Trainguyrom
@Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 16 hours ago:
Yeah I compared some numbers and guessed a plausible interest rate for the 50 year based on the 15 vs 30 year interest rates at a couple of real banks near me
50 years at 6% with 5% down on 200k (fairly plausible for a decent home where I live and realistic for a first time home buyer who 50 year mortgages are clearly catering to) is 1k/mo almost exactly
30 years at 5.85% is 1,121/mo 20 years at 5.75% is 1,334/mo 15 years at 5.50% is 1,553/mo
So the difference is pretty small on a realistic first time home buyer’s home, but having been on the edge of approval for a home loan before that $100/month can absolutely be the difference between getting the home now and having to wait another 2-4 years depending on markets. In my case they assumed my insurance would cost more and that actually made all of the difference in my home loan application because that shaved about $100 per month off
One interesting side note, one of the local credit unions I looked at offers different interest rates depending on the value of the loan! For a 30 year fixed loan they offer the following rates:
800k or less: 6% 300k or less: 5.875% 200k or less: 5.875% (presumably they have this bracket for future rate changes) 100k or less: 5.75%
So yeah that’s new! I’ve not seen that before!
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 17 hours ago:
And my property taxes are 2k per year and that’s high for this county. It’s all relative and back of the envelope math is all about getting a rough idea, not getting spot on for any specific person
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 17 hours ago:
good luck finding a 350,000 home
This is going to vary wildly by region. There’s tons of large cities where the going rate for homes is around 300k and there’s notable large cities where you’re lucky to find any property for under a million.
Depending on the market you might simply need to lower your standards if you’re filtering by homes built too recently or homes with a ton of square footage or a high number of bedrooms/bathrooms. Or you might be in a truly fucked market where your best bet is to get creative and either buy a home with friends and/or family or even buy a home with a family member or friend helping with the intial mortgage and then rent out some space or find some other hustle with the property (I’ve heard of folks buying homes & property in the country and turning it into a wedding venue for example. Or renting it out for film shoots or AirBnB or whatever else happens to work where you live. I know a guy who built an ADU just to rent out on AirBnB as a side stream of income)
Even the homes that are 40 years old in my area
That’s…extremely new even by American standards. I say this sitting in a home which was built while the ottoman empire still existed. Yeah there’s quirks and it would be nice if the home was built to more modern standards, but it’s nothing that a bit of creativity, ingenuity and maybe a contractor or two when you can afford them can’t sort out. Plus the equity I’ve gained in just a few years makes it a damn good choice that I bought when I did and didn’t wait until I could afford to buy the perfect house
So getting a home at $260,000 that you got would be a dream.
Hey, the house across the street from me is listed at that right now. It’s got a pool and some nice updates, decent amount of bedrooms and bathrooms. Cute place. I live in a pretty small town so you might not like that, especially since job availability can be a struggle here even during good job markets if you’re in a white collar role. On the other hand if you’re willing to change careers entirely it’s pretty affordable. Guy who’s selling it works for a landscaping company and mows lawns on the side for several folks in the neighborhood. Or I’m thinking I’ll go be a school bus driving as a backup if things go south with my employment status for example. See above about either lowering your standards to what you can afford or getting creative if you’re in a more fucked market.
Ultimately life in this world is all about finding the best way to enjoy the opportunities available to you. If you’ve got a career you love living somewhere you love maybe it’s worth renting for an extra decade or two until you can finally afford to buy. Or maybe you aren’t fully in love with your career and/or where you live so relocating or a creative change to your finances might make sense.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 17 hours ago:
Usually folks signing a very high interest mortgage do so to snag property while prices are down due to the rough market then will refinance in 2-5 years when rates are lower.
