Car Talk

I'm in the middle of a major #firstworldproblem right now - namely, I want to buy a new car. Despite the fact that I don't actually need a new car. And I've got too many to choose from.

Right now, I drive a 2006 Ford Ranger - purchased new, now with about 88,000 miles on it. It also happens to be bright yellow. Aside from an annoying tendency to attract cops, it's been a great vehicle - the only non-wear item I've had to replace was a temperature sensor It's gone through plenty of tires and brakes, but this may have more to do with the fact that I drive like a cross between a crazy taxi driver and the Duke boys.

The Ranger has it's minor annoyances, though - it's a bit lacking in creature comforts - cloth seats, a stereo that still sports a tape deck, and the squeaks and wear that a vehicle that's approaching 100k tends to show. The other thing about a pickup is that it is awesome for hauling big stuff or large loads of stuff - but not particularly well suited to the smaller stuff, like taking a couple bags of groceries and 12 packs of Diet Mountain Dew back from Target.

I've always been a bit of a car nut, ever since I was ramming Matchbox cars into the base of the glass-topped kidney-bean shaped coffee table in my parent's living room. So I've been looking at new cars ever since I bought this one. In that time, I've gone through a ton of possibilities - everything from used Range Rovers and Lincoln Navigators to new Toyota 4Runners or Nissan Frontiers. I've also toyed with the idea of keeping the Ranger for hauling duties and buying a sports car - an early 2000's MR2 or a Porche Boxter or an Infiniti G37. Or maybe something vintage, like an early-90's Bentley.

My current thought has been a 2006 or newer Audi A6 Avant wagon. It would be fun to drive, comfortable, and unique. Sure, I couldn't haul some of the big loads I've hauled in the truck, but I could probably count the number of times I've hauled more than I could fit in a wagon on one hand - especially if I equip said wagon with a roof rack and a turtle top. And they are 4 wheel drive.

The Audi has one thing that is both a feature and a bug - they are pretty rare. From a quick look at Auto Trader, there appear to be exactly 3 low milage examples in my price range within 300 miles of me, and one is at a very sketchy dealer. I do know a guy who knows a guy who might be able to find me one at a dealer's only auction, but I don't know what the odds of that actually happening are.

From a financial perspective, this is probably a good thing, because it makes it really difficult to actually buy one, and the longer i drive my current paid-off and heavily depreciated truck, the more I'm basically riding for free. Of course, one of the advantages of looking for a car before you actually need one is that you hope to get rid of your current ride before it develops some expensive problem, and I'm hoping that i don't wait too long.

But there's a pretty good chance I will. If I had to choose one thing about myself, I'm really not sure what it would be, but it might be that i'm indecisive, but maybe not. I tend to be reluctant to make big decisions, and tend to overanalyze them. In the grand scheme of life, buying this car will be pretty minor - but I'll still flog the decision to death. The odd thing is that some of the decisions I've agonized the most over or planned for years have turned out the worst, while some of the ones I've made impulsively have been the best.

Why pr0n and video games aren't to blame for immature guys...

Via Best of the web (last entry) comes yet another article about how guys are a bunch of lazy video game playing porn watching losers who live in their parent's basement instead of getting married and raising families like responsible adults used to do.

As Taranto points out, part of this has to do with the rise of women - which meant a decline in men. And I'm not sure about some of the article's conclusion. We are in a pretty bad recession, and it tends to hit entry level recent college grads worst. While the people profiled are at least partly voluntarily underemployed, some people living at home are clearly doing it because they don't have a better option. And it's worth asking if moving out is really a sign of maturity - there are some young adults who can afford to move out but choose to live at home for a few years to build up a nest egg. That's called deferred gratification - dealing with the inconvenience of living with your parents for a while - in exchange for being able to get a nicer place when you do move out. Rent and associated costs can easily eat up 50% or more of a paycheck, and living at home for a few years can mean that someone can bank tens of thousands of dollars towards, say, a down payment on a house.

The article also sites declining marriage numbers and later marriages as proof that guys are basement-dwelling porn addled losers. But part of lower marriage numbers is because of increased cohabitation - some of those guys aren't single, it's just become normal for couples to live together for years before tying the knot.

But let's accept the premise that there is a bunch of single, loser guys living in their parent's basements, and a bunch of women who are not too happy about that. Why? Is it video games and porn? I doubt it. I think the real answer is that the reason there are so many loser guys is that there are women who are willing to date them.

