Hugh's Worthless Blog

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'...