The realities of the housing situation for the middle class.

My wife and I are on the road to house ownership. We figure that we'll need at least $300K to buy a suitable house for us in the greater Boston area. Kids are not in the near future plans. So to avoid a monthly PMI payment (which could add $45-50K onto our total mortgage payment) we need to save up $60K for a downpayment. We're about 1/5 of the way there with what we currently have in savings and investments.

Step one--no debt spending. Zero. We're putting a good deal of our money towards debt relief. We have not put a dollar on a credit card for several months and we never plan to again. We have old debt on low-interest credit cards and we are doubling the minimum payments. Tons of debt in grad school loans, but worth it in that wife is just starting a new job that she is sure to love. We're double the minimum payments on that too. At the current pace, we will be free from credit card debt in 2 years and the grad school loans in 8-10.

Step two--save money. ING savings bank offers a savings account with a variable interest rate that is currently at 3.75%. Compare that to 0.5% from bank of America... Thanks to wedding gifts we have a decent amount in there. I have an IRA that was started for me by my former employer 10 years ago. There's not a ton of money in it but it's growing at about 6-7% per year at this point. Wife has an annuity with a bit more than is currently in my IRA, but we have no idea how well it's doing as her dad is still the executor of the account. We're working on taking care of that. We deposit money into the savings account on a regular basis, but we've recently been depositing less so we can pay off debt quicker. With my wife's new job we'll be able to save more each month.

Step three--wait. Keep on working, paying down debt and saving. For a couple years... Damn I hate the man... How are we going to grow our savings by 50K in 2 or 3 years? That remains to be seen... But we don't have enough capital to invest to make a

Step four--mother-in-law is a real estate broker... Buy something.

Step five--keep working, paying down debt, and trying to rebuild savings. Be in debt for at least 20 or 30 more years. Hope that retirement plans don't go bust (wife will have a 403b, which will help). Hope that the effects of peak oil are mitigated enough (nowhere near enough is being done) so that the dollar doesn't crash (it might).

Our other choice is to rent forever, be debt free in 10 years, but risk having no place to live if/when TSHTF. I suppose with a huge loan out on our house that risk would still exist anyway...

Thanks to Japan.

Some of you may remember that a while ago I posted a blog entry about why oil and gas prices have fallen so much since the spike which followed Katrina. I mentioned in that blog entry that the shipment of oil reserves from the international community were about to stop--but I was thankfully wrong.

Now, there is substantiated proof that at least some of the shipments to the US will stop. I wasn't aware that we were getting petroleum products from Japan--as they do not produce petroleum domestically... But we were. And now we ain't gunna be no more. Not sure if what they were sending us will be replaced by domestic production coming online in the gulf or by imports from another nations' reserve stockpiles, or not at all. I won't be so bold as to suggest prices will start going back up. But it certainly wouldn't surprise me...

60 Minutes misleads the Public About Avian Flu

I'm on a rampage today...

Last weekend 60 Minutes ran a piece about avian bird flu. There was only one misleading statement made, but the tone of the piece and what they didn't focus on is what caught my attention. In the intro to the piece, Steve Kroft said that "there are no proven drugs or vaccines to stop [H5N1]." While this is not an outright lie, thanks to the inclusion of the word "proven," that statement and the following piece focused soley on the virus, how it can spread, how much damage it would do, how unprepared we are, etc. etc. There was no mention of the vaccines that already do exist nor the many scientists who are working on perfecting them and getting them ready for public consumption.

At this point in the virus' life, it is impossible to have a "proven" vaccine because thankfully, the virus is not transmutable from human-to-human. The fact that the 60 minutes piece didn't even mention any medicine other than Tamiflu is interesting, to say the least. Why would they leave that aspect out of their findings when there's so much going on?

For instance, The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been testing a vaccine.

St. Judes has one too.

Vietnam began testing a vaccine in June.

Azko Noebl is developing a human H5N1 vaccine.

The US Department of Health and Human Services awarded a contract for the mass production of the vaccine last August. This contract will provide approximately two (2) million doses of monovalent inactivated influenza vaccine in multi-dose vials produced by a U.S.-licensed manufacturer. The vaccine will be kept in the Strategic National Stockpile for usage in the event of influenza pandemic involving avian influenza H5N1.

And I could go on... Or you could ask google yourself... My point is--why didn't 60 Minutes see it worthy of their piece to include any of this information or talk to any of the people who are working on vaccines? Why are they only telling us half of the story?

House Has Hearing on Peak Oil

Only about 30 or 40 years too late, the US House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce hosts a hearing "Understanding Peak Oil Theory." The link will, at some point, have a transcript of the event.

Note that one of the speakers is Kjell Aleklett Ph.D., one of the foremost experts on the topic from a scientific standpoint, and one of the original members of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, an international organization of petroleum geologists, oil and gas industry scientists, etc. Hopefully he can help shed some light on the situation.

Kelly Way of the ASPO is producing a documentary called Asleep in America that hopes to wake up Americans to the issue of Peak Oil. If oil industry folks are right--the peak will occur around 2020. If the "pessimists" are right, the peak will occur around 2010. In either case--this is an issue that will not go away. Americans, and all human beings, will have to deal with it in our lifetimes. Forget about the techno-fix--there is none. Forget cornucopian dreams of human ingenuity inventing a solution at the last moment and the public never knowing how close we were to collapse. Forget ignoring this issue anymore. The time to change the way we live is now by choice, or later by force of nature.

Freedom From... Advertising

Click here! Buy this! Ask your doctor about this! Drive this! Eat this! Stare at this woman's breast implants!! Corporations plant desires and wants in our heads, 24/7. The Web has been so successful as a business tool partly because of the ease of tracking users' browsing habits and delivering targeted advertisements based on that that information. A lot of companies have made a lot of money without any added overhead... Which I guess isn't an entirely bad thing, because more people probably have more jobs due to the added revenues from Web sales and ads. But I hate advertisements. I don't want to look at them when I'm using the internet. So much useless crap is being pushed at the average Web user from so many directions... I, for one, haven't had to deal with any of that garbage for the past few years... I use AdMuncher.

Click Here!!!

Buy Now!!!

I suppose this blog entry amounts to an (unpaid and unsolicited) ad for AdMuncher, which you must buy for $29.99 after the 30 day trial period. But trust me--you will want to... It's just one small way to keep corporations out of your head.

A new kind of bling for the streets of LA

I will rarely just link to an article and make some brief comments. This is one of those times.

Well, Well: Oil Rigs Return. This is an article my dad sent me a few days back. I finally got around to checking it out and since I haven't posted anything in a while I thought I'd let the blogoshpere know what I thought...

My first reaction: Great! Let's just dig it all up now as fast as we can! Not to worry, this article says there is "plenty" left!!! And by "plenty" they mean "I actually have no idea how much recoverable oil is left in southern California, but I read somewhere it was like a billion barrels! That's gotta be plenty!" I also have no idea how much oil is left in SoCal. But with US consumption over 20 million barrels per day, a billion barrels ain't all that much...

The average human being's first reaction: Great! Now maybe gas prices in CA will go down some. (i'm guessing, being that i'm not any sort of average human being, other than in my physical attributes and my love for trader joe's fresh packed hot salsa.)

So where is the "best" most well-measured reaction to the article? As usual, probably somewhere inbetween what a freak like me thinks and what the average human being thinks. We definitely need more product to keep the wheels of growth turning (pun intended) but at the same time, the wheels can't keep turning forever...