Here is a question for the left wing college elite

I asked what interest rates were then vs now. I also asked what you know about paying PMI.
Easy questions to answer for any American home owner.

 

You are correct that classic Latin is not spoken by any contemporary culture.

 

I had PMI on my original mortgage because I only had 10% down and I worked my ass off to pay down that mortgage as soon as possible to get rid of the PMI.

Now before I waste my time looking up trivia like PMI rates why don't you explain why that is even relevant to the Wall Street Casino Toxic Mortgage Ponzi Scam first?

 

When I ask about interest rates then vs now, anyone who had ever purchased a home would be well aware I was referring to mortgage rates. Rates in the early to mid 2000's were around 7.5%, no points, 30 year.
They are about 4.5 now and have been for years. That is a three point difference that profoundly affects both your monthly payment and the total interest you will pay over the life of the loan.
PMI is paid as part of your monthly payment. PMI, Home owner's insurance, and property tax is collected a little every month, rolled into your mortgage payments. It goes into a little account called Escrow. Annually your lender pays the lump sum for each of these.
10% down? Pretty much nobody does that because mortgage rates are so low. Your cash could be invested in many other much more lucrative options.

 

Poor performing public school districts have more crime.

 

PMI stands for Private Mortgage Insurance and has nothing whatsoever to do with Mortgage Interest Rates!

PMI is paid to the INSURER and they probably want to be paid monthly because it is their money and yours or the banks.

Your mortgage payment goes directly to the bank because they are not going to sit around waiting for their money for a complete year. If they did your mortgage would cost you a whole lot more in interest.

What does go into your Escrow account are your PROPERTY TAXES because those are usually only paid QUARTERLY to your local township.

Depending upon the type of home there may or may not be home owners insurance. Condominium associations have their own insurance so that the home owner doesn't need to pay it.

Tell me all about those "other lucrative options" that you are invested in? Are they paying more than 4.5% plus PMI plus taxes each and every year? What are the risks associated with them?

 

Because they are located in poor crime ridden areas!

 

Your monthly payment is made to your mortgage lender. Taxes, PMI, and insurance are rolled into it, put in Escrow then your mortgage lender pays the bills out of escrow and in January you get your annual statement.
If you still owe a considerable amount, your interest is a HUGE tax deduction.
Very few state's use the word township. It's usually county property tax and if you live within certain city limits, you pay more.
A 4.5% interest rate over 30 years is the lowest by a significant margin for mortgage rates. I am actually at 4.25, no points.
You would most certainly pay all your other debts first to get rid of monthly payments that have 5x the rate. Next, you would max out your 401K, invest in a whole life policy, buy gold...

 

I know, but it is still a huge component of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian and Italian, and is used daily in the sciences and the law. Having learned Latin at school from the age of 11, I found learning other Romance languages fairly easy because of fundamental similarities.

 

I'm sure it is helpful for one who wants to master many languages.
In the US you are required to take 2 semesters of the same foreign language. Your options are almost always Spanish and French. And you do this half way thru high school if you plan to go to college. In my two years of Spanish 1 and 2, I acquired nothing useful if I were stranded in a Spanish speaking country.... In the US we introduce foreign language Way too late imo.

 

Quod est pietatis.

 

Ahhh, lekela mutoya.
How's your Latin work with a Bantu language?

 

So let's do the math and see what it tells us. The average cost of a home in GA is $213k and nationwide it is about $188k so let's split the difference and use a nice round number like $200k. If you decide not to put down the 20% then you will be paying PMI of 1% on the entire $200k loan amount which effectively increases your mortgage interest rate from 4.5% to 5.5%.

Now the PMI insurance is ONLY deductible if you are earning $55k pa ($110 filing jointly) so you might be eating the whole 1% across then entire $200k mortgage which is $2,000 pa.

