[Artifact]

Ditto on receiving the exact same form letter response – I rarely feel compelled to write to my senator’s and congressmen because I really believe that not one of them, regardless of party, gives one rats behind about any of their constitutents who are not (a) big donors or (b)highly influential. Getting a nice political speach writer style form letter response does not do much to change my opinion.

Better to just not respond at all like Feinstein!

[Artifact]

Here are the plots. Mostly the same trend continuing.

[img_assist|nid=3170|title= San Diego County Short Sales and Total Listings|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=272]
[img_assist|nid=3171|title= Percent Changes in Short Sales and Total Listings and Percent Short Sales of Total|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=272]

[Artifact]

I could use a check for 100K!

Maybe if all of the presidential candidates used the millions to 100’s of millions in campaign funds we could get somewhere – at 100K each, 400 or 500 million could help a small portion of the idiot speculators.

[Artifact]

I rarely feel compelled to write my senators or congressmen but the whole housing bailout notion just bothers me so much that I have written both Boxer and Feinstein twice now saying what a bad idea I think it is; the main point being that I feel it is a complete slap in the face to anyone who has been responsible to use their tax dollars to bailout the few true sob stories and the multitude of frauds and speculators. In the end, they could end up spending my money to help keep home prices higher than I can afford, despite having a decent paying job.

For what it is worth, I also pointed out to both of them that I almost always vote for the democrat candidates, which could change with enough things like this despite my dislike of the republicans on other issues.

[Artifact]

Not much different in the plots – the rate of increase in the percent short sales seemed to decrease slightly due to the larger increase in total listings.

[img_assist|nid=3089|title= Total and Short Sales|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=281][img_assist|nid=3090|title= Percent Increases and Precent Short Sales of Total|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=281]

[Artifact]

That is one of the homes that ocrenter has posted about (http://www.bubbletracking.blogspot.com/) that was brokered by “Super-Realtor® Jenae”. I think he has a picture there of the exact flier you are talking about.

[Artifact]

To clarify – the green line in the second plot I posted is the percent of the listings that are short sales – I labelled that axis Percent change, which is referring to the change in short sales and total listings.

I do find the near linear increase in the percent of sales that are short to be really interesting given the variability in the the rate of change in short sales and total listings individually.

[Artifact]

Here are the new plots – I cleaned up the axes a little, but if anyone has suggestions for improvement in clarity I can try and include them.

Again – apologies to sdrealtor for the improper credit of the data!

[img_assist|nid=3017|title= Short and Total Sales|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=377][img_assist|nid=3018|title= Percent Change and Percent Short Sales|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=377]

[Artifact]

The California plan expense ratio varies – the standard index portfolio is .50%. They have actively managed portfolios that range from .72% to 1.09% and a social choice portfolio at .80%.

I am not sure exactly why – but the Fidelity portion of the expenxe is only .40% – the extra .10% is a “State Fee”. That same fee is included in every one of the portfolios.

Added: Here is Fidelity’s comment on the “State Fee” –

“The State Fee is the percentage of net assets paid to California’s ScholarShare Investment Board for administrative costs.”

[Artifact]

I think the transfer limitation is that you can move the fund to a different state a maximum of 1 time per year – so in essence there is very little limitation.

Morningstar did a report on 529 plans not too long ago:

http://news.morningstar.com/article/article.asp?id=187673&pgid=wwhome1a

Utah ranked pretty well.

[Artifact]

I have one existing 529 – the Nevada plan with Vanguard. I chose that one for 2 reasons: (1) I had existing accounts with Vanguard and (2) the fund had no restrictions of which colleges the money could be used for. The fund has done relatively well.

I am getting ready to start a second 529 for my younger child, but I will probably do this one with the California plan at Fidelity – I have switched most of my funds there since starting the first fund so it makes sense. This one has not been around long enough to really judge it’s performance.

From what I have read/learned the biggest issues are whether you can use the money anywhere and if there are tax breaks in your state. California does not have any tax breaks for using the California 529 plan, so there is not a huge benefit to using that over another if you live here – some states do have tax breaks, so if you live in one of those states it is worth using the state 529.

I am sure there are others here who understand the whole thing a lot better than me though.

[Artifact]

Oops – as you said, I meant to credit sdrealtor – sorry about that!

So many “sd” something’s around here, you would think we live in San Deigo or something…That is what I get for trying to post things late, for me at least, at night.

[Artifact]

I threw those plots together relatively quickly at work – I will clean them up for next weeks numbers – but looking at them again the increase in short Sales has been pretty astounding – almost doubled in 4 months – but more interesting, I think, is that despite the week-to-week changes being all over the map, the change in short sales has been slightly higher than the change in total litstings every week (even when oth are negative) resulting in the nearly linear increase in the percent of listings that are short sales (the green line).

Of course all of that has the error inherent in the method of collecting this data – which all comes from sdcellar’s posts in this thread by the way (don’t want to steal any credit other than making a plot of data provided by others).

[Artifact]

The companion to that – here are the week to week percent changes in Short Sales (red), Total Listings (blue) and the overall percent of the listings that are short sales (green).

[img_assist|nid=2962|title= Week to Week Percent Changes in Short Sales and Total Listings|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=311]

[Artifact]

Let’s see if this works…Now that I have done this once – I should be able to quickly redo it every week or two as sdrealtor puts up new data – no promises, but I do try and keep tabs on this post and others here even if I don’t post a whole bunch in response.

I will try and label the axes better some other time – but they are pretty self explanatory – left axis is short sales, right axis is total sales.

[img_assist|nid=2961|title= Short Sale and Total Listings 3/27/2007|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=335]

[Author]

Posts