I actually paid off my car loan a couple of months before I ended up buying the house and was panicked for a bit that that was going to screw me.

Of course it depends on the market, but if you can get a downpayment together, mortgage payments in my neighborhood are about 1/3 of monthly rent for the same houses. Yearly property taxes do not eat all that up either. Maintenance might bring it close depending on the state of the house, but all in all I'd say you save a little month to month by owning in my hood.

Insent, SA.

Wow, ND. That is some impressive BS on BoA's part.

Yeah, and they didn't give us the loan either. After almost a full year of getting the run around from them. Shocking, isn't it.

The best call ever was when my boss said to the caller, "Well, I think manna is a spiritual food, so I can't tell you the nutritional content of it." (Which led to me looking up manna in Wikipedia and discovering there were intellectual debates about whether people who survived on manna pooped or not.)

I saw once, can't remember where, something about two engineers who decided to build a machine to the specifications given in the Bible (?) of the "Ancient of Days". They ended up with a machine that, if properly seeded and provided enough sunlight, would produce an endless supply of some kind of nutritional yeast or algae. The machine would have to be cleaned once a week, so no food that day, and that was supposedly the origin of the Sabbath Day. They worked so hard on their theory and it really was cool; I really wanted to believe helpful aliens gave the wandering Hebrews a manna machine. (I bet they pooped, though.)

The gift tax is horrendously complicated. I read a lot about it to make sure my mother wouldn't have to pay tax on the money she's been giving me. The person who gives the money, not the recipient, owes the tax. Amounts above $14,000 a year are classified as "taxable" and should be reported on their own special, incomprehensible form. However, and it's a big however, the current lifetime exemption for gifts is $5 million, so the taxable amount only kicks in after someone has given away $5 million. It's a tax designed to keep rich people from using gifts to reduce the estate tax.

My sister and I used the $14,000 limit to help Mom move money out of her accounts into one we'd set up for taking care of her, ahead of her inevitably having to go into a nursing home. I don't think my sister knew that Mom would be paying the taxes, or about the lifetime limit. I sure as heck didn't. While Mom was in no sense rich, I was astonished at how much money she managed to save up over her lifetime just by being super-frugal. Possibly needless to say, that will not be me.

If you google it, it's amazing how many sites simply say, "Gifts over $14,000 are taxable" without saying to whom or noting that there are exceptions, much less that lifetime exemption.

And that is why doing things the way my sister does - trying to do a thing yourself, without asking any professionals (because they're all too expensive and also out to rip you off) - is a bad idea. Sometimes you just need a professional, and you can't become one by doing research on the Internet. Alas, the one time I managed to talk her into going to see a professional on estate planning, it turned out he actually was a horrible person trying to rip people off. So there.

From tales of "my manager actually understands me": we had our post-release review meeting, and one of the items in the GOOD column was "Witchcraft is alive. Don't piss off the witch".

That is fan tas tic.

I had to send my boss a request for temporary admin privileges and I knew she wouldn't read the email, she'd just call me and ask what it was for. And she just called me. I answered and without any preliminary, she just said, "What, what do you want?" I broke up laughing. She knew I'd know what she was talking about.

I actually want to move to a less affluent area. And the rents are crazy. Much more than I'm currently paying.

That was my experience. When I was renting this very townhouse I now own, I was paying almost twice as much as my mortgage payment is. And homeowner's insurance is cheaper than renter's insurance. Yearly taxes are about equal to two mortgage payments. Maintenance has been not too bad, considering the townhouse is only about 15 years old. I had the house painted and I bought new appliances, and I had the roof fixed a couple times. (There's no windbreak for the wind that comes up the mountain before it slams into my house, and it tends to rip off shingles on days like today when the wind blows hard. I should plant a couple trees.) Once I was sure I wanted to live here, buying made sense. Not saying it makes sense for everyone everywhere, of (continued...)

( continues...) course. I could never have afforded to buy a place in NJ. I looked a couple times, but I couldn't afford anything I'd want to live in.

ND, your stories of dealing with BoA have always given me chills of despair. I bought my house through SunTrust and they were okay, a couple instances of dumbassedness, but no outright incompeetence, or evil. But if I ever buy another place here, I'll go through my credit union, for sure.

This is apparently what happens when I'm not depressed: talky meat.

Go you with the talky-meatness, Zen!

I felt so good the day that I closed all of my personal and business accounts at BofA. I had been banking there since the late 80s and stuck due to inertia mainly. I adore the new bank we have. It's not a credit union since we weren't able to find a good credit union who could handle what I needed for my business, but it's a small bank that feels like a credit union. I go in and deposit some of my checks in person just so that I can say hello to the staff.

I just realized my pants have fake pockets. WHY?