Friends,
The body of this email was being rejected by the Gmail spam filter. I tried changing it in several ways, but couldn’t figure out the source of Gmail’s dissatisfaction. So I’m going to assume it was just too controversial for its easily triggered filter. And hopefully that lead in will make you want to read it even more 🙂
You can find the post Ideology Sounds Like Idiocy on my site. (Link)
The Money Angle
- Follow Up To Making Property Taxes Apples To Apples (Link)
Last week I showed how you can amortize the difference in property taxes into a mortgage to compare the true price between 2 properties. Stefan replied with a good point:
You said $1m is equivalent to 700k in jersey based on tax rate. But you didn’t mention that the interest rate on the 300k delta is tax deductible.
This is material. If you are at a 40% tax bracket it lowers the mortgage rate you should use to amortize the higher tax property by 40%. In the example I laid out we used a mortgage rate of 3% to find that a $1mm CA house is equivalent to a $700k NJ house. But if the after-tax mortgage rate is 1.8% (.6 x 3%) then that reduces the NJ house by an additional $50k. So a $1mm house in CA should be compared to a $650k house in NJ. Or stated otherwise, if you have a budget of $650k in NJ you could actually afford a $1mm house in CA (assuming you have the down payment).
- Using Twitter Moments Functionality To Organize All My Money Writing (Link)
Whenever I publish a money post I’ll thread it to the corresponding “Moment” category. Just an added layer of organization to make reference easier.
Last Call
- The Four Horsemen Of Relationship Apocalypse (graphic)
SketchplanationsIt was our 11 year anniversary on Friday. All relationships take effort. But I feel marriage is interesting from a purely numerical point of view. Children grow up and eventually leave the house. You will spend more time with a spouse than anyone else over the course of your life. So it takes some special tending. John Gottman identifies 4 behaviors that fester.
- How I Introduced Zak To Coding When He Was 6 (thread)
My description of Scratch Jr, MIT’s block-based coding tool. I include a link to the PDF I used as well the exact exercises I had him work through to learn all the functions.
- Quote I enjoyed
“Someone asks me if I feel young? I answer this way. You are young if you total up all your life’s accomplishments to date, and your dreams are still greater than your accomplishments’. You pass on the same whether you are a pessimist or an optimist”
Shimon Peres 9/28/16 via @loggyrhythm
From my actual life
On our last anniversary, we saw Greta Van Fleet in SF. I thought back to the last show we saw — we flew to NY to see Tool in November. We miss live music and one of the reasons I love live music hit me this weekend. We have a habit of spending too much time in our heads. Live music with its immersive volume and bone-shaking pulse is distilled sensation. It gets us out of our heads and into a physically-centered place in a way that only a groove can.
We made the most of this year recreating with Khruangbin on Friday night. If you think you’d like the sound of international, most specifically Thai, funk mixed with soul, psychedelia and dripping with 60s surf guitar reverb I highly recommend this 1 hour concert we watched.
(We also watched the Dark Side Of Oz…the Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland set to the Dark Side Of The Moon album. The fact that they are in sync was discovered in 1995. Pink Floyd has said it’s just a coincidence. I believe them, although some swear it was intentional, citing that they had already written 2 movie scores by the time DSOTM came out. If you are interested in those I am a bigger fan of Obscured by Clouds. Anyway, there are some benevolent Youtube accounts who have synced the movie and the album for you already. This is the one we watched.)
Kampai!