At least one of the single basement-dwellers in the article has had a string of girlfriends, despite possessing none of the traits that women supposedly find desirable, like his own place or gainful employment. Yet despite the fact that, on paper, I meet all those things that women are supposedly looking for - I own my own house, am gainfully employed in a decent-paying job, am in reasonably solid financial shape, and am looking to settle down and raise a family - I don't even get dates, let alone have relationships.

Sure, there are plenty of things wrong with me - I'm short, marginally overweight, I blog, I'm introverted, I have a strange and unsexy hobbies like going to auctions, and i talk to my cat. But presumably if women were formost concerned about financial stability and long-term relationships, at least some of them would consider overlooking these things and at least giving me a shot.

But they don't. Why? Because when women say they are looking for financially secure stable guys, they mean they are looking for tall, attractive, athletic, outgoing guys, and they would prefer that they be financially stable and mature. But when push comes to shove - when they have a choice of the attractive guy or the responsible one - they will pick the attractive one every time, even if he lives in his parent's basement and spends all day playing Halo. Which means guys have no incentive not to live in their parents basement and play video games, because it isn't hurting their dating all that much.

I suspect part of this is evolution - even though women - especially educated women - have become the dominant and more successful gender, they are still wired to look for the kind of strong, agressive guy who would protect them from bears and not the less the guy who can't kill a bear but can make sure the mortgage is paid.

And hey, women are free to date who they want and choose what they think are the most important things. But they should be honest about that decision - about the fact that financial stability and maturity and employment are all nice to haves, not must haves. And if they aren't happy about the guys they are dating, maybe they should blame porn and video games a little less and look a little more internally instead.

You're nobody until somebody loves you...

I was talking to a couple coworkers over lunch a few days ago, and one suggested "you know what you're problem is, you don't have enough self-esteem". (When you blog about your personal life, it tends to cause people to offer you advice).

While I respect this person's opinion, i disagree. I think that, if anything, America is awash with way too much self esteem, and that my own lack of it is not some figment of a mind that doesn't perceive things correctly, but rather one that does. I don't like myself very much, but there's a good reason for that - namely, that nobody else likes me very much either.

Recognizing and addressing our faults is how we grow, how we improve - it's what drives us to do better. For years, I was obese - like, BMI over 40, size 46 pants obese. And for years, I told myself that was OK. It was only when I stopped doing that, realized I had a problem that would have serious consequences if I didn't actively do something about it, and started exercising and watching what I ate did I get down to a healthy weight.

Which gets to the major problem in my life - being single. As the Rat Pack once crooned, "You are nobody until somebody loves you". Which would make me nobody, because throughout my life, while I watched friends and classmates and coworkers do all the normal things people do - date and marry and have kids - I've been forever alone. For a while, I could blame that on my weight, but losing most of it hasn't made much of a difference in finding relationships.

Dating advice columns and blogs are always full of advice about how people can be happy as singles, how you shouldn't let that control your life. I suspect these people have never been single - really single. Not temporary, between significant others single, not I could date if I wanted to but I don't feel like it single, but knowing that there is a pretty good chance you are going to die alone having never known loving someone or being loved single. But that's my life.

And it's not for lack of trying. I know lots of people who have found love online, but I haven't gotten it to work for me. I've used online dating on and off for years, and can count the number of dates I've gotten out of it one one hand. Like the Pontiac Aztek or Microsoft Bob, I've been rejected by the marketplace. And that's why I have low self esteem - not because of how I perceive myself, but because of how other people - well, specifically single female people 23-34 living in the Baltimore Metro area - perceive me.

I know, maybe I just haven't found the right person yet - maybe somewhere there is a reasonably attractive woman in her late 20's or early 30's who is looking for a short, hairy guy with bad posture who enjoys blogging, flea markets and auctions, reading books about business, and running road races (poorly). But the older i get, the less likely that seems.

I keep hoping there's just something I'm doing wrong that i can change - that if I make more money or get a cooler job title or spend more time at the gym I can overcome whatever it is that repulses the opposite sex. But I suspect it's not one specific thing - it's just that I'm unloveable, and thus will always be nobody.

This post will tax you....

So yesterday morning I downed my usual Sunday morning pot of coffee and did my taxes. My effective tax rate came out to 10.85%, which means that I pay a lower tax rate than Warren Buffett's secretary. It also means that I'm getting about $4500 back between federal and state taxes.

