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They don’t even come close to making sense for existing houses. For building a place far from utility lines, they might make sense.

Since commercial buildings have economies of scale and do not get a “base amount” of cheap electricity like houses do, you will know these are ready for prime time when businesses start installing them.

High capacity lithium-ion batteries remain quite expensive.

For emergencies and travel use, and really as a toy, I was lucky to get one of these guys lightly used for half off:

It is a really cool product created on kickstarter if you want to dip a toe into solar powered batteries. You can use the phone app to see how fast it is charging and/or how fast it is draining and comes with 100% of what you need to use it in a slick and tough outdoor-proof package.

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SK, thanks for the info on S-Corp losses.

I made a decision now:

1. Don’t sell condo this year

2. Sell about 100k worth of my most highly appreciated stocks, save about 10K in capital gains. Possibly buy them back with a new higher basis if they end up cheaper in 31 days.

3. My S-Corp losses were covered by me writing checks to it. I don’t see why I have to characterize them as loans or capital contributions right now. But the whole restate prior year returns sounds so complicated, I think I will just likely call them loans, and when I make money in 2018, repay them to me tax free. So the loss in 2017 will end up reducing 2018 ordinary income, which will now be untaxed loan repayments.

4. The new question is, how do I get my 2017 AGI below 39k to avoid capital gains taxes when I made about 60k in net rents, dividends, and capital gains? Probably my deductions will do that, but I might have to take 20k loss in the business by calling some of the checks I wrote the business capital contributions.

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You can always make a direct property tax payment online with the county.

At some point I may get one of those credit cards that gives you tons of points if you spend $10,000 in the first three months. I don’t spend that much normally, however using the card to pay $2500-5000 in property tax, while involving a credit card fee of about 2%, could still easily be worth it.

I tend to get Southwest and Delta credit cards because those miles are worth the most to me. The last few southwest cards I signed up for I got 50,000-80,000 in SW points as sign-up bonuses. At southwest’s 2.1 cent per mile conversion rate, that means the 80,000 mile signup bonus is worth about $1600. Paying a credit card fee of about $100 to prepay $5,000 in property taxes, I would still come out way ahead.

As someone mentioned, when the escrow company gets the tax bill and sees it mostly/entirely paid already, they only pay what is due and at the end of the year will send you a check from the escrow account that will give you back what you prepaid.

At some point I am going to take a business class trip to probably Singapore for an Asian vacation using these credit card bonus miles, something that normally costs $3000-6000.

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Thanks for the correction on wash sales.

The question is, my k-1 profit statement from my S-corp might say when I issue it, -$120,000. Absent anything else, I can carry that amount back or forward to reduce my ordinary income that I pay a marginal rate of 30% or whatever, saving me about $36,000 in taxes (.3*120k).

If, however, I take a $120,000 capital gain this year, and pay no tax on it because my AGI is 0 and the cap gains rate for single people with AGI of less than $39,000 is 0%. So I save $18,000 on capital gains taxes.

The question is, do I lose the ordinary income carryback/carryforward worth $36,000 because my 2017 reported AGI is 0, not -$120,000?

That seems kind of illogical since the rule for capital losses is that only $3,000 against ordinary income per year. But I want to use my ordinary losses against ordinary income, not same-year capital gains.

My hope is that my bad year for my S-Corp day job will let me do both, avoid about $18,000 in capital gains taxes by having a low income, but also avoid $36,000 in taxes on ordinary income from loss carryback and forward.

I am kind of worried about doing a carryback since that would involve me not paying less taxes, but asking the government to give me back taxes I paid in the past. I’d also need to refile tax returns. It seems safe and easier to just carry forward. Looks like I don’t have to decide until I do my 2018 taxes, though the carryback option is attractive in allowing me to get a bunch of money early in 2018.

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I just realized I can also take advantage of my temporally negative income and tax bracket to sell my appreciated stocks. I have a few I have been wanting to sell, but avoiding doing so because of capital gains. This seems to be a better option than losing trying to rush out a cash condo sale before 12-31. (When you own beach properties, you get unsolicited offers to sell them all the time. Usually low balls, but in my case one of them was from a friend and pretty reasonable.)

The nice thing is after 3 months, I can buy the stocks back if I want to and have a new, higher basis if I desire to sell them again.

My final issue to research is, should I worry that using my S-Corp losses to avoid a 15% long term capital gains taxes will reduce my tax loss carryforward that could be worth more than 30% by reducing my income taxes.

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It was a double bottom if I remember right, first at the bottom of the crash in 2009, then a false bull market caused by tax incentives to buy in 2010, then a second bottom in 2011.

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I would hate it if the NSA knew I like it to be 67 at night!

Seriously though, I have yet to be impressed by any of these smart appliances. I just have never felt the need to adjust lights and my heater with a phone app. Nor spend hours setting it all up. (A lot of these items seem to be either very expensive VC products like Nest or Chinese companies who purchased disused US trademarks like Westinghouse and Zenith and have low build quality and very poor user interface, not to mention may have Chinese government spyware on them.)

And LED lights obviate the need to turn lights off. An 8w bulb can be on 24/7 at a cost of about $20 per year at the most expensive electricity tier. Setting up a program where it is only on 25% of the time thus saves $15 per year at most. Not even close to being worth the added up-front cash and time expense.

It looks like a lot of these smart devices are getting hacked and turned into botnet slaves to send out spam emails from your home internet connection.

The big improvement I saw in lighting next to LEDs is not smart timers but installing dimmers on every overhead light. It is quite nice to have a slight warm glow from overhead after 8pm.

