Renovations gone overboard

So, I wasn't able to catch the first day of Buy Me's Budget Breaker's Week due to a propensity to nap. I did catch the second day though titled "Revamping for a Sale" about a woman who originally bought a Georgian style house but poured in a whopping $380,000 worth of renovations to update it to compete with new construction that was going up across the street. She enlisted her sister as an agent. I think her sister hates her because she kept insisting on spending money to update the building, building dormers to make the house look bigger, knocking down the front living space wall for a more open living space, which turned out to be a big mistake. Even after $30,000 more in renovations, the house still didn't sell even after listing at $875,000 - a $75,000 loss. This really opened my eyes up to the fact that a house is a home, yes, but it also is an investement. Going overboard in renovations can really hurt you in the resale market.

HGTV Budget Breakers Buy Me

Been busy these past few weeks. Work is heating up and I've been involved in my hobby as a translator of manga. This weekend, though, I discovered HGTV. It's always been there on the dish but funny, I'd never actually seen a show. Once I did, however, I am hooked. Spent the whole weekend glued to HGTV watching home makeovers and real estate shows. Yeah, its that obsessive-compulsive side rearing its ugly head. This Monday, HGTV startes a special theme call "Budget Breakers" about people who use their homes to get out of debt. I will tune in because it's interesting. Besides, nothing else much to watch on Mondays. Better than Wife Swap.

Listening to the Voices in Your Head

So, my nucleus accumbens and insula, according to this NY Times article here, are responsible for the glut on my Mastercard bill. Who knew?

Last year, after surveying shoppers’ passions, behavioral economists at Carnegie Mellon University developed what they call the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale.
But this kind of survey reveals only what shoppers choose to confess. To find out more, the economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of gadgets, appliances, books, DVDs and assorted tchotchkes. Lying inside the scanner, first you’d see a picture of a product. Next you’d see its price, which was about 75 percent below retail. Then you’d choose whether or not you’d like a chance to buy it. Afterward, the researchers randomly chose a couple of items from their mall, and if you had said yes to either one, you bought it; otherwise you went home with the cash. The good news, for behavioral science, was that the researchers saw telltale patterns, which they report in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Neuron.

Don't Hold Your Wee for a Wii

This NY Times piece "Too High a Price" speaks for itself. My family has a Nintendo Wii. We got it off Craig's List in a covert operation involving secret handshakes, paranoia and cover-ups and the system sure is fun. However, it's not worth a life.

CNN Says I can afford Ohio, not California

Here's an morbid CNN article about the declining affordability of housing for Americans.

"An annual income of about $85,000 is needed to afford median-priced homes; salaries have not seen modest gains, according to a study. In the New York metropolitan area, a $500,000 median-priced home required a $171,000 annual salary. The median-priced home in San Francisco, the most expensive U.S. market, was $759,000, requiring income of $260,000. In less-expensive Chicago, the median-priced home cost $254,000, requiring an $87,000 salary.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Mansfield, Ohio, homes cost a median $85,000, requiring $29,118 in income."

Geez Louis. It seems like I can afford to live in Ohio. I like corn but not that much.

Give More Than You Can

Giving more than you can really isn't the way to get rich. In fact, its the opposite. Living on a strict budget of $15 for the rest of the month, I just gave away $11 of that grand sum. Don't ask me why I'm on such a strict budget. It's a tale for the weekly postings. Anyhow, I met a older guy on the light rail last night and he ran through a long story about him being a Veteran whose check hadn't come in and that he'd already gotten two light rail tickets and really needed to get home and he already had a dollar, could I spare 75 cents? I was telling the truth when I said I didn't carry cash. I somehow discovered 75 cents at the bottom of my bag and sent him on his merry way. Hope he didn't spend it on booze instead.

I usually never just hand money out to people who ask. However, I've been stranded before with no money and th fact that he had half of the amount needed worked in his favor. The rest of the $10 I handed over to our company's Foodlink drive. I just hadn't gotten around to donating and the deadline is today. And, the fact that I was one of the food drive coordinators made it embarassing that I hadn't added to the pot. In my defense, I was roped into the job on my first day here at my new job because nobody else wanted to do it. I remember being poor and getting canned food from charity. Lots of V8, corn, tomato soup and beans.

The Seed of Want

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I began lusting after a house of my own. After much screaming, angst and anger, my boyfriend and I had just broken up for the third time that year. Drowning in the tail end of our seven-year relationship, we took the next logical step: we got engaged and began house hunting. It made a crazy sort of sense at the time that a 30-year financial commitment built around brick and mortar would bind us together in a way that love and stardust couldn’t. I know. Don’t ask me what the hell I was thinking.

In 2005, the real estate market in California was hot, really hot. Houses, even Psycho-vibe ones with a body in backyard and REDRUM scrawled on the walls, were commanding top dollar as long as it had at least two bedrooms and a working bathroom, vengeful ghostly presence optional. The interest rate was low, Adjusted Rate Mortgages (ARM) offered easy affordability and new construction was popping up like resurgent daises after a heavy snow. You would think that after the heady days of the tech boom and bust in the early 2000s, Californians would have learned to exercise caution. If everybody plus their grandmother and Strudel the bichon-fritz wants to get in on the game, the Titantic is more than likely due for a rendezvous with an big, market chilling popsicle. But, the thing is, Californians are suckers; we believe in magic. Proximity to Hollywood and near constant sun brings a propensity for goofy, contagious, completely unfounded optimism. How else to explain the re-election of our Govenator?

I was ambivalent about home ownership even though I was 26, had no debt and was vested in my job at a high-flying Public Affairs firm. Raised in a culture where a female child didn’t leave home until she married, the concept simply never entered my mind. I’d only barely begun to question tradition by moving out to an apartment of my own when I turned 25. (I’d stayed close to home for college) My parents didn’t speak to me for a year and still refer to the decision as the Aiya-Disgraceful-American-Daughter-Bring- Shame-to-Ancestors incident. Really.

M. and I had a great time looking at a half-dozen houses. I was intrigued not with the houses themselves but with the staged décor. They all looked like budget Martha Stewart on Prozac. People actually decorate powder rooms and make striped orange paint work? Who would have thunk? But, it still didn’t inspire me to part with close to half a mil. Until, that is, I saw the one house that made me go all gooey.

It was a two-story sandstone colored house built with soaring ceilings, rounded archways, a ridiculously spacious master bedroom suite and a gorgeous tiled bathroom with a whirlpool hot tub. Oh Lordy, the bathroom alone made my knees weak. The house was also full of secret nooks and crannies, unexpected, whimsical space that made you want to linger to enjoy the surprise and go around the corner to find the next discovery all at the same time. I fell deep in unexplainable, rushing-to-your-head, put-your-head-between-your-knees, Romeo-and-Juliet type love.

I purred in M’s ear, “This house is so sexy.” He looked at me with wide eyes, not fully comprehending. I’m usually the demure Asian girlfriend stereotype. I pushed M down on the master bedroom bed which, of course, was a sham display frame that almost collapsed under his weight. “I want to jump your bones. Right N.O.W,” I said throatily.

He drove us home very, very fast.

We didn’t buy the house. Our relationship came to its inevitable end just as the real estate bubble burst. I’m lucky that I wasn’t burdened with an inflated mortgage and a disgruntled man at the same time. But, the seed of want was definitely planted. The desire gnaws at me like a dog niggling at a bone.

This is the chronicle of my journey to become a single female with house.

Some women are stimulated by hormones, food, Prada, whatever. I salivate at the thought of an affordable, 3 bed/2 bath with hot tub. I’m weird but also one of the new women of this age. World, watch out.