Some people who hear this will probably think that I'm an idiot for giving the government an interest-free loan, and that I should change my withholding so that less in taxes is taken out of my paycheck instead of getting a big refund at the end of the year. But there is a method to my madness. The way i figure, if I lower my withholding, I'll get about $50 a paycheck more. That's a nice amount of money, but it's small enough that I'd probably ramp up my consumption to eat it up - a few more pairs of sneakers, a few more drinks from Starbucks, a few more electronic gadgets. But instead, I get a couple grand in one lump sum, which I feel I need to save - so it goes into my savings account, to be put towards bigger things - most likely a new truck and some home renovations.

Yes, I realize there are other ways I could probably still achieve the same result, like decreasing withholding and automatically putting the additional amount in a separate account. But that requires work, and I didn't get to be a blogger with readership in the double digits by proactively doing stuff. This works for me, and requires me to do nothing, the job I was born to do.

And it's hard to get too worked up about the lost interest, since I think my savings account is earning around 0.5%. Half a percent of $4500 works out to around $22, and the actual lost interest is considerably less (since only 1/12 of the principle would earn interest for a whole year).

So I'll continue to smile when TurboTax rings up the green digits of how much I'm getting back. Sure, it's my money, but it's money I probably would have spent on something stupid otherwise.

We all end up on two tables...

I went to an auction today - a large estate/consignment auction that a local auction company holds in a fairgrounds building every month or so. I've been to their last two auctions, because they had specific consignments I was interested in - one from the estate of a guy who owned a mastering studio, and one from a creditor that had seized the contents of a doctor's office. I did very well on both, and since I was close to being maxed out on vacation time and needed to burn some hours, I figured I'd go to todays as well, even though there wasn't anything specific that interested me in the listing.

I found a couple items I was interested in, but it was an all-day auction and the first item was about halfway through. Since it was a nice day, I bought myself lunch from the lunch truck and sat down at a picnic table outside. While I was eating my hot dog, I overheard the guy next to me say something interesting - "most of the stuff in there is from dead people. After you've lived on this earth, it all comes down to two tables - the embalming table and the auction table".

Estate auctions are a reminder of something that we don't want to think about - our own mortality. I've only been to a handful - I usually look for electronics, computers, and business equipment, so I generally seek out bankruptcy or business closing auctions where there is a lot of that kind of stuff rather than estates where there is a handful of that mixed in with clothes and furniture and knicknacks. But when you go to one, it's hard not to be a little creeped out and a little sad that the person who owned all that stuff is dead. But more than that, it's the realization that one day we will be too, and the things we surround ourselves with - the furniture we sit on, the clothes we wear, the TV and computer we stare at - will probably end up either on a table at an auction house or hauled off to Goodwill.

And with that comes the sad realization that there isn't much to my life beyond my possessions. Besides going to the gym and running the occasional road race, my biggest hobby is my side resale business - buying items to resell on eBay and at swap meets. I use my vacation days at work for it, I plan my weekends around it, especially during the summer, and it's reflected in the piles of merchandise and packing material that fill my house.

I want there to be more to me than stuff that ends up on a table at my estate auction. i want to be a husband, maybe a father. I want to do something with my life that people will remember me for. But I haven't had any success at finding a relationship - either because I'm not working hard enough at it, or I'm just not lovable. I haven't found a charity that I think I'd be a good match for.

About the only living thing I can say that's benefited from me (besides family, but my parents have given me more than I could ever pay back) is my cat, Nibbler. I understand crazy cat ladies, because I've become a bit of a crazy cat guy. When you are lonely and unloved, and a cute furry thing curls up on your lap, puts her head on your chest, and purrs contentedly, you feel loved, you feel important, you feel loved, like you've done something for someone other than yourself. Even if that someone spends most of the day licking herself and pooping in a box.

I'd like to get that feeling from a human rather than a feline. I'd like to leave something more behind than a corpse and a bunch of stuff with consignor numbers. But I feel like I probably won't.

I don't like sports, and i don't care who knows...

Someone on facebook posted this story about a Baltimore grade school that was going to hide any kid not wearing purple to detention in the library during a "purple Friday" visit from the Raven.

Of course, the fun-hating cynic in me skipped the whole "school crushing nonconformists" angle and wonders why we are pulling kids out of class to have them cheer for a football team. No wonder the Chinese - and a ton of other countries - outscore us on math tests. I bet they never pull kids of out school to root for a football team.

But the other aspect of this is that i'm an anomaly. Not only am I a person who doesn't root for the home in a city (and county) that paints itself purple, I don't root for any team, in any sport. I don't take part in the office fantasy team pool, or wear team shirts to work, or spend my weekends in front of a TV. And that's not just limited to football season. I ignore a wide world of sports, from football to baseball to hockey and basketball.