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I should say, despite my crack on goldbugs, I think gold and silver will do moderately well over the next 5-10 years, with a decent chance of a big price spike but much less downside risk.

With silver, there’s a growing number of industrial applications, and it currently costs more money to build new silver mines than the current $17 market price of silver. There are older mines producing silver for $7/oz, but mining costs tend to go up and there has been no new big discovery in a very long time. Even when silver was above $30 for an extended period, mining simply did not go up much.

What I do not think will happen is the gold $10,000 silver $200 scenarios because of the various conspiracy theories out there about supposed “Fed manipulation” and “naked shorting” of gold and silver.

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I agree with Ron Paul’s views on foreign policy much more than Obama/Clinton/Bush/Trump.

I think it is a shame he also advocates crankish “End the Fed” stuff.

He also is honest in always voting for tax cuts and spending cuts, compared to the rest of his party that wants to cut taxes for the rich, raise military spending, and only advocates cosmetic spending cuts elsewhere.

Paul was right we should have stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars have cost us about $5 trillion, which is 25% of our $20 trillion national debt. For half that we could be almost completely converted to renewable energy, with a bit of natural gas generation for peak load periods or to account for random days without much wind or sunshine. Instead we got death, debt, pollution and destruction. On the biggest issue of the past 20 years, Ron Paul was one of the few people in public life who were right from the beginning.

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As further evidence this guy is a hack, notice he uses a non-standard measure of affordability: “increase in median income need to afford median house” rather than the standard mortgage payment to rent ratio.

Now there is nothing wrong with being innovative in choosing economic indicators. But the proper way to do this is (1) note what is happening with the standard accepted indicators (2) explain why alternative indicators may provide additional information not captured by the standard indicators (3) back test and compare the predictive power of standard and non-standard indicators.

He does not do a single one of these three steps.

On the other hand, you know you are dealing with a hack when someone just piles on these non-standard indicators, all of which support the same conclusions, and simply not acknowledge contrary data.

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Anyone like this guy who whines about “printing money” and how it causes inflation does not understand basic economic concepts I learned as a freshman in college: Liquidity traps, secular changes in velocity of money and desired savings, etc.

There is a lot of depth to these concepts that you do not learn as a freshman in introduction to macroeconomics, however the whole “HYPERINFLATION PRINTING MONEY OMG!!!!! CHINA WILL DUMP TREASURIES OH NO” crowd never showed any indication they even understood the very basics. They have been singing the same tune year in and year out from 2008 to 2017.

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Mark Hanson IS NOT at the top of his field. He is a permabear. What is the point of that?

I started looking for my first house in mid-2011 and purchased later that year. I did so because I saw prices were well below rents on a 30 year 5% down mortgage.

My $30,000 or so downpayment + initial renovations resulted in, so far, a $450,000 or so capital gain. Plus a mortgage payment far below local rents and a low property tax locked in for life.

So, this financial decision that turned my $30,000 in $450,000, what would he have said about it at the time?

All I see from him in 2011 was doom and gloom in the midst of the biggest buying opportunity of my adult life, possibly one that will never come again:

Here he is in May 2011:

“With respect to negative equity as it relates to the housing market and repeat buyers — the much needed but missing ingredient to a magic housing fix — effective negative equity is far greater. This is because to rebuy a homeowner has to sell, which means paying off the first (and second) mortgages, paying a Realtor 6% and putting 10% to 20% down on the new purchase. When you lower the negative equity thresholds to real life, effective negative equity is epidemic and will keep the organic buyer — especially at the mid-to-high end — at bay for a generation.”

That’s right, he predicted depressed prices, right before a massive appreciation, for “a generation” ie 25-30 years.

—

Here he is in October 2011, right before prices in my sub-market began a beeline to a near doubling in just the next 6 years:

“After nearly 5 years, if there was an easy fix (HAMP mods, HARP loans, HAFA short sales, printing trillions of dollars in order to try to create inflation) housing would be experiencing a v-shaped recovery already. Housing and mortgage are in a generational downturn for which the only cure is time. Anything done to prevent the market from clearing extends the duration and ultimately, the severity.”

Now let’s go to April 2012, when the take-off in housing prices was starting to clearly show up in the data. So he writes a very long post saying don’t trust the data:

“In conclusion, this is not a healthy housing market; rather an epic “stimulus” and “select supply driven” dash-to-trash trap, which will lead to housing market “paralysis” and lower sales volume and prices.”

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Ucodegen, funny you mention an infested fridge.

Twice in the past ten years I discovered hundreds of frozen dead or nearly dead ants in my freezer. Not a single one in the fridge side which was full of meat and sweet fruit. But hundreds of dead ones in the freezer.

Both times I never figured out how they got in, and the problem solved itself in one day. Everything in the freezer was bagged or wrapped in plastic, and they did not even appear to be going for anything in particular. Just hanging out and freezing to death on the bottom half of a side by size freezer.

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I did some research on Fipronil, active ingredient in the gel tubes I always get.

It is extremely safe for people, cats, and dogs. the .01% concentration was 100% effective. The amount in a full tube would not harm you if you ate it all.

An $8 tube was enough to squirt a little in every crack and corner inside and out in a 1600sf house and still have 1/3 left over.

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When I have ant problems the ant and roach gel in small tubes is very effective. Sold at home depot and amazon. All dead in 2 days.

Using this sticky gel in corners inside and out seems cleaner than powders and can go on vertical surfaces.

Little bait traps never worked.

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