patrick.net

Why so many people think that the "1% fixed rate" will never end:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=fAYnc_-ddlw

"Derivatives are going to save the world. Yeah right !"

SiBA, your comments (along w/Mish's predictably sober view of reality) are the absolute correct context for that hastily put together article. Btw (and not to plug) but Mish had an announcement that he is joining www.sitkapacific.com (for all you *non-momentum players!) :)

Given his take on the economy I'm confident he'll do quite well. When appropriate..... I SAID (when appropriate!) throw some business at this guy. Anybody with that much passion for the truth has got to be a pretty stand up guy. Seattle could use some sobering up.

"perfer a women over a man"

WomEn? Freudian slip if ever.....

Perhaps you will find a school marm type that can teach to freaking spell in between having torrid sex w/her/her friends?

WAFL!!!

SQT,

Galadriel? :(

Can I try again? (I promise not to give a rip about anyone or any thing) if it would get me a cooler name. I was thinking....... Sledge Riprock?

Any MST3K fans out there?

“perfer a women over a man”

Does he mean 'prefer' or 'pervert'?

allah,

Pervert.

A few comments back, someone said that they knew of someone with a 4 1/4% FRM. Let me just say that I find that unlikely. What is their total APR? They must have paid a bunch of points or something to get that rate.

In any case though, that is a very good move.

I am much prouder of my 5 1/4% 30 year FRM than the price I paid for my duplex. Though it has appreciated quite a bit since 2003, I cannot convince my wife to unload it, or even half of it, since you guys have me convinced that it is unlikely to appreciate much over the next 20 years.

She works in finance and I showed her the bubblizer, so there is hope...

Jimbo,

That was probably me. I used to work with a guy that claimed whatever the *best possible rate was...... well that was what he got. Then again he'd been in the front row of Woodstock when Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner. (rolls eyes into back of head) We figured out (given the range of ages he'd given over the years) that he would've been between 11 and 15 at the time.

Then, as now, it comes under "Whatever dude".

Heh, okay then. I never realized that loans ever even got that cheap.

Maaaaybe a 15 year, but even that was not really ever much lower than 4 3/4%. And that is not a jumbo, which is what you need here in the BA.

I do know a guy who got a 15 year FRM at 4 5/8% in Albequerque, but that was lowest one I have had from a reliable source. And I think he paid a point, so his real rate is a bit higher.

Riggs, or Myer-Briggs?

Jimbo,

It's just part of the frustration that comes w/this whole package. My buddies that cold call for mortgages are forever telling me about loanowners that "have a growing family tree" (as per FAB's youtube link) not being able to distinguish between fixed and teaser rates.

"Oh, my loan is at ____% ! Can you BEAT THAT!"

Uh.... lady, you're SURE that's "fixed"?

Pause..... Oh I'm SURE!

Pffft. Whatever dudette.

Jimbo Says:

> A few comments back, someone said that they
> knew of someone with a 4 1/4% FRM. Let me
> just say that I find that unlikely. What is their total
> APR? They must have paid a bunch of points or
> something to get that rate.

Not a lot of people have FRMs under 5%, but quite a few people that locked their rates between March and July 2003 when rates dropped like a rock did get rates that low. The low rates are what helped so many FBs get in to homes. The yield on the 10 year treasury almost went below 3% in June 2003 and LIBOR was below 2% for most of 2002-04. P.S. I locked the rate on a 10 year fixed rate apartment loan in the summer of 2003 with all in rate (just) under 4.25%...

Somebody wrote on here why they "hate (somebody) so much".

Panic buying to "get in before (prices, loan rates) go up" is a (self-destructive) emotional reaction.

So is hate.

Wow, so it was possible. That was right about the time we purchased, March 2003.

Cheap money could still extend this out quite a bit. I don't really see any big impetus to drive rates up, but increased lender scrutiny of marginal homebuyers could have the same effect, at least on the bottom end of the market.

Haha, where did you get your number that 1/4 of the mortgages in Vallejo are in foreclosure? That numbers seems hard to believe to me. Is it just a "projected" number? If so, what is your source?

Probably Myer-Briggs. Too much time thinking about Friday Night Lights and very little time thinking about personality tests...

PS - anyone else here upgrade to Vista? I just bought a laptop loaded with Vista (because I recently spilled juice on my old laptop and killed it) and I'm not at all impressed. It seems to run very slowly.

I may return this laptop and get myself a Linux machine.

PS - anyone else here upgrade to Vista? I just bought a laptop loaded with Vista (because I recently spilled juice on my old laptop and killed it) and I’m not at all impressed. It seems to run very slowly.

I upgraded a laptop I got in 2004 with Vista. It actually boots FASTER. The other apps run just as fast.

The key is that I have 1.5 gigs of memory. If you don't have more than 1gig - uh... yeah... :(

No, I think it's 512 MB expandable to 2 gigs. I'll have to try it with a memory stick and see if that helps it run faster.

It does boot up faster.

Pitbull, kid on weekend, barely literate casanova wannabe, SHARING A BATHROOM...WTF?

Yes, of course I'd want to room with this guy. The only thing missing from the description is an interest in activites at 420 and the career choice of drummer in a garage band.

I like the Debt Relief of America, Inc. banner ad right now. "Eliminate up to 75% of your debt. Never pay back the debt that is settled!"

See, money is free. We all need to loosen up our spending and borrowing so that we can keep the U.S. economy clipping along at its current rate of growth. And if you borrow too much, just settle the debt and get out of jail free!

No, I think it’s 512 MB expandable to 2 gigs. I’ll have to try it with a memory stick and see if that helps it run faster.

