Hugh's Worthless Blog

I receive regular e-mails on homes that have relisted at new prices, just because I am a big real estate nerd. One that caught my eye is on the corner of the block where we used to live in Brentwood , a 2005 teardown that is now for sale again. Anyone who drives up and down High School Drive knows what I'm talking about, it's this giant blob on the corner of High School and Lawn that listed near a million dollars back at the peak, selling for over $900K in 2005 . Now it is back on the market and they recently dropped the price from $849K to $795K. Now I love the Brentwood area and the stately brick homes in that neighborhood, but that house in particular was a bit extreme in cramming a 4,000 sq foot house with a pool and a 3 car garage onto a not so large lot. The driveway for the house comes off High School Drive and is barely a car length long. In my aerial photo here from Google Maps you can see in in the upper right hand corner. If you notice the two large teardowns in th...

Well, last month I said we would not refinance, but just to be sure I had to write up a new online calculator  to check things out! Because our current rate is a reasonably low 4.91% already, I had to call up our lender to see if there was any point in us refinancing, especially since our loan is also rather small, especially relative to any closing costs. Incidentally we used Schwab Bank who did a very good job and who I highly recommend, especially if you already have a brokerage account with them. They always gave us good rates and very quick responses via phone, e-mail or FAX. The very nice lady I talked to today was very informative and gave me today's rates on our smallish loan. Since it is under $100,000 the rate is actually a bit higher than the lowest available, 4.25% on a 15 year $90,000 loan and with closing costs she estimated at about $1,900, the closing costs would be over 2% of our loan value. They would also charge 0.25% of our loan to eliminate the escrow account ...

I recently received an e-mail from the nice folks at the Citizens for Modern Transit which spelled out the latest bus restorations that will occur at the end of this month, on August 30 . Honestly, though, I have to admit I hardly ride the buses anymore, now that the new train schedule works so nicely with my commute to Wash U. However, if I did take #2, I realized my old bus stop at Brentwood and Rose would no longer exist as they are rerouting Metrobus #2 to not loop around the Brentwood Industrial Court anymore. I know there were always 2 or 3 ladies who regularly exited the bus right there (at the White Building where the DD's Irish Pub and Karaoke Bar lives), so hopefully they will still be able to get to work. Instead the bus now continues north of the Walmart all the way to Big Bend, and then takes Big Bend all the way to the St. Louis Community College at Meramec Campus. That is definitely a nice route for people to get to Meramec, but that will take them a looonnnggg t...

Since today is the start of the month, I thought it was coincidental that I received an e-mail from Ziff-Davis with an interesting article saying how Windows 7 had surpassed Vista in usage as measured by checking website logs. I always check our monthly logs on the first day of the month, so I modified one of my handy, dandy Perl scripts to see how our local distribution compared to the numbers in the article. This is the last month I can easily check on our old departmental site since we are folding our main site into the boring, humdrum corporate look for the rest of the College of Arts and Sciences , hosted more centrally where the log files will not be as easy to obtain. Plus our new site is a drupal site running on an aging Solaris Sun, so it is incredibly slow compared to our old site of static pages running on an even older Solaris Sun. In any case the article was saying their numbers had Windows 7 at 14.5% versus Vista at 14.3% with XP holding a big lead at about 62%. T...

Yes, the only thing plunging faster this summer than the necklines of Hollywood's finest are the interest rates on new mortgages. Unfortunately, it appears that there are not too many people who qualify left to take advantage of these super low rates. It seems like the only people left who want those loans are those who are not qualified to receive them. New winners this year are people looking for jumbo mortgages who are finally seeing their rates drop close to the 5.5% level. People like ourselves who could qualify for those great rates already did so in the past few years. We refinanced last year after we sold our house and grabbed a good rate during the dip late last spring (April 2009). Sure, we could cut an extra 0.25% to 0.50% off our already low 4.910% rate, but that is hardly worth the closing costs on the loan for us. So no matter how low the rates go, I doubt we will take advantage of them. Yet other folks who could use those lower rates simply do not have the credit t...

Even though I do not own an Apple iPod , each of my two children own an iPod Touch since they have very generous relatives. However, my son is not too gentle with his charging cable so he needed a new one.  I know we could have made the very quick trip over to the Apple Store in the St. Louis Galleria and purchased one for $19 plus tax, but I knew there were cheaper options. First I checked my favorite local retailer in the world, and sure enough the Brentwood  Micro Center had something available for one fourth the price of the Apple product. It is a retractable Kensington USB cable with an iPod tip included for only $4.99. However, with my experience with retractable mice, phone cords and other such items, I know they tend to break, and the tip may be the most valuable piece included. So I thought I would look around to see what else existed. At Cyberguys you can get a product called the Bone Link II for $11.95 which looks like exactly what I would want, a solid ...

Yesterday to celebrate the Fourth, we decided to skip the fireworks and go to Sonic instead. Since they have their after 8:00pm 99 cent sundae special, we decided to go there and indulge in some inexpensive ice cream. It was starting to drizzle but the Sonic had an awning and it was not too hot to just park there and eat ice cream. We picked the closest one to us, the one on Manchester in Brentwood which we had not been to in two whole weeks (since Father's Day, when I decided it would be fun.) Once again I ordered a hot fudge sundae, but it appeared to be just a chocolate one. But I did not complain since it was only 99 cents! It appears the Sonic Blasts are also only 99 cents since my daughter bought one (a Reese's one). They skipped the whipped cream and cherry on our sundaes and gave us more ice cream instead, so again, I did not complain. It all tasted pretty good to me! I remember earlier in the Spring we had stopped by the Baskin-Robbins at McKnight and Manchester one ...