As long as homes are investments, buying a home as soon as you can regardless of interest rate is the most accessible path to financial success for the average middle class American
For one thing, when you buy a home you’re basically locking in your home payment for decades. A 30 year mortgage originated in 1998 would have the exact same payment this month as it did in 1998. Unless of course you pull equity out of the home in a HELOC or refinance but that’s generally not a good idea anyways since you’re trading long term wealth for short term cash, and that’s basically always a path to economic ruin. Point is though, whatever payment you lock in with your initial mortgage it’s not going to change significantly until the mortgage is fully paid off. Even if you refinance, even considering property tax changes, your home costs are largely not going to increase. About the only wildcard is insurance which those rates are mostly determined by the risk of property loss, so as long as you don’t live somewhere that is at relatively high flood, fire or hurricane risk you’ll probably not see a dramatic increase
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 17 hours ago:
Truth is rural any state usually has affordable homes, just not the jobs. It’s a good option if you work remotely or in an extremely in-demand job like healthcare
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 18 hours ago:
Having worked at a bank before (in their IT dept specifically), banks are extremely risk averse (and that extends to all aspects of the bank, from financial risks to HR risks to IT risks), and all of the loan officers I worked with were far more interested in doing their job right than being sales people.
It’s in the banks best financial interest if it’s customers get wealthier because where does that wealth go? Into the bank they already bank at. Banks need to keep a certain amount of deposits in reserve, so the more cash deposited the more money the bank can invest in financial products itself to make itself more money. If all the bank does is mint loans that customers struggle to pay back their deposits will be very low and therefore they’ll make less money.
Also sketchy loans are harder to sell as securities, as security bundles have to have balanced risk profiles both for legal compliance and for investors to be interested. Investors in mortgage backed securities (MBS) aren’t investing in MBSes for insane growth, they’re investing in a relatively safe security to park some cash in as part of their diversification
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 18 hours ago:
I think it’s a famous photo of folks at NASA celebrating but it does look different. You might be right that this one’s been touched up or even fully generated by AI as the depth of field is just all over the place in a way that cameras don’t do. Also some funky compression artifacts that don’t really look like compression artifacts (which I’ve seen AI image generators add generate fake compression artifacts to generated images before)
- Comment on The height of sophistication: the 1994 McDonald's manager collection 4 days ago:
My first job was as a cashier at a grocery store. When I started they required everyone to wear a white button up shirt, black pants and a tie. Hilariously that’s the only job I’ve worked where I’ve been expected to wear a tie. Anyways about a year after I started they shifted to these weird slightly patterned shirts and you could either wear that or a dress shirt and the tie was optional. Now they’ve shifted entirely to just black pants and a red or black logo wear shirt and nobody wears ties anymore. It’s not even been that long! I’m not old enough to see this much of a change am I?!
- Comment on 1 week ago:
All I know is one minute it was summer and the next my heat is on, my coat is now on daily and there’s no leaves on the trees. I miss autumn, it seems to get shorter every year
- Comment on grindr dump (in post body) 1 week ago:
NO: Guns, dead animals, motorcycles, trucks or other vehicles you wish to show off
Dang it so no train pics I take it?
No pics that include other women, no matter who they are. I’d try to leave male friends out as well.
See I’ve heard the opposite advise. A non-cover photo of you with some friends including non-male friends if you have any indicates you’re not a loner and might have some idea of how to talk to other humans
- Comment on Popular Tech Youtuber Enderman looses his YouTube channel after AI error 1 week ago:
Nebula is cool because every creator on the platform becomes part owner, so it really gives creators on the platform good control of their content. I just wish that there was a way to federate video content between paid platforms so you can have one pane of glass to view stuff scattered across the web
- Comment on Popular Tech Youtuber Enderman looses his YouTube channel after AI error 1 week ago:
Rising tide raises all ships!
- Comment on Come the fuck on.... please? 1 week ago:
I grew up reading the books as they came out, and where I had read (or had my mom read to me when I was too young to read them myself) the first 3 books repeatedly, I definitely aged out by the time 6&7 were released. I think I read 6 once and I couldn’t even finish 7.
I also noped out of the films after the spider in 2 (holy crap I was way too young to be seeing that film btw!)
- Comment on She is making a GREAT point 1 week ago:
I tried 4 times in a 24 hour period once with a partner and we were both far too sore to finish the last time. Maybe if we did so more regularly we might have been able to do it but the flesh is weaker than the spirit a lot of times
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.
Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
1.7.10 (or 1.6.4, or 1.5.2 for that matter)
1.3 was another nasty one. That was the one where multiplayer and singleplayer were merged and LAN play was introduced. Before that mods were released specifically for either single or multiplayer and authors would have to specifically build 2 versions of every mod if they wanted to enable use in multiplayer. This shift killed a ton of mods and version 1.2.5 was a peak for mods like Red Power for example
If you use an alternate launcher like Prism Launcher it is trivial to install tons of modpacks for any version of Minecraft and manage many different mod loadouts (with handy search and auto-download of both modpacks and individual mods, plus it makes it super easy to modify a modpack you downloaded and add/remove mods) Its really the best way to play modded Minecraft (and has been since the fork from MultiMC) plus unlike most launchers which are super-simplified to not scare newbies, Prism Launcher also exposes tons of handy technical stuff if you want to dive deeper, such as optionally displaying full logs, java version and argument management, world edit and other tool integrations and more.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
I’d say its more like going to a fancy ice cream shop with amazing ice cream and ordering vanilla (hehe see what I did there?) or a fancy pizza place known for their amazing topping combinations and just getting a slice of cheese pizza. Its perfectly fine and probably better than some other places you’ve had vanilla ice cream or cheese pizza, but holy crap are you missing out!
- Comment on My friend got hacked and of course microsoft will not even try to help 1 week ago:
My gut instinct is they’re great about account access problems because that can lose a customer for life but not so much for the marketplace because the skins marketplace freaking prints money for them while others interface with it to use it for money laundering and illegal gambling. People Make Games did a really good deep dive into the subject and how it enables literal children to become addicted to gambling, and there really isn’t any resources or safetynets set up for children who are addicted to gambling real money for virtual video game items because that’s just not a thing most people realize exists at all!
- Comment on My friend got hacked and of course microsoft will not even try to help 1 week ago:
Yeah I strongly suspect they’re being re-scammed. Scammers specifically target victims who have been scammed before and will even go and claim to be trying to help prevent the victims from being scammed while further scamming them, whether using perpetual access to their accounts and computer as a VPN endpoint and legitimate accounts to try to bypass fraud protections or just scamming for more money.
Honestly if you can set aside a couple of hours for research, watching Kitboga’s scam baiting videos is really good for learning the hallmarks of common scams and some of the turns of phrase scammers tend to use (they frequently sell scripts and playbooks to eachother so you can have a bunch of completely unrelated scam callcenters using the exact same scam, and naturally folks working there will pick up certain verbage and keep using it even when running completely original scams) you can start with this one in which you can see how literally everyone this victim is relying on is in fact a scammer
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 1 week ago:
So funnily enough a majority of my friends are feminine-presenting and several of them are single so I hear a lot about their experiences with dating guys and almost universally their primary concerns are hygiene and listening abilities (and past that concerns for their ability to budget and be financially stable), because that’s how low the bar is for men.
Given how consistently the only people I ever see saying that women like big trucks/expensive cars happen to be men, and every women/feminine presenting person I know never even mentions vehicle choice when talking about what they do or don’t like in a potential partner, plus the memes posted by women consistently matching this opinion, I have to believe that that’s the case.
How are you meeting these dates who scoff at your sound financial decisions? What are your filters for a potential date? I strongly suspect you may be inadvertently filtering your dates either by where you meet them or expecting certain characteristics (or potentially you might be doing something that scares away non-gold diggers) so that most of who you date happen to be overly veign
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
Strangely enough SiriusXM has a really good punk channel called Faction Punk focused on punk from the 90s and newer. I’m guessing it doesn’t get enough attention to cost SiriusXM more than it makes them right now.
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
If you’re going to take such a nihilistic approach you could at least take a nihilistic approach while doing something to try to make things better for everyone left behind.
Go obstruct fascists at a protest, be the next tank man and be a hero. Help with directing traffic around protests (a critical but risky job to do!) and get involved with whatever local movement you can to find action you can take
Or, if your risk tolerance is too low for any kind of action like that then don’t be a nihilist and instead find what small acts you can do to help even if that’s purely in a harm reduction capacity. Help out at a food bank, set up a little free food pantry/library, print zines to distribute, put anti-fascist stickers in public places and cover/remove fascist propaganda. Help friends and neighbors in need. Connect with neighbors so you have someone you can lean on when you’re in need
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
That song is old enough to die in the wars it was written in protest of though. The OP seems to be asking about much newer stuff than 90s/2000s punk.
Rise Against is of course still around and still writing music but they’ve softened their sound a ton in the last 10 years or so. Which like, bands sounds change which is good but also they changed away from what I’m into and their early albums are still amongst my favorite albums of all time
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
A lot of early punk started in church basements. The best punk movements start in the spaces they can get, might be a church basement, someones garage, a retail space between leases, etc.
