Financial Advice for Normal Folks

Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 2pm
By John Friedman

Everyone should have access to financial advice, right? I think we can all agree on that — or at least we can agree that it would be a good thing if we all had some way to obtain financial advice.

But the world in which we live does not offer that up. Instead, financial advice is just about always bundled in with investing or insurance, and that means that, unless you need investing or insurance sorts of financial services, well then, no financial advice for you!

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Something along these lines happened recently:

…more ►

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15-Year vs. 30-Year Mortgages (Part 2): Which is Better for You?

Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 5pm
By John Friedman

Quick! Which would you rather have: a 30-year mortgage at 4% or a 15-year mortgage at 3.25%?

I thought I knew the answer — the 15, right? — until I recently spent a good deal of time what-if’ing the numbers. And what I found surprised me.

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San Francisco Realty Realities Bite or Nourish, Depending on Which Side You’re On

Friday, October 25, 2013 at 12pm
By John Friedman

I am fortunate to live in Noe Valley, San Francisco, California, USA, North America, Earth.

I am doubly fortunate to have bought a house in En-Vee Ess-Eff See-Eh in 1996 (though admittedly the downside of this time scaling is that it puts me well into the second half — final third, even — of my allotment of likely time for joyfully residing aloft life’s mortal plane . . .).

When we bought our humble abode in 1996, houses in Noe Valley went for somewhere in the neighborhood of $275 per square foot, so an average-sized house in Noe of about 1,600 square feet went for roughly $450k — a shocking number at the time and, in all-seeing hindsight, a shocking number now, but for exactly the opposite reason.

For that reason I did not believe it when an acquaintance recently told me that, Noe is selling for $1,000 a square foot.

Maybe for the square feet inside of a brand new, super schmancy place, I thought to myself, But surely not these idiosyncratic square feet inside my hundred-plus year old Edwardian that has yet to be MacMansioned and re-kitchened and re-foundationed and California-Closeted and steel-moment-framed, right?

But yesterday I learned in a fairly definitive, quite objective way that the ~$1k/ft metric does indeed apply to my house. Oh muhgosh. All the sweating and toiling and saving and honing of financial decisions hasn’t amounted to diddley when compared to the wealth-creation this unassuming little house hath begat.

*  *  *

San Francisco is on a building tear — a building bender, a building binge, a building craze. And, happily, that crazy building bender binge is mostly about human beings and families and such; by one count, we have 48,000 units in the residential unit pipeline, which, if all completed, will increase our housing stock by more than 12.5% over the existing stock of roughly 373,000 units.

And that means that most of those cranes we see all over the place are building living space rather than working space, as urban-infill and highrise condo-living firmly take root in the deep muck of the little city by the big bay, and as every single triangular lot on Market Street, every single gas station and parking lot everywhere, and every dilapidated building is now up for grabs, soon to be a mixed-use use of ten condos over retail and not very many parking spaces but excellent bike storage or, not-without-a-fight, something like a 55-story building blocking rich folks’s views or something like a wall of condos along the waterfront, to accompany the dreaded nearby anti-pedestrian pedestal that is Maritime Plaza and its surrounding vehemently anti-human environs.

Perhaps when all of it comes on line we’ll have a glut and prices will come down, but for the time being? Not so much. And just wait until the Twitter IPO plunks down another $1.5 billion of cash (and multiple tens of billions of market cap) right smack dab in the middle of where all the cranes perch, along the part of Market Street known as Mid-Market, where the gas stations and under-used triangular lots are going the way of the dodo bird.

…more ►

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The Treasury’s Checkbook: Healthy or Not Healthy as We Peer Into the Debt Default Abyss?

Wednesday, October 9, 2013 at 10am
By John Friedman

Looking at a couple of statements from your day-to-day checking account, I tell new clients in our first working meeting, is like looking at the lab results your doctor orders when you have a physical. Staring out from those pieces of paper [pdf files] are a bunch of numbers that tell us all the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly that is your day-to-day financial life at the numeric level. And from that we can together gauge an important part of your overall financial health. So roll up your sleeve and pump up your vein — let me take a look-see at those statements of yours — and let us together start getting smartened up about your financial life at the numeric level, shall we?

*  *  *

In our nation’s darkest domestic hour in years, we face debt default next week. Or so we are told.

Most experts look at the situation and see dire, global, long-lasting consequences of a debt default, though recently a few on the right have claimed that a debt default would be just no biggie. …more ►

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The Last Act of Love

Friday, October 4, 2013 at 7pm
By John Friedman

Tom Friedman died at 3:43 p.m. today, Central Time.

A bit later Nurse Ellen said, “See, I told ya. He waited until all four of you were here. It was his last act of love.”

*  *  *

We have, all of us, embedded deep within our biological self, a shutdown program that, except for very rare occassions, each of us uses just once, if at all. That shutdown program helps us transition from I’m-here,-thank-you-very-much,-this-is-quite-nice,-isn’t-it? to I’m outta-here,-never-to-return,-but-it-surely-was-fun,-wasn’t-it?

In one sense the running of the program lasts for the blink of an eye, and, in another, it lasts hours or days. Five days, the hospice people say, is the normal outside limit.

I’ve seen that program run, up close and very personal, just three times — first some ten years ago when our kitty exited this mortal plane, and then July 27, 2007 when my wife’s mother exited, and now through my beloved father’s exit today.

I will not detail here what the running of that program looks like. There are plenty of online resources. Suffice here to say that, from an outside perspective, it looks mostly peaceful, but also somewhat scary and foreign and, ultimately, final and unidirectional, in the sense that things happen which, even if you know nothing at all about the human body, you just know are irreversible: you can just tell when you see them that there’s no turning back, no undoing of that which just done got done.

And a lot of it can look like a coma.

*  *  *

Within that can-look-a-lot-like-a-coma, though, Nurse Ellen tells us that the heart of the father and of the husband is capable of choosing the just-right moment — the right moment among all the effortful breaths and pulses and oxygenations at which to begin the final different-in-kind breaths, as the invincible life force surrenders to entropy and the punctuated atoms of a human being become, once again, more or less, undifferentiated stardust. 

Tom Friedman, my dad, my mother’s husband of 65 years and father to my sister and brother and grandpa to my young nephew, chose his moment well. Starting on Tuesday — when he had what we now know was his final health downturn — we all had our separate times with him. First my mother and brother were with him that day. Then my sister flew in that night. And then I flew in on Wednesday (having just left his side on Sunday). Thursday was then a mish-mosh day and a time for all of us to be together with him in various combinations and permutations. And then this afternoon, just about five hours ago, we all were there to see him together. It was the first time we had all been together, all at once, as a five-some, since I-don’t-know-when. Years, maybe. Modern life.

*  *  *

The final part of the shutdown program took about one hour. And then it was peacefully, beautifully, permanently, releasingly, over. He lived 90 years minus a month minus a day, aloft within this loverely ol’ world of all of ours.

That was his final act of love, Nurse Ellen says. He was waiting for all of you to be here. He was doing his best to take care of all of you, right up ’til the end.

Yes, he was. And, yes, Dad, we will miss you very much. You were really something. And you wrote a great last chapter for yourself and for your loved ones. Thank you.

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