afford the current rate.
Last night Pete and I had a discussion about this, where we determined that the reduction would save us about $40 per month. That seems to me like it is not a make or break amount when it comes to being able to take out a mortgage or not. It doesn’t seem like something that would significantly change the number of people who can feasibly take out a FHA loan… it just makes it a bit less of a burden to pay for it. However, having $500 a year to put toward other things would be cool.
The main point Pete brought up though, is twofold; that little extra multiplied across every household with a FHA loan would provide a significant infusion of mobile money into the economy, and it is better for our economy overall if households are building equity with their monthly payments rather than just throwing money into a void and not accumulating any assets.
So, from an economic standpoint, I can see where this measure would have value. I’m still paranoid about making sure “insurance” funds have enough liquidity to cover what they’re supposed to. Maybe that is a factor of my job. I also don’t know that this would significantly increase the number of people who can reasonably afford to take out FHA mortgages, based on the math we did using ours as an example.
In ANY case though… it seems like Trump had no legitimate reason for this and he’s just cancelling it because it has Obama’s name on it. Which is totally a dick move to the middle class. I’m not in any way surprised about Trump being a dick to the middle class.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg
Only 69000 yen a month which works out to 600 US dollars.
I’m considering buying a house sooner than later since the average house price increase percentage for Seattle has increased way beyond every other city in the US. I’m also just kinda getting tired of having to tip toe around getting permission to do simple updates to a place.
I was going to say, looks like she’s paying extra for luxuries. And why does she try to do everything in her home and not a shared space? Furnished, high ceiling, English speaking & foreigner friendly, utils included: probably makes up half the rent. You can get a 35m2 apartment in tokyo for 70kY, which is not bad at all. I much prefer it to here, where I have a 3LDK for $950/mo (which is really good for the area), lots of space to put stuff and pay to heat.
Holycow! I’m putting in an offer for a town home today. It’s a little bit more than I was hoping to pay, but the HOA fees are much cheaper, which pretty much offsets the additional costs, and the location is super convenient to commuting to work.
I’m equal parts terrified and super excited.
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Congrats! Welcome to the fun!
Wanna come up and help me mitigate water in my fucking basement? Or dig a trench to run a French drain so I can stop mitigating water in my basement?
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Bidding wars suck.
After a brief bidding war, where I had to increase my offer by about $4,000, the seller accepted my offer. Holycrap, this is really happening.
I want to simultaneously jump up and down and throw up.
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Ohhhh I thought you didn’t have a water problem when we talked? guess that wasn’ the case?
//french drained two basements and helped with a third.
Well, we fixed one problem via surface drainage. Apparently, though, the spring melt creates a problem elsewhere - the back yard is graded towards the back side of the house, so the basement is getting seepage along the joint between the wall and the floor.
This appears to be a limited time-frame issue related to snow melt. It doesn’t happen during heavy rainfall. So, yeah, caught us by surprise.
French drain along the outside of the house to conduct water elsewhere seems like the plan. Thought about an interior drain, but if water is permeating the wall due to hydrostatic pressure, I think it’s more prudent to try relieving the pressure in the first place rather than allowing seepage to continue.
I’m contemplating doing a deep excavation of the foundation wall to do exterior waterproofing - but that requires heavy equipment and might be overkill. We’ll see where a simple curtain drain gets us.
Currently, seepage is manageable with a wet/dry vac and absorbent material. Cheap pine pellets are doing the trick nicely.
We purchased a house recently for a great price in Portland, OR that was a foreclosure with almost no damage. Everything was going great until a few days before we moved in someone broke in and stole all of my father-in-law’s tools that were here, which was most of them due to fixing rot in the floor, and some of our stuff that had been brought over. They somehow got in through a doggie door made for tiny dogs in our fenced in yard. We assumed that would probably be the end of it after moving in until someone literally broke our fence down yesterday to try and get in that door again. Luckily they found that we had installed a security door in front of the other door, gave up, and left. On their way out they did cut the lock we had on the gate though.
I guess my main question is if anyone has any home security recommendations. My wife and I are a bit of a mess and our kids may not know yet what happened but they know something is wrong.
I know the solar company I use also has a security system Vivent Solar, you can look into them. I believe they are Utah based.
I’d do two. Get a camera system (even something like Nest despite its problems) and, completely independent of that and from a different vendor, get a security system.
I’m usually an advocate of only the former, but as soon as you’ve been a target multiple times, you have to go full security.
Sorry to hear that, I’ve heard that foreclosures can be suspicious because people have a tendency to trash the place before the bank takes over. Wonder if that was related.
In the first apartment we lived in in Seattle I was naive and didn’t ever lock my bike up in the garage. It ended up getting stolen. The working theory was this dude who got evicted (didn’t pay rent for a long time I think) and was possibly in charge of some small maintenance tasks around the building. As such he knew exactly where a lot of the stuff was and how to get in. It was believe in retaliation he came and stole a bunch of shit since whoever it was definitely had knowledge of where stuff was to gain access to the garage. It wasn’t someone who just jumped in while the garage was up, it was someone who had access to the secured elevators and such. My bike got stolen out of the myriad of other available bikes probably because you could just hop on and ride out. Rookie mistake on my part.
It was kinda weird because I found someone on Craigslist selling a bike that looked very much like mine. Same accessories and everything from what I could see in the picture. The cop I filed with said if I can arrange a meeting to test drive the bike I should just ride off with it which I thought was amusing. I contacted the guy and mysteriously it got stolen that night, weird. Anywho I got contacted by the police a couple weeks later saying they found my bike abandoned when investigating another call about a stolen bike. Whoever had mine left it and stole someone else’s. That was a few years ago and I’ve been way more cautious about bike lockdown than I was before.
We’re already leaning towards Rym’s recommendation mainly due to multiple attempts. The cops we talked to said they normally advise against security systems since most of the time they’re useless as anything more than a deterrent but multiple issues in such a short time is weird.
As for potentially being the old owner that’s hard to say. Whoever it is had to know about the doggie door since you can’t see it due to the fence, even if you were tall enough to see over the fence it is obscured, but the house has been in foreclosure for years and the former owner is an elderly woman.
Thus the camera. You want to build evidence for eventual legal action. You don’t want a deterrent anymore: you want an arrest.
Yeah, we’re definitely going with camera. I haven’t slept more than 5 hours in the past 3 days. Coffee is nice but surviving on it isn’t. Thanks for the advice.
Get a camera and make sure you have the typical overhead shot, that’s great and all, but set one (or more) facing the doors that can see faces. The overhead camera shot is nice, but these thieves often wear hats on purpose in order to cover their faces.
With a face shot the department can put out an internal attempt to locate and you’d be surprised how often the theif is a known entity who can easily be identified if you have footage of the face.
The feelings of violation you are going through right now are the reason Burglary of a residence is always a higher level crime than just breaking into a business.
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I didn’t consider that, thanks.