You still get to take the rest of the 4.5% mortgage interest deduction and depending on your tax bracket that could reduce the effective rate to around 3% or 3.5%. In other words you would be paying $6k or $7k so let's split the difference and call it $6.5k on top of the $2k for a total of $8.5k pa which gives you an effective overall rate of 4.25%. Without the PMI $2k your effective after tax mortgage interest would be 3.25%.

Now let's focus on the $40k that you decided to use to pay down your other bills. If it was credit card debt then you just flipped rolling credit at say 15% into a 30 year debt at 4.5%. If you paid down the $40k in 5 years it would cost you about $17k in interest. Instead you are going to be paying it off at the after tax rate we calculated above over 30 years so it is going to cost you $31k. Your credit card interest rate would have to be at least 25% for it make sense to roll that debt into your mortgage.

Let's apply the same $40k to Student Loans at say 7% pa. If you pay that off over 5 years you pay $7.5k in interest. if you roll that into your mortgage over 30 years you are going to be paying the same $31k we calculated above.

Now let's assume that you did pay off those debts and now you are going to "invest" in your 401k instead. Note that most you can "max out" is $18k so let's figure out the average earnings that would have to be earned to offset the 45% of the $31k (+/- $14k) over the 30 year period. You would have to average at least 2% plus the inflation rate just to break even. That means earnings of at least 4.5% on average in your 401k. But then there are fees and taxes when you take the money out. If we assume that you are still in the same middle tier income brackets then your earnings would have to be closer to 7% to cover those expenses and still break even.

Note that none of the above has actually earned you anything at all. It is all just breaking even.

If you invested the $40k in your house and paid off those loans instead you would have saved anything from $16k to $24k in interest. That is money that would be in your pocket for an average of $500-800 pa. Doesn't sound like much but if we took the average of $650 pa and had it earning a modest 3% then it would have grown to $33k in 30 years. Given that you were paying less for your mortgage because it was smaller would have been additional savings on top of that.

The lesson is that all debt is bad and long term debt adds up even if the interest is lower the amounts are usually considerably higher. The goal is to have no debt at retirement and a nest egg. Doing the math BEFORE you decide what to do makes sense because you don't want to still be paying off a car loan for 30 years when you sold that car after 5 or even 10 years of use.

When it comes to investment advice watch out for fees and other hidden expenses. Always bear in mind that unless it is a Roth you will be paying taxes whenever you take the money back out again so make sure that the growth takes that into account.

Good luck!

 

Hopelessly!

 

When I was a young man I used to entertain fantastic scenarios as you are here doing. In many was it helped inspire me to pursue a career in science and technology. Yet the more I learned about the physical world, through studying theory and doing experiments, the less credible many of these scenarios became. Ideas of scenarios, like yours, began circulating ever since stories of the FBI confiscating Nikola Tesla’s papers after his death came out.


The nature of electromagnetic radiation, which is photons, is that it is pure kinetic energy. As such, when a photon collides with an atom, the photon’s existence comes to an end as the atom/molecule, or one of its electrons acquires that energy. This added energy causes atoms/molecules to increase in vibrational, rotational, and linear motion, or electrons to bounce into a higher orbit, or even be knocked loose. We measure this added motion as heat.


Microwave ovens heat by use of electromagnetic radiation, the earth is warmed by the sun by way of electromagnetic radiation, and it is an increase of electromagnetic radiation bouncing between the earth and molecules in the atmosphere that is warming the earth.


In nuclear power plants, the gamma rays are not used to induce an electrical current. Rather the kinetic energy is used to super heat water which then drives an electrical generator.


The thing is, if there was to be a thermonuclear explosion, in the atmosphere, heat and kinetic energy would be the major effect, not electrical conduction.


A part of Reagan’s so-called Star Wars program was a satellite with an on board thermonuclear device. The idea was that the nuclear explosion would energize a massive laser that would split and burn holes in multiple enemy ICBM’s, causing them just enough damage to severely alter their course. The program was abandoned when it was discovered that Soviet rockets had an outer surface that would reflect the lasers, rendering them harmless. If your theory were true, we could have just blasted their rockets with the gamma rays that would have burst out of the atomic explosion.

