Hugh's Worthless Blog

Since I took the week off, I am getting to catch up on my reading, and the latest book I have been reading is Bill Clinton's recent book, " Back to Work ". One interesting proposal he brought up was a mortgage refinancing proposal by Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of Columbia University . They propose that any current mortgage being held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac should be allowed to refinance at current market rates for only a modest refinancing fee. Clinton mentions in his book the closing costs would be a flat 0.4% of the loan amount and I did finally find that amount buried in the very lengthy description of Hubbard's proposal. Their Columbia University site has a whole ton of information and data available but it definitely took some wading through to get to the details. Having learned about this, it was now time for me to, of course, compose a simple calculator to see how this would compare to a more conventional refinancing where consumers often must ...

Some kind soul on the internet sent me $25 via PayPal for my financial calculator website , and told me I should go buy something for myself. Normally I do not really purchase too much frivolous crap for myself, but I received my daily message from Geeks.com and noticed they were offering Free Shipping on almost everything, no minimum purchase! Included was their ' USB Sport MP3 Player ' (BLK-KY-07) which sounded like a cool idea since I am one of those many people who go through ear buds all the time with my MP3 players, and this looked more durable. Since the MP3 player was only $14.49 with free shipping and I could also get a 2GB microSD card at Geeks.com for only $8.49 more, I thought, why not, I am worth it! For less than the $25 PayPal payment I received, I could purchase both items and have them shipped to my house for my personal enjoyment. The package arrived yesterday at our house in an unusually large cardboard box. I was afraid they had my order wrong since...

It was just last year when I was mentioning I should not be complaining because our school taxes were going up by only 4%. Of course, I spoke too soon. I just received the latest Ladue School District newsletter explaining how our school tax rate could be going up by $.49 per assessed $100 (if the proposition passes), which translated means an increase of 15.8% over what we paid in 2011. However, our district will still actually have the lowest tax rate in the county, but that is only because all the other districts with low rates have been jacking up their tax rates as well. I thought I needed a nifty online calculator to figure out the increase, so I wrote one, not only for Ladue, but for most of the other school districts in the area who increased their rates substantially last year. I also found the median home values for all the districts to see how much a median home in each district would see as an increase. The actual increase for us personally will only be a few hundred...

It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation  32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local Galleria Apple Store , the Brentwood Micro Center , Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep  total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough, Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipp...

I read an interesting article  yesterday on StLToday.com about what would happen if city residents were allowed to send their children to any county school they wanted. The Clayton School district did a survey amongst many city residents to see what the effects would be on their district. The answer is probably what they expected, nearly a quarter of the city respondents (22.7%) would want to send their children to Clayton Schools. That would result in about 3,600 city children who would want to attend the small Clayton district which currently has 2,500 students. That is obviously not very practical. Ideally if some sort of transfer program did take place they would have to allocate more students to go to the large districts further out that may actually be able to accommodate the vast numbers of students. If we look at the current VICC student breakdown, (as I found in their latest board meeting highlights from June 17, 2011) there are 5,600 VICC students in Fall 2011 an...

I saw an article on stltoday.com yesterday about the new 4 year high school graduation rate formula that also linked to the graduation rates of all the St. Louis area school districts. I found some of the numbers on the big chart quite interesting. I thought I would take those numbers, sort them and then put them on a chart along with the median home sale prices in those districts (from blockshopper.com) to see how well that correlates. Note that I capped the home prices at $250K, although Clayton, Ladue and Rockwood all went over that median amount (at $530K, $414K and $280K, respectively.) At both the top and at the bottom the obvious districts are there, but some of the ones in the middle are interesting. Some of the "out of place" districts are obvious, like University City where there are a lot of expensive homes, but also a public high school known to not have the highest graduation rate. The two I found the most interesting, though were Parkway and Jennings,...

Today I received an e-mail message from my friends at TIAA-CREF who holds the bulk of my retirement assets. Included was an interesting webinar that talks about a retirement asset to salary ratio that can be used to see how well you are saving for retirement especially after stocks took the big hit in 2008/2009. When I saw that I knew it looked like an on-line calculator in the making to me, but TIAA-CREF did not have one on their site! So I knew I had to create one . First I interpolated their graph so you do not only have every 5 year increments on the retirement, but every year in between, and then I calculated the ratio for anyone who wants to enter their asset balance and salary (since dividing two numbers is so much work!) If you are going to make the 70% or 90% of salary goals I tell you, and if not I tell you now much more you need to get there. Hey, it sounded like a fun little calculator for me to write, so here it is . I also saw that Firefox 8 was just released ...

Back in August I never would have believed I would be posting about the Cardinals winning the World Series, but sure enough they won the whole thing in dramatic fashion. So now it is time to celebrate... by buying  Cardinals World Series 2011 Champions gear! But what is up with the official "authentic World Series" caps? Someone decided the winning cap should be this ugly black and white two-tone thing, when everybody knows any real St. Louis Cardinals cap should be solid red (or at least blue with a red bill and the red cardinal in front.) These black and white things are just not very appealing, especially when you look online and can find that red 2011 World Series caps have been designed. Unfortunately if you go to any retail store in St. Louis all you find are the ugly black and white things. We did get some T-shirts, but I am not spending $30 on a Cardinals cap with barely any red on it! Even checking the Sports Authority on-line, all the red World Series caps are...

