Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
livinincali
Participant[quote=bewildering]From the UT article:
“Still, the outlook isn’t necessarily dire for the average family. Rent consumes less than half of a typical household’s income,”
HALF a household income on rent? That seems very high to me.[/quote]
And economists keep wondering why household spending is not picking back up and the economy isn’t growing like it should. Plenty of landlords out there that would probably prefer to be collecting 4% yields from a CD or safe bond rather than rental properties but there’s no other options.
It be be interesting if the government attempts to protect renters at the expense of landlords during the next recession.
Participant[quote=The-Shoveler]Because Greece
1) Does not have the resources to be independent economically.
[/quote]Of course it does. Not at their current standard of living but at some lower standard of living Greece can certainly support itself by trading tourism for whatever goods it can afford. It’s people won’t like the fact that they can’t retire at 60 anymore, but they’ll survive, just like the rest of countries that have gone bankrupt over the years.
[quote=The-Shoveler]
2) Cannot print it’s own money.
[/quote]
Of course they can. If they leave the Euro they most certainly will be printing up dracmas. Their currency won’t be worth anything close to a Euro and it’s people will take a big haircut to their savings and standard of living, but that’s going to happen one way or another anyways.Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]Money maker, comparing debt to gdp makes perfect sense.
The federal debt will never be paid off because that represents savings to people who own the debt. The federal debt is an investment vehicle.
If you could live forever, you would never pay off your debts either. You would keep on rolling over your debt and increase it as your income increases. You would have unending increases in standard of living.[/quote]
Yeah right up until the interest rates rise and the cost of rolling the debt exceeds your income. Opps there goes your standard of living and most of what you have gets liquidated. Brilliant plan it’s working out so well for countries like Greece and the rest of the PIIGS. Do you guys think these things through before you say them?
ParticipantDon’t know about the housing market but paying 50x earnings and 4x sales for a mature low margin company that’s been growing about 5% per year is crazy. That kind of M&A deal just screams humongous bubble to me. I haven’t seen crazy shit like that since 1999-2000.
Participant[quote=spdrun]Exactly. Which is why the best environmental policy is to make electronics and vehicles that LAST a long time. Recycling them or building new ones is environmentally expensive.
Apple is talking out of their anuses about environmental responsibility, when they deliberately make older app versions for 3-4 year old iPads hard to download.[/quote]
Apple is probably one of the worse offenders on the planet. hard to replace batteries that have a lifecycle of about 2-3 years before you’re pretty much required to be attached power cord to use the thing since the battery won’t hold a charge. Holding back obvious improvements to a future release. They could have made a larger form factor years ago but didn’t because they knew it was one of the last major selling points they had left. Of course now that everybody on the planet that can afford a smart phone has one it’s the only way you have to keep your sales up. It’s going to be hard to keep selling 50 million iPhones a quarter if you can’t get people to replace perfectly good ones.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]Plus people always look for better housing. Pay them more and they will upgrade housing.[/quote]
No they won’t. If you make the minimum (lowest) wage you’re going still going to live in lowest cost housing. Instead of getting that section 8 housing voucher it will come from your paycheck, but you aren’t moving on up.
Participant[quote=spdrun]Why are apartments higher than condos, out of curiosity? Amenities in each type of complex are very similar from what I’ve seen.
[/quote]Large apartment complexes have always been able to push the envelop on rent. They always have some percentage of vacant units and an extra month of vacancy on one unit is a tiny drop in the bucket. A Landlord with a couple condos doesn’t usually have that luxury. They don’t want to miss a month or two of rent in exchange for a marginal increase in rent because it probably will take a couple of years to make that lost month of rent back in the higher rate.
Large apartment complexes have a better marketing profile than an individual landlord and they always have something available for people new to the city or in some kind of pinch. Large apartment complexes are also probably willing to take some chances on tenant with poor credit profiles. In addition they don’t care if some landlord down the street is only charging $1200 for a single condo unit, they only care about the other large apartment complexes in the area and the vacancy rate they are experiencing.
