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Looong long distance relationships are not worth it.
It really depends. I did long distance for years during college and we got a place together after college and have been happily together for a very long time now.
Personally I disagree. They come with their own set of problems and admittedly probably require specific character traits on both sides, but they can be worth as much as any other relationship!
And you can buy those Bluetooth dildo/fleshlight combos that work over the Internet.
Art school isn’t worth it, period. I got a far better art education through my local community college by far, from instructors who weren’t incrediblely stuck up and full of themselves.
That was an 80k expense that I’m still paying off almost 20 years later, and I didn’t even finish my degree.
I went back to get my AS at a CC and took some art classes there. 10/10, far better instruction for a fraction of the price.
College, probably
Don’t buy a house.
I’m curious why you say that, unless you mean in today’s market. Sure, it’s expensive and often something needs fixed. But it sure beats paying inflated rent to someone else to live surrounded by methheads, folks with kids that literally bounce off the walls all day, and/or older folks that go to bed at 6pm and complain if you make a peep after 6.
Personally, I like my house, as spendy as it is. I’d amend your statement to say “don’t buy a house you can’t afford, do your homework and research”.
Buying is not always cheaper than renting. You’re on the hook for closing costs, ongoing maintenance, property taxes, insurance, HOA dues, PMI, etc. Then if you’re only living somewhere for a few years you have to pay real estate agent fees to sell. Depending on length of ownership it can very easily be cheaper to rent. Plus you can’t just up and leave like you can at the end of a lease. Renting is far more flexible and that’s attractive for some people.
There’s also something to be said for paying more to live in a house rather than an apartment for the reasons you listed, but the same math above applies to renting vs. buying a single family home, or some other standalone housing.
I don’t disagree at all. Renting can be more practical for many people for many reasons. The reverse is true for many others that want to buy a house, like me. It’s just the original comment “Don’t buy a house” isn’t necessarily a life lesson, more like ymmv.
For sure, I’m not trying to say that buying a house is a bad idea by any means, just that for some people you can rent and still come out ahead of a homeowner. It seems like people always compare a mortgage payment to their rent and think “wow, owning is so cheap compared to my rent!” and then forget about all the other costs associated with owning that can easily result in monthly costs double that mortgage rate. For example, I pay much more for my house now than I did when I was renting. Yes, it’s building equity but if I took the difference in costs and invested it in index funds over the long term could easily be equal to or exceed money earned from property appreciation. Plus, index funds are far more liquid than real estate is and I never have the mow the lawn of my portfolio. But on the other hand the stability and sense of ownership in a home is worth something as well which is harder to put a dollar figure on. If that’s worth something (as it is to me) then buying is likely worth the premium.
My mortgage is cheaper than any rent I could get in my city and interest paid on said mortgage is tax deductable.
Renting is fine and dandy, but most people want someplace stable after their 30s
I’m sure it is, but when you throw in property taxes, insurance, HOA dues, PMI, and the big one: maintenance costs (which will vary dramatically on a case-by-case basis), comparing mortgages to rent becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison. For me personally, I spent $50k in the first six months of owning my home on maintenance & repairs alone. That could have paid for 2+ years of rent. Not to mention the ~$30k or so you’ll pay to sell it if you’re only going to be there for a few years.
Keep in mind too that the mortgage interest deduction is now capped at the first $750k. For people in HCOL areas, that’s starting to become a fairly low limit.
But yeah, I’m with you on the sense of stability is worth something too and that’s hard to put a dollar figure on. Most people want that stability, but there’s also people that want flexibility or may move around a lot such that buying a home every other year doesn’t make sense. My overall point is that it’s not always cheaper to buy and that renters can and do come out ahead, especially when they’re also investing excess funds appropriately.
I admit I’ve gotten pretty lucky, but so far buying a house has been great for me
I should have just majored in STEM, without giving a shit I probably would have been a C student.
Now I am unemployable and going back rather late because I refused to heed the “STEM or GTFO” demands of employers.
I have a STEM and am unemployable, which is/was also expensive:/
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When buying a house people tell you to make sure the roof is in good condition because that’ll be expensive to replace. What they don’t tell you is that is all the other things that you may need to replace and how expensive they are. Fence, paint, siding, water heater, washer/dryer, AC, heater, kitchen appliances, etc. Some this might show up in the inspection report, but it’s hard to get a good idea of what it’ll cost beforehand. Also your realtor will have an incentive to downplay any problems to get the deal done.