With all the "Occupy Wall Street" protests complaining about how the Top 1% are prospering at the expense of the other 99%, it was interesting to hear this week's news from the Congressional Budget Office which pretty much agrees with their argument. It is rare to see a government branch agreeing with a grassroots movement this far from elections! It seems that in the 27 years from 1979 to 2007, the top 1% of Americans saw their incomes increase by 275% while the bottom fifth of Americans saw their incomes increase by 18%. But what about all the incomes in between? I pulled the full PDF file from the CBO and pulled all the data for now only 1979 and 2007 but 3 other intermediary years (1986, 1993 and 2000) to build my very own income percentile calculator for anybody to use! You simply enter any income amount and it interpolates the percentile that income would be for each of the five years for which I pulled data (1979,1986,1993,2000,2007). It shows how over the ...

I have been helping a company develop a couple underwater mortgage calculators and in discussion with them they mentioned that nearly 1/4 of all homeowners currently hold an underwater mortgage. I found that difficult to believe but he assured me it was true, and today in the news I read an article that confirmed it . However, that statistic is misleading since most of the underwater loans are in just a few states, like California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. In those states the percentage of people with negative equity is staggering, about 60% in Nevada, nearly 50% in Arizona and over a third in Michigan and Florida. I found this cool graph to figure out where Missouri stood and it is much more typical, where about 15% of homeowners are underwater (about 1 in 6.) That is still not great news, but nothing like the numbers from the hardest hit states. The federal refinancing plan set up to help people with their problematic loans has been far from a success, with les...

They always say in real estate that what sells is "Location, Location, Location", but in reality sometimes the location can be too good. Case in point is a house I travel by nearly every day which is located in a prime Ladue location, directly on Clayton Road near the Immacolata church and the Galleria Mall (and on the #58 Metro bus route!). Every time when I am stopped at the red light northbound on McCutcheon I am forced to stare at it and wonder who would ever buy it.  At only $375,000 in Ladue schools and close to everything it would be a steal if it were not directly on Clayton and across from an incoming street with a street light located right in front of it! On all the online photos they make sure they do not show the unsightly street light in front, but it is definitely right there: When the house sold in the fall of 2009, I was waiting to see the wrecking crew knock the whole thing down to see how they would rebuild a new McMansion somewhere on that property,...

Yesterday, our shiny new Bank of America Power Rewards VISA card showed up in the mail - a credit card we never applied for in the first place! We had been happy users of our old Schwab Bank VISA card for years, but they no longer wanted to be in the credit card business so they transferred us first to FIA card services (whoever they are) and now completely over to Bank of America, an institution I never held with the highest regards. (The same crooks charging folks $5/month for a debit card.) But since we did need a backup credit card I activated it yesterday with the toll-free 800 number on the sticker, and pocketed my shiny new card. I did find it humorous the card said "customer since 2005" when we really only had the card for an hour or so, but I did not realize at the time I would own that card for less than a full day. I had not even had time to sign up to manage the card on-line. Today we received a call from the fraud department of Bank of America and someo...

I was very sad to see that Clayco has stopped updating the Wash U  Green Hall webcam that has been running non-stop since April 2010. It seems to have ended as of last Friday, October 7, so now I must grab some of the images before they take it down altogether. I can no longer catch myself or other people on the sidewalk as they walk to and from the Skinker Metrolink. How sad! In memorial I have captured some photos from Wednesday. October 5, which I like to call "instant lawn day", the day that the green grass amazingly appeared on the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway, all captured by the now deceased Green Hall webcam. At 9:53am that morning the corner was still as I saw it Tuesday evening, all dirt except for the two strips of grass by the sidewalk. But then the transformation begins: 9:53am 10:52am 11:52am In two hours the corner is transformed into a sea of beautiful grass, thanks to a large crew of ground workers and Washington University'...

This morning I was reading the latest news on the KSDK.com site when I saw they mentioned our lovely new engineering building, Green Hall , that was dedicated yesterday. So I took a look at the article and noticed something odd. The photo that was included of the building had a lot more luxurious, green grass than that same building that I walked by late yesterday afternoon on my way to the Metrolink station! The article stated the photo was "Courtesy of Washington University" which means someone in our media department has been very busy with Photoshop! They added extra grass that is actually just brown dirt right now. Checking the ClayCo  webcam confirms that they did not rush out and lay sod last night after I left, and there is still only those two strips of sod right next to the sidewalk. I have yet to be able to walk down the sidewalk but I plan on doing so soon!