I suppose part of it is nurture - neither of parents had much interest in sports. And since I was pretty much the fat, last-picked kid throughout school, I developed a certain dislike of participating in anything athletic, which extended to watching it as well.

I no longer have quite the dislike for athletes that I did as a kid - I now work out regularly, and run (err, walk quickly) in the occasional road race, so I have an understanding of how much work it must take to be a professional athlete. But I still have no desire to watch it.

I don't begrudge people who enjoy watching sports - everyone has their own hobbies. Given that my spare time is spent doing things like watching all 483 Republican primary debates and going to flea markets, I can't really criticize people who like to watch football, or whatever.

But sports have gone from a hobby - from what people do in their spare time - to something that seems to pervade every part of daily life. Purple-lit buildings. Stores and workplaces full of people dressed like they are about to tackle someone. It makes me feel even more like an outcast that I'm not participating. Which is pretty much how I feel about the world of people who actually seem to have relationships, but unlike my inability to find love, I really have no desire to join the world of the sports fanatics. I just wish their world was a little more contained and didn't leak into mine so much.

The continued evolution of mad.anthony

I make this post every year. It's completely self-serving, and a complete brag to make me feel better about myself. But if you can't make a blog post for no other reason than to boast, why have a blog at all?

Here's the deal - back in 2004, I had one of my parents take a picture of me standing in front of their fireplace while I was visiting them at Christmas. At the time, I was 24 years old, 5 foot 5 inches tall, and weighed about 250 pounds. A few months after that, I was killing some time on a message board and took a "how long will you live" online test. It said I would be dead by 55. For some reason, despite ignoring years of doctors, family, and strangers telling me I should lose weight, something about that clicked. I started watching what I ate, and I started exercising. And in about 2 years, I'd dropped about 100 pounds. In the time since then, a lot has changed - i finished an MBA program, bought a house, got a cat - but I still managed to stay at pretty much the same weight. And every year, I have the family take a picture of me at Christmastime, and I post the series here. And yes, it's a chance to pat myself on the back, but it's also a reminder that if I want to be able to post this again next year, I need to keep up the trips to the gym and cut back on eating entire cartons of ice cream.

In the last year and a half, I've also added some strength training to my workout, in the hopes that I'd develop giant pecs that would cause random women to seductively rub my arms and ask if I've been working out. Alas, that hasn't happened - maybe I'm not working hard enough, or long enough, or maybe I'm just genetically doomed. But I do aim to keep up at least some of what I've been doing - I notice a very slight improvement when I look in the mirror, and I also feel like it's a little easier to lift stuff.

I've also started doing some road races, starting with the 2010 Baltimore Half. I did a few more races this year - a 10 miler and a 10k in addition to the half, and I shaved 28 minutes off my time this year for the half this year, going from 3 hours 7 minutes to 2 hours 38 minutes - not a great time, but it means something to me because there is a time where even that was way out of reach for me.

So it's the new year, and if I want to be able to post this again next year, I need to figure out what I need to do to get there. I do need to get back to watching what I eat - I've been really lax about it, and I work out enough that I can get away with it - but I'd like to be a little more careful, so that if I ever need to cut back a little on the exercise I can still fit into my pants - and because eating a healthy diet is in general a good idea. Before races, I had started adding an extra 15 minutes or so of running on my treadmill late at night to my routine, and I need to start that up again and keep it up. I want to keep up the road races - they are good exercise, a nice chance to see other runners and different parts of the city, and a great way to acquire t-shirts. I'd like to do another 10k or two, as well - it's a short enough race that i can focus on speed instead of just on trying to make it to the finish line, and that I can feel good the next day instead of feeling like I got run over by a truck.

And hopefully I'll have another good picture to post here next year.

(picture note - pics are in order, starting in 2004. For some reason, I can't find my 2010 pic, so that is missing. There wasn't a major change.)

What am I going to do with all this junk?

So one of the perks of working in higher ed is that i get a shitload of vacation time and paid holidays, including from just before Christmas to just after New Year's Day. Early in my career I would spend all that time in NJ with the 'rents, but now that I've got a house and a cat I make sure I spend a few days in Maryland, usually with a list of errands and things to do around the house.

One of those things this year is to clean said house. It's a bad sign when bsom, upon coming over over Thanksgiving break to feed my cat and collect my mail, not entirely jokingly commented that he thought i should go on Hoarders.