Even home warranties won’t defray much cost, or often have combined limits for annual reimbursement that are lower than you would imagine.
Home warranties are universally a scam. It was talked about pretty much every week on the Reddit homeowners forum. Just week after week someone getting scammed.
For one, they’ll fight tooth and nail not replace things. When there is absolutely no way that heater can be patched up and run a little longer they’ll replace it with the cheapest heater possible using the cheapest HVAC guy possible.
Don’t take 4 pills of molly in one night. And don’t make that mistake more than once.
Don’t go with the low bid.
College isn’t for everyone.
Tried shipping my motorcycle cross country without insurance.
Ooo 😮
Woman I liked borrowed money from me to buy a motorcycle, and in a drunk haze I told her to keep the bike as a valentine’s present.
Don’t get married
If you must get married, don’t have kids.
And if you must have kids, don’t.
Why not?
I once set an S3 lifecycle setting that accidentally affected 3 years worth of logs to Glacier. The next morning I woke up to a billing alert and an AWS bill with an extra $250k in charges (our normal run rate was $30k/month at the time). Basically I spent my entire add annual cloud budget for the year overnight.
Thankfully after an email to our account rep and a bunch of back and forth I was able to get the charges reduced to $4,300.
Yeah luckily Amazon is good about mess-ups that are one-time like this. Was the cost because you were pushing to, or retrieving from Glacier?
Deleting from. We move logstores and I added an ageout policy for anything over 1 day, to “easily” empty a bucket overnight. I forgot that I had been cycling stuff to glacier after 6 months, and there were 3 years of logs in there.
I made this mistake but honestly? AWS is the most confusing clusterfuck of all time. I can’t stand it and refuse to use it for personal projects.
For me the problem came down to four conflicting sources on AWS regarding tiers and then another problem with the SDK. The SDK didn’t match the tiers at all so “archive” meant Glacier for some reason. 👎
Is cloud even cheaper than managing your own infrastructure anymore?
It depends on the workload. Some workloads do well on other people’s computers, some are better on your own computers. One size does not fit all.
Depends on your needs. If you expect to grow fast and unpredictably, or have extreme burst workloads (at my company it fluctuates between requiring ~10 cpus to ~50,000, and between 0 GPUs and dozens) or if you need several complex types of services and no people at hand who can manage them, it can be way cheaper. If you just need a few servers, a tape backup and a database, actual hardware has always been cheaper.
If I never have to buzz into another colo and stand in the exhaust of hundreds of servers again, it’s worth every single penny. If I never have to plan for capacity weeks to years in advance again, its worth every penny.
The problem is having a competent team to manage your infrastructure. You can do a lot with a handful of people - but you need competences spanning a lot of areas, and finding that is pretty hard.
If you can get a competent team the only advantage cloud still has is the ability to quickly scale up and down - but if there might be a need for that it’d still be better to go hybrid, most on your own hardware, and just the prepared ability to quickly bring up cloud workers if needed. The cost savings of properly doing it yourself are so huge that it still might be cheaper to just have some pre-provisioned standby hardware for that, though.
I wanted a newer car, so I rolled my existing auto loan into the newer vehicles loan. So easy right?
I was upside down on it for years and years. It’s so disheartening to drive a vehicle that’s falling apart and stranding you everywhere but still owe $10k on it. It was an awful decision that took years of pain but that was my lesson on buying things I can afford.
As an IT-worker, it’s not uncommon to test technology and scrap it due to bad results or unfit implementation. Usually this isn’t considered a waste, since there are a lot of things to learn in the process.
However, this one system which was designed for testing applications was a bit different. From the day we were told about it, basically every developer knew that this would be unfit. However the customers were firm on that it should be implemented. I’m not sure if it was because of the looks of the sales person or if it was a genuine incompetense that the decission was landed, but I felt a bit too junior to stand up against it. So about a month of work with 2 developers went down on something that every other developer knew would be scrapped. 2 devs at ~$100/hour, 4 weeks of 40 hours, so roughly $32,000.
The lesson was that I need to be more direct and firm when things like that is decided.
If you got paid, it’s not your lesson to learn.
True. It was an expensive lesson, but not expensive for me.
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