I have eternal allergies which require me to spray weird prescription stuff up my nose every night so I can breath a little better. However, one thing I discovered that helps me out a lot are those little Breathe Right strips. I put one of those things on my nose and it really helps me sleep through the night and it reduces my snoring too. One problem with the strips, however, is that they are fairly expensive if you use them every day. At my local Walgreens a pack of 30 costs $11.99 plus tax which means over 40 cents a night to strap the thing on my nose. Even Walmart is only $1 cheaper at $10.99  (when they have them in stock) so they are expensive everywhere. I tried some of the cheap store brands and they do not stick as well and sometimes leave a sticky residue. No thanks! So it was time to go to the Internet and the world's favorite on-line flea market, eBay . Back in March I found I could buy six boxes of 30 strips (180 total) for $43.99 which I thought was a deal (24...

Stock market drops, more unemployment claims, housing prices dropping - this "economic recovery" we are supposed to be having does not look like much of an economic recovery! One way our buddies in Washington have thought of helping the economy is to widen the HARP and HAMP programs to become more widespread so more people can use them (since not very many people did!) I know I recently received yet another letter in the mail from Quicken Loans saying that I might be eligible for the HARP program. But when I went through their program requirements   I did not meet the proper criteria for the special HARP program and would only qualify for a more standard loan refinancing. It seems like anyone with 5% equity in their home must go through a standard refinancing, and for us that is simply not worth the closing costs since our rate is already reasonably low (4.910%) and our loan amount is small (under $100K.) So now I am curious what particulars are in the latest Washington pl...

I was happy to see that the original mock up photo of the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway is not how they ended up designing the sidewalks leading from the new Preston Green Hall . Wash U actually did "cut the corners" of the sidewalks as they had been laid out before, with a sidewalk already in place right now in front of the massive new Washington University sign they erected on the corner. The original photo has little bits of greenery jutting out keeping people from cutting the corner, but as they probably know from the ugly pedestrian formed path cutting the corner from Forest Park Parkway to Hoyt Drive in front of Whitaker Hall (yes, it is visible from Google Maps! ) people will cut corners when then can: So now instead of their original plans pictured below (which I stole from Clayco's site ) , I have created a new image of the corner using the ever powerful and always open source image editor, GIMP . Original view: My update view: I think there migh...

Okay, every day I walk to and from the Skinker Metrolink station and I have been watching the construction of the Preston M. Green Hall . Now, however, they are building something in front of the building by the street corner and it looks like quite a substantial structure, more than the smaller "Washington University in St. Louis" sign that used to be there but closer to the corner. I grabbed the latest image from the Claycorp webcam and cropped out the strange structure they are building there. I also decided to troll the Internet to find any architectural drawings of what they plan for the street corner and found this lovely picture here : It appears that the corner will be a large plot of concrete with some greenery behind it! Was that really the best plan they could devise? Where they are building the large granite covered structure looks like a bunch of greenery in the mocked up photo. Is that going to be a large planter of sorts with "Washington University...

One of our fine faculty members recently received a shiny, new MacBook Air , and was looking for a nice mouse to use with it. He was curious about the Magic Mouse , and it seems pretty cool until you see the price -- $69. I had recently given him a very capable Kensington wired mouse we purchased from CDW-G for $6.47, which means for the same price as the Magic Mouse we could purchase ten Kensington mice and still have change left over. You may argue that the Magic Mouse is a Bluetooth device and hence more costly, so we also looked at other Bluetooth mice and found the Microsoft Bluetooth 5000 Mouse and the Logitech V470 , both for about $40 instead of $69. Now $40 is still quite a bit for a mouse, but it is a lot cheaper than $69. Searching on NewEgg.com , I did find some Bluetooth mice selling for $20 to $30 from some off name brands, but with shipping they were almost $40 anyway, so it seemed safer to stick with the Microsoft or Logitech (we get free shipping all the time from C...

I was not expecting it, but I received an unsolicited e-mail from mozilla.org today telling me that the latest version of Firefox was out, not just an update to 4.0.1, but the fully updated and just released version 5.0 . Although I have been quite happy with version 4 (especially over the bloated version 3), I felt compelled to try out the latest version. The big test -- Frontierville on Facebook! I play Frontierville as well as Farmville and Cityville on Facebook, and Frontierville must be the slowest Zynga game there is to play, especially with my overcrowded frontier with its many buildings, animals, trees and everything else. When Firefox 4.0 first came out, I was pleasantly surprised how much better it seemed to run Frontierville than Chrome did at the time, but now even Firefox 4.0 seems to run it slowly, even with our very fast Internet connection at the university (it is painfully slow at home over DSL.) So now I am trying Frontierville on Firefox 5 during lunchtime St. Lou...

Over the weekend I had some free time to sift through my junk mail, so I thought I would complain about the ridiculous offers I receive via our wonderful postal service. I first noticed that I had received a lovely letter from American Express congratulating me on being approved for a gold card: "Congratulations are in order. You've earned an important distinction - a Card that reflects your achievements and complements your life. A Card designed to reward you and bring you the extra service and privileges you require." "It's the American Express Gold Card, and you've been selected for Card membership with the annual fee waived your first year (a $125 value)." Wow, a $125 annual fee that is being waived for a year. What an honor! Does anybody really want that? That means in a year I get to pay them $125 per year for a credit card I do not need when all my other credit cards I own charge me no annual fee at all. They promise me 25,000 membership p...