Once again, Raymond rocks

On how marketing edited the blurb on his talk at the PDC:

[T]hey stuck my name into the description of the talk, thereby drawing attention to me rather than putting the focus on the actual talk topic. Because I'm not there to be me. I'm there to give a talk. If I were just there to be me, the title would be "Raymond Chen reads the newspaper for an hour while listening to music on his headphones." [...] They also took out the reference to finger puppets.
- source

I miss his bug reports.

Spending vs Investing

The article in general is worth reading - but I left un-cut a particularly telling piece.

( I )

magine you bought two homes, one for your own use and one that you rented out. The rental property, I would argue, can be considered a pure investment.

Like a stock, you will get both capital gains, thanks to the home's price appreciation, and dividends, in the form of monthly rent checks. If you added up your rent and price appreciation and then subtracted homeowner's insurance, maintenance expenses, mortgage payments, taxes and other costs, you would have your profit. Often, this profit can be pretty darn impressive.

( Meanwhile, you don't collect rent on the house you live in. )

That's a big deal. The reason: If you are a landlord, rental income is typically your biggest source of profit, dwarfing the gain from price appreciation.

On the other hand, you do have to live somewhere. Shelter is a necessity. Buying a home and effectively renting it to yourself hardly seems like frivolous, discretionary spending.

So if you live in your own home, are you investing or are you spending? I would argue it's a little bit of both. Most of us own homes that provide more than just basic shelter, so there is indeed a large element of consumption. ( Read more... )

I know people who argue that the mortgage (or the PITI) is equivalent to the rent they'd pay, and so they shouldn't count deduct it from the appreciation in determining how much they made on a house sale. Personally, I go back and forth. One advantage to a fixed-rate mortgage is that the the payment IS fixed. Rent is SOO not fixed! OTOH, I don't think that upgrades or remodels are automatically 'investments' because you really don't know if other people will want to "reimburse" you for, oh, Corian countertops.

Judgment call, judgment call, judgment call...

I do like that Clements includes pleasure and satisfaction as dividends, tho. Warms my little non-ascetic Taurus heart.