I'm not quite that bad. I don't spend hours debating if I can throw away an empty Big Gulp cup, and I don't have any dead cats hidden in the back of my closet. But I do have boxes of stuff piled everywhere, and it's getting silly. I have to crabwalk through certain hallways, and I find myself apprehensive about having friends over, or what would happen if I ever wanted to invite a date over.

I had dreams that I would get everything cleaned over break, that my house would look like something out of an Ikea catalog by the end of the weekend. Clearly, that is not going to happen. I've done a little, and I plan to do some more. But I'm also realizing that, much like losing weight, cleaning out several years of accumulation is not something that is going to happen over a long weekend. And like losing weight, part of the battle is not just getting rid of crap but keeping it out in the first place - and that means making changes in the way I approach stuff, and in the way I do things.

What I'm doing this weekend isn't so much cleaning as setting in motion the things necessary to get and stay organized. I've got bags of stuff I'm getting rid of, a bunch of stuff listed on eBay, and I've started loading the back of my pickup with stuff that I'll dump in our Electronic Waste Recycling vault at work on Tuesday.

But I also have quite a bit of saleable stuff that I plan to hold on to, and i need to find ways to keep it organized and out of the way. Most of it is hamfest stuff - stuff I've bought to sell at electronics swap meets. But most of them aren't until spring/summer, which means this stuff needs to stay a while. In general, items I buy for eBay aren't a huge part of my clutter problem, because they tend to be smaller items and because I tend to turn them over pretty quickly. Hamfest stuff is inherently stuff too low value or bulky to eBay - which means it takes up a lot of room for a long time.

I've wrestled with the idea of renting storage space for that stuff, but I don't think I can make the numbers work - it would make a huge dent in my profits. Having limited storage space has the advantage - at least in theory - of capping how much stuff I buy - which is good, because there are only so many hamfests per year, and I can only take so much stuff to each one (ie, what will fit in my truck).

So what I plan on doing for the next day and a half is small chunks of cleaning - an hour in the basement here, some time going through papers in my home office there. It makes it more manageable, even if the results aren't as good as a 12 hour cleaning binge. And the hope is that I'll keep it up, doing a little every night even after work starts up again.

It will never be perfect, but I hope it's at least better.

New year's resolutions, again...

Every year, for the last few years, I make pretty much the same resolutions - save money, stay in shape, get organized, fall in love. And every year I'm pretty good about the first two and a complete failure on the last two. And that's true for this year as well. I'm in pretty decent shape, at least relative to what I used to be. I'm doing OK financially, thanks to reasonably conservative spending combined with a pretty good year on eBay and hamfests. And my house looks like a computer store exploded, thanks to a pretty good year of finding stuff to buy to sell on eBay and at hamfests. And I'm still single.

So obviously one of the things I want to do this year is clean the house, get organized, and try to find the right balance between buying things I can easily and quickly resell for a nice profit, and not buying large, low-valued, crappy items that sit around the house - and by getting rid of the stuff that currently is filling my house, preferably by selling it but by tossing it if necessary.

Which is difficult, but still easier than the whole finding love thing, which is probably why you find a lot more poems and music written about failing in love than you do about failing to clean out your basement.

It's occurred to me that one of the things that probably doesn't help me - in dating, but also in a broader sense in life - is my less-than-positive outlook. I find myself waking up every morning and thinking "I really don't want to get out of bed". And it's not just "I don't want to get out of bed and go to work", because I do it on weekends too. And when you think about it , it doesn't make much sense - I have a pretty decent job, surrounded by some pretty cool people, on a beautiful college campus, where I get to use some pretty nice technology. It's not like I'm working in a coal mine or something. But more importantly, I'm alive at pretty much the best time to be alive, in terms of technology and the standard of living and lifespan and a host of other things. And I'm doing that in one of the freest and most prosperous nations in the world. People today in our country complain about their lives being unfulfilling, yet the fact that we can even complain about being unfulfilled shows us how good we have it - that we have the time and money to worry about things bigger than finding food or a place to sleep or worrying if the tribe down the road is going to kill us.

So yes, this year, I'd like to hit all the usual goals - have a little less fat and a little more muscle. Keep the savings account funded, maybe buy a new car and finally redo my bathroom and install that fence in the backyard. Be able to walk from the basement to the top of my house without tripping over stray computers and boxes of phones.