Yes, you definitely want at least 1 gig of RAM. What kind of memory stick do you have?

Just remember, and tell yourself while you look into the mirror, "I am a baller", tell yourself this each and every day, when you drive your Hyundai, "I'm a baller", when you pay over 1/2 of your monthly take home pay towards a I/O mortgage, "I'm a baller", when you pay your rent with a credit card check, "I'm a baller", when you wonder why that 60" plasma didn't make you happy after all, "I'm a baller".

On second thought, just go fuck yourself.

Why the fuck not?

tinyurl.com/2bhmso

Actually, memory sticks can make Vista run faster. It's called ReadyBoost.

It really really really helps computers with only 512 MB according to the reports I've read.

Looks like time to shop for a memory upgrade for the laptop.

I did run it with memory stick (pretty sure it's just a conventional mass storage device) and it really seems to help things run a bit faster and smoother.

Peter P,

I just have a Memorex 512 MB stick I bought about three years ago.

Yeah, you need a memory upgrade instead. 512MB is marginal even for XP.

Myer-Briggs is INTJ and ENFP and all that stuff. Based on Jungian constructs, never been validated on a population as constructs, full of binary opposites in execution, and much beloved of HR types...

astrid,

Peter P is correct, 512 MB is indeed marginal for XP.

I have just finished loading a couple of old boxes with XP Pro and Office 2003 for use as breakdown spares. CPU's are identical (AMD 1.3 Celerons, which themselves are a bit marginal). One has 512 MB and the other has 1 GB, and it's quite startling how much difference the extra memory makes.

Mind you, if you want slow I once saw a 64 MB laptop with XP loaded (an end-user decided to upgrade his software without seeking advice from the 'useless shower in IT Support', and then came bitching to us about performance).

XP actually did load and run (a bit of a surprise; 64 MB is below the Evil Empire's stated minimum), and once it was running you could do work if you could live with not-so-occasional long pauses, but it took 20-25 minutes from power-on to get the desktop. We politely suggested new hardware.

SP/eburbed,

I would imagine ReadyBoost is using the memory stick to speed up page swapping. OK as a stop-gap, but not nearly as good as getting more true memory.

Here in South-Eastern Australia, both yesterday and today (Sunday, Oz time) the Canberra and Sydney papers have had HUGE spreads on the ongoing 'rental crisis', and how it's going to push up house prices so 'buy now before you're priced out forever'.

Sigh ... :(

I remember GEOS out about the same time as Windows 3.0 (1990?), which was a pre-emptive multitasking, paged, multithreaded WYSIWYG GUI OS which ran over DOS on XT computers with 640K RAM and 20Mb hard disks, and produced near laser quality on dot matrix printers, when Windows required an AT at least and was swapped not paged. Further, installation was a no-brainer, much like XP today. For about $200 you got the OS AND a complete productivity package slightly more powerful than MS-Works. Two main differences were that many menus were multithreaded as 'tear-off' menus, so you could move around a document with the Format dialog pinned up and check the formatting as you went -- great productivity feature. No MS product does that even today. The other thing was that it would restore all your programs to their prior state when you shutdown and restarted -- docs opened at the same place you left them, etc.

A lot of it was written in assembly, and it never got much market share "for some reason". It was last being sold to African countries under a New Deal banner, which failed. Think a GEOS kernel is being used on some smartphones...

because it was written in assembly, it took them a long time to publish a SDK. i was a mere babe in arms at university when it came out, i was ahead of my time ;)

StuckInBA Says:
Tried Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy?
Never heard of it. Will google it.

I tried it when I was about 15. I couldn't get through it even then, found it very slow-moving and hardly worthwhile -- no Harry Potter-style stunts in it to keep the pages turning. LOTR-style fantasy doesn't work on me, I'm too hyper-real, believe it or not... ;)

ajh,

I'm not sure how much the 'rental media panic' in Oz right now is being stoked by REI interests. Not sure if it really is an issue. The SMH has run some very fair stories over time on the housing boom, I don't think they would start taking payola to run rental panic stories if there wasn't a shortage. I don't know why there should be a shortage tho, given all the apartments that are still being built -- unless it is a ploy by developers to get people to buy those apartments in panic. I heard at one stage there was a slow net loss of people from Sydney due to high prices... I can't find any weekend articles in The (Melbourne) Age on it, the (Sydney) SMH has been breathlessly talking about it for 2 weeks now...

sorry, ajh, meant to say, what's your take on it? all through alexandria in sydney, new residential blocks are going up, and meriton is still building apace -- but developers are terrified of the downturn, and RE sales are slow... the only driver for rent increases is really the specuvestors who paid too much, and are looking to raise rents to cover losses -- and the fact that gen X, Y and Z are being locked out of housing by high prices forcing them to remain as renters indefinitely... this changes the whole % of ownership terrain...

@ Jimbo,

I mentioned a friend with a 15 year fixed at 4 5/8%. That was a conforming loan with no points. He nailed the low in rates!

Paul

Muggy,

When I was handed the check at the closing of the sale of our house 1 1/2 years ago I said to everyone in the room "the next time I buy a house I'll pay cash"

Paul

astrid:

No, I think it’s 512 MB expandable to 2 gigs. I’ll have to try it with a memory stick and see if that helps it run faster.

This may answer your question.

Thanks to everybody for answering my Vista related questions. I guess I'm surprised that Toshiba sold a 514 MB computer preloaded with Vista even though it is apparently way under the requirement for good performance. The memory stick work around seems to help for now so I'll probably hold off on upgrading for a few month. I'm still thinking about returning this laptop and grabbing one of the last XP loaded notebooks.