The small time landlord wants a quality tenant and to get that quality tenant they are willing to take a bit of a hit on price.
May 19, 2015 at 9:59 AM in reply to: OT: I take back everything I said about how stupid the apple watch is. #786443ParticipantPeople will buy the watch on the hype. The question is what do they think of it after having it for a couple weeks to a month. Our CEO of a company of about 3000 employees sent out an email blast saying don’t waste you money on it and wait until version 5. The biggest problems just being the battery life and the lack of really useful functions for the money.
Maybe China will carry this product for apple because I don’t see them selling to more than the 5-10% of the population that are complete fanbois in America.
ParticipantThe budgets are tight because the schools have spent too much money on things that aren’t all that useful for educating students. Everybody says the problem is state funding went down but when you look at the actual numbers, per student spending by the state is pretty close to the same as it was 10 years ago. Alright so let’s factor in salary increases for the educators of 50% over the past 10 years if that. So UC schools should be costing about 50% more maybe even 75% more than they did 10-15 years ago, but instead they cost 300-400% more. Where is all that money going. It’s going into more administrators, more glitzy buildings, more things that do little to nothing to provide an education.
ParticipantRental market in San Diego is starting to slow down for sure. I can tell you based on a bunch of data that the rental vacancy rates have been rising for the past 6-9 months and in most markets the rate of increasing prices has started to level off although it is still going up a bit. I’d expect us to plateau around these levels for a bit, and then who knows what happens after that. If we get a recession we probably see prices move down if we get real wage inflation then perhaps prices move up.
April 6, 2015 at 7:41 AM in reply to: Foreclosure deadbeats are now rewarded with free homes #784489Participant[quote=CA renter]
Some people seem to be under the impression that DB pension plans will fail. IMO, the much bigger failure will be evident when the majority of these DC pension retirees hit their latter years. That will be a much bigger problem, and we will still be forced to bail them out (at a much greater expense than if they had maintained DB plans, IMO), but that will be a sudden expense that “nobody saw coming,” making it even worse than the DB pension issue where people have at least been trying to better fund these plans in advance.
[/quote]I don’t think it matters if it’s a DC or a DB plan, the math doesn’t work for either of them. Comfortable long retirement for the masses will fail. Most people in retirement will be living a much lower standard of living than they expected. It’s just a demographics and time problem. Of course the top 10-20% will still be able to retire comfortably just as they always have.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
As far a food, we can import what we need. Give the business to Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil. the water is better used in tech research and manufacturing.
[/quote]We already spend billions of dollars militarily to protect our oil/energy interests in the middle east because of our poor energy policy. Now we want to offshore another strategic interest because some tech workers in San Diego, LA, and San Fran want to keep their lawns green and can afford too.
I’ll all for desalination and toilet to tap. They are building desalination in Carlsbad despite all the environmentalist howls. At the same time we live in a desert do we really need a bunch of green grass around as a quality of life. I can certainly live without a green grass lawn especially when the alternative is to install a bunch of military presence in Chile or wherever to prevent some military coup that will interrupt our supply of fruits and vegetables.
Participant[quote=AN]Maybe we should just ban farming in CA all together. Wouldn’t that solve the drought issue over night?
[/quote]Give up $45 billion in annual farm revenue and the taxes that generates.
I guess we don’t need any of these ingredients anymore as CA is the bulk producer of the US production for these things.
A small list but not inclusive of everything.
99% of the artichokes
98% of the garlic
95% broccoli
94% celery
85% lettuce
85% spinach
96% tomatoes
99% almonds
88% avocados
96% olives
etc.March 31, 2015 at 7:01 AM in reply to: Foreclosure deadbeats are now rewarded with free homes #784333ParticipantIt’s more than Florida. I know New Jersey and New York were mentioned. Basically it would apply to any state that uses judicial procedure for foreclosure. Most judicial procedure has some sort of statue of limitations, it would vary depending on the state.
-
AuthorPosts
