Hugh's Worthless Blog

I actually received an e-mail from the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce looking for a simple payday loan calculator to post on a site they were developing. Being a fan on on-line calculators , and not a fan of payday loans, that sounded like a fun little project to do. I took my old " Find the Missing Value " calculator, and modified it a little so that now it is adapted more for the common payday or auto title loans where you pay a flat fee to receive an advance on your paycheck for a certain number of days. Using a typical $17.50 per $100 loaned amount (from Consumers Union ) if this amount is over a 14 day bi-weekly work period, it would amount to an annual interest rate of 422.8%. In today's market with record low mortgage rates, that is a pretty staggering percentage. Obviously the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce thinks so too!

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,...