- Comment on Dear neighbor... 2 weeks ago:
Conveniently, the beeping smoke alarms often beep at a frequency that exits older individual’s hearing range
Also there is simply not enough smoke detector safety education right now. I only learned about the 10 year life space of smoke alarms when one in a rental started alarming as it’s “it’s been 10 years replace me!” warning (and being a super young adult I had no clue what to do and called the fire department which was quite a way to start my day)
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 2 weeks ago:
I was going to say we don’t know for sure why so many parents choose to drive their kids, but it turns out after a quick Google that there has been at least one study into this matter, and it seems a large portion of the surveyed respondents can be attributed to carbrain (vague “stranger danger” and “risk of bullying” as listed reasons) but also a significant number drive their kids due to “traffic danger” indicating that it is poor road design pushing a significant portion of parents to choose to perform school pickups and dropoffs by car. And most of the remainder drive their kids to and from school out of “social convenience” (which is probably where my specific instance falls) so based on this one study based on a survey of almost 300 parents we could actually reduce the number of cars in those lines by a significant portion by making other options than driving more convenient for parents, but a large number state they’re primarily concerned about pedestrian safety which is more of an infrastructure challenge than a direct “car brain” challenge
I really wish I was better at reading studies because that is some fascinating data that I’d love to play with some more and see what other conclusions I could tease out of it
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 2 weeks ago:
If only there were free public transport provided to every student outside a small radius of the school. That would make things so much simpler!
Just gonna throw this out there, while yes car=bad and carbrain is real, sometimes its just administrative bullshit that fails to consider the realities of their student’s and/or parents’ needs and living situations.
When my kids started school, because my youngest is special needs and other specifics they both started around the same time in different grades. For the majority of the student body my town’s school district will simply bus between different schools plus a couple of specific designated points so that everyone who lives within city limits is within about half a mile of a place that the buses pick up and drop off. They require a parent/guardian present at pickup time for 3k-Kindergarten bus pickup and dropoff. For students in special ed they instead get to take the special ed bus which has extra staff and seatbelts and only picks up and drops off at the home and also requires a parent/guardian present. Both do pickups and dropoffs at about the same time. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Since my wife has been a stay at home mom (primarily due to daycare costs exceeding what she would realistically make) and can’t be in 2 places at once^[citation needed]^ we were forced to do our own pickups and dropoffs instead of bussing. I’m sure there’s similar levels of bullshit if your kids are in different grades putting them at different schools because the local school administrators seem to be really good at not fully thinking things through like that and usually require experiencing the consequences of their actions to change course on a decision
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 2 weeks ago:
lots of women are into big trucks and expensive cars.
There’s always exceptions to the rule, but the things dudes think attract women and what actually attracts women are so often two entirely different things. Most women have little interest in expensive cars, huge muscles or fancy gadgets, they’re instead interested in a man with decent hygiene who can listen and be financially stable (all things that a lifted pickup with extra-edgy stickers and whatnot communicates the opposite of)
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 2 weeks ago:
Real talk, based on how extremely faithful that conversion is in every aspect they can convert a bus into a Santa Fe F-unit(and the sticker pointing to www.mytrain.com which has a page dedicated to Milwuakee Road 261 meeting IAIS 6988 and 7081 I think they’re a rail fan and would be very pleased to see more rails being laid
- Comment on card game shop 2 weeks ago:
I’ve only had that happen to a couple of tshirts years ago with Axe deodorant sticks.
I generally use Degree (there’s only like 4 deoderant options in my local stores and I can choose between Oldspice which my wife hates, Axe which smells like a middle school dance in all the worst ways, Suave which never lasted the full day when I tried it or Degree) and I’ve noticed some older shirts have gotten some minor staining on the inside, but its literally only visible on the inside and only if you really hunt for it
The BO AOE cloud that follows not wearing deodorant is what’s wrong with not wearing it.
SO MUCH THIS. My dad has refused to use deodorant my entire life. You don’t want to do anything around him after about 2PM because he showers every morning and reeks of BO by the end of the day (he also matches the meme about only using Head and Shoulders for literally everything in the shower just to complete the mental image for you)