But I'd also like to wake up each morning remembering how good I've got it, how lucky I am to be born in the right time and the right place, and to approach each day less like a burden that needs to be slogged through and more like an gift to be enjoyed. I know if I could truly do it, the other things I want in life - the friendships and the relationship and the career advancement - would probably come a lot easier - and the absence of them would probably be a lot less painful. And while I doubt I'll ever reach self-help guru levels of cheerfulness, I'd like to think I've got it in me to be at least a little more positive and a little more grateful for the things in my life that are due to luck, and not just to keeping resolutions.

Housing (thought) bubbles...

It's been a while since I've posted about housing, and I figured now is a good time to revisit my decision in July 2006 to buy a house... at the exact top of the housing bubble. I was debating if I should put actual numbers in this post, or just to use percents. I decided on the former - while some people see the amount they paid for their house to be a secret, the reality is that all this information is on the internet, accesible for a couple clicks, so it seems silly for me to try to obscure it when it complicates the post and is easily circumvented anyway.

I bought my house - a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath "split foyer" townhouse in Baltimore County - for $215,000 in July of 2006, with a 10% down 40 year mortgage. I refinanced it last summer into a 30-year mortgage, and threw down another $20,000 to reduce the principle. I also got a much lower interest rate.

So how am I doing? Well, I now owe $168,000 on it. So how much is it worth? Whatever someone will pay for it. When I had the refi done, it was reappraised, and it appraised for $205,000. However, I did my refi right at the end of the $8000 new homebuyer tax credit, which i suspect helped keep prices higher. Zillow right now claims that my house is worth $200,000 - but there is a similar house for sale in my development right now for $189,000 and it's probably in better shape and has been on the market for 6 weeks plus. So the reality is that I'm probably underwater - my guess is that if I had to fire-sale the house, I'd probably get $150,000 to $175,000. Which means that the $40,000 or so I've put into the house is gone, and possibly more if I ever had to sell. Which means that - assuming I found a place for rent that's the same as my mortgage payments plus the money I've put into things like a new roof and plumbing and HVAC - I've basically done the equivalent of taking 40 grand and setting it on fire.

Which is pretty depressing. I'm the kind of person who is typically pretty careful with money - shopping the clearance rack, buying and selling stuff on the side for extra income, using coupons, keeping the house cold in the winter and hot in the summer. So the fact that I've thrown out basically a year of after-tax income is pretty depressing. But hindsight is 20/20 - while i figured that housing prices would decline slightly at some point, I was expecting more like 5% instead of 30%. And maybe I was stupid for thinking that - but based on the number of very large banks and traders who made bets with similar expectations, it wasn't an out-of-the-ordinary thought.

So clearly from a financial perspective, home buying was a loser. But ignoring the financial implications, was buying a house a good lifestyle decision? That's a lot harder question to answer than the financial. When I bought my house, I was probably driven largely by the idea that it was a good and responsible thing to do from a financial perspective. But I think on some level, I also saw it as a signaling mechanism, that if I bought a house the wife and kids would follow, because it would show potential mates that I was a responsible, "nesting" kind of guy. That hasn't worked out, and I sometimes wonder if I should have bought a house in a trendy city neighborhood full of bars and cute girls in yoga pants walking dogs. But I do like certain aspects of suburban living - not having to fight over parking, being a few minutes' drive from pretty much any store I could possibly want to go to. And the reality is I don't really go to bars, and doubt I would even if they were next door... or that I would, and become a raging alcoholic.

in some ways, I'm probably not the best person to be a homeowner. I'm messy, and having lots of space for clutter means I tend to fill it with crap. Also, if I had realized how much I was going to expand my flea market and ebay businesses, I would have looked for a house with more storage space or a garage. And I'm not terribly handy, which means that I have a lot of things that need to be fixed and that I'll eventually need to shell out for professionals to do it. It also means I have a bad habit of deferring maintenance until it gets really bad, like an infected wound that you keep picking at.

But home ownership has it's perks - it is a form of forced savings. Renting advocates like to point out that if you rented, and put away the difference between your rent and mortgage payment, you would have a buttload of money. But that's not the way people in the real world work - chances are I'd blow that money on flat-panel tv's and other crap. Home ownership means eventually I'll own the house, and not have to make a payment for a place to live, and that's good, and maybe even worth the extra cost. Owning a house let me have a cat, it lets me have space to buy stuff for resale, it means I don't need to worry about the rent going up or the landlord selling the place.

So from a financial perspective, buying a house was a giant mistake. From a personal perspective, though, it's much muddier.