Your confusion may come from the fact that physicists often use volts as a measurement independent of purely electrical considerations. Doesn't matter what type of energy, thermal, kinetic, electrical, chemical.... Volts are even used to express mass, distances, and temperature. Knowing the volts might even help in calculating how many horses one has. However, energy, by and of its self is rather useless. It is only useful in relation to and when interacting with other things. Is not the engineering level definition of energy, the ability to do work? In electrical terms is not work, in watts, the product of volts and current? Yet in the article you presented it doesn't talk of a current flow. It talks of Compton electrons. Do you know what Compton electrons are?

It is where a photon of sufficient energy/frequency strikes an electron, imparting with the electron all of the kinetic energy of the photon, possibly causing the photon to break away from the atom that it was bound to. The excited electron, wanting to be less excited, emits a second photon which, in effect, spits the energy of the original photon, say a gamma ray photon, in two. This process can happen in several steps. The net effect is to disperse the energy. On a fundamental level the second law of thermodynamics says that energy always goes from high density to low density, never the other way around - unless an outside force is applied. The Compton effect is an example of the second law of thermodynamics in action.

Add the above with the inverse square law, that the atmosphere is full of things for gamma photons to collide with, and the fact that even the smallest transistor junctions involve many hundreds of atoms I find your nightmare scenario of massive electronic failure highly unlikely.

 

Good advice.

But, we don't have a vocational track either in high school or post high school.

Those without families that can support them are discouraged from college by the serious debt that will result.

Remember that paying college tuition is not a guarantee of completion, so teen age kids are betting tens of thousands of dollars when they pay tuition - bets that many can not afford to make.

 

Here you are saying that you don't take people's word for things, yet it appears that is exactly what you are doing. I didn't ask you to take my word for it, in fact I was purposely vague so to not influence what you might find if you took the journey to discover what is reality; separate from the party line.

All I'm asking is to look up the data for yourself, plot on a time line all manner of economic markers, and you'll see that you have been being lied to. While you are at it you might want to look into Wisconsin, especially. There you will find that they have been funding their policies by selling off public assets. Not exactly a sustainable practice.

 

Oh crap. Now I need to be responsible for their personal ambition, drive and risk taking proclivity.

 

Again------------------there is a huge difference getting a useful degree, and and "fine arts" nothing degree. Drinking beer at parties for four years really doesnt qualify you for much.

Tell me, when a customer come into Burger King and orders, does he strike up a conversation on 16th century poets???????????????

 

Good question.

Sadly, I can't be of much help.

I am independently wealthy and serially-date 21-year-olds.

But, your question is rather interesting.

Carry on.

 

It depends. You don't actually have to care about our economy.

Also, you don't have to care about the quantity of social services we end up supplying.

 

Please show me in the scientific literature where volts is used in any situation except for electricity. I have never heard of it, but am open to the idea.

 

You'll find one at a Chevy dealer.

 

Um, you framed the context as Wall Street Bankers. I was merely pointing out that 97% of US Businesses are not beholden to Wall Street, but they are beholden to Market Forces, including regional and global shifts in Capital.

 

Just more "baffle'em with BS"!

Volts and Volts/meter ARE *NOT* the same thing no matter how much BS you cover it with. And it is the electric field density measured in volts/meter that creates the high voltage differentials that puncture semi-conductor junctions.

As those photons encounter atoms or molecules they can actually knock free electrons loose which then follow the earths magnetic field representing a current flow. That current flow creates a *very* intense electric field, e.g up to 20KV or more, which in turn generates high voltage differentials in conductors. Just as the document I referred you to calculates will happen.

You can throw all the BS you want against the wall to try and argue this doesn't happen but none of it will stick.