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On Should Your Wedding Gift Cover Your Meal?
@KPeeps Because as readyornot so nicely puts it below, "weddings are a social ritual to make a commitment and have it observed by your community," which fortunately doesn't require professional photographs to occur?
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On Middle Class in Israel
@RachelG8489 Maybe one difference is a lot of the Americans are driving out of state rather than flying. If you have a family of four or five, that's going to be much cheaper. (My middle-class family, for example, never flew anywhere for my entire childhood.)
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On People Will Buy Homes in Cities With Jobs
I guess you can call this a recovery, but it's not really a recovery for prospective first-time home-buyers. They're are getting priced out by the "private equity firms [that] have raised as much as $8 billion to buy as many as 80,000 homes" and will basically be left renting the same houses back from these firms. Right now, in Phoenix 45 PERCENT of houses are being purchased with cash (no mortgage), vs. 10% in 2007. Apparently this is happening mostly due to banks holding on to foreclosures (because to actually foreclose would mess up their balance sheets, so available inventory is limited and rents stay high) and the Fed keeping interest rates low (meaning there aren't too many better places for those firms to invest). Capitalism marches on!
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On Sorry About This Year's Bonus
"'Conservative husbands will also pressure their wives into questioning whether their job is really worth sacrificing family time for when the bonus is low.' To avoid this situation, she also advises that female bankers signal to their spouses that their bonuses might be disappointing before the bonus is revealed. That way the difficult questions will have been addressed in advance." Right, maybe he'll make you quit your job *before* you get your bonus!!
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On Don't Get a PhD, Says Person With PhD
@questingbeast Financial stress, job-market stress, trying to make consistent progress on a project with very few intermediate deadlines for years... and then there's this: "If you decide in your first year [of graduate school] that it is not for you – indeed, suppose you conclude that you’re better than all of this, a broader, richer thinker who can’t be constrained by the ivory tower–you will still have to deal with the nagging fear that somehow, some way, you just weren’t good enough, that you couldn’t cut the mustard. That fear will almost certainly be wrong. Perseverance can get most students through graduate school. You should feel good about how well you know yourself if you decide to quit. But academia is a total culture. It changes your standards for what is good and what is bad, what is smart and what is dumb." Read the whole piece, it's great.
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On Are They Paying Too Much in Taxes?
Umm, if her plan of "adding a cost of living factor" to federal taxes succeeded, the going prices of all the houses she's looking at would increase. Markets!
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On The Second American Civil War
@KatNotCat Actually, the article talks about NoVA's connection to the federal government! It says Virginia wouldn't so much secede as become the center of the "Restored United States" and "assume the moral responsibility for reunification." I agree about the rest of Virginia probably wanting to join the Neo-Confederate South though...
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On We Became a Family When 2 Bank Accounts Became 1
@Lauren I love that APW piece too, even though I actually do have an "allowance" that's half the size of my husband's (my idea, just like Bowen Close). For me it's to give myself something to look forward to and work towards, since he currently makes 6x what I do. When that changes in a couple years after I (hopefully!) finish school, we'll even out the amounts. We don't think of it like it has to be a percentage of our income or anything, like if one of us became unemployed that person wouldn't automatically get $0! It's just that in this particular situation I think it makes sense to set up my fun money budget with incentives to keep working toward my goals, even while we both think of it all as "our money." (Socialism, but with better contingency management? Trying to prevent the marital version of the USSR's empty shelves, or something?)
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On Why Renting an Apartment in NYC Sucks
"We’re going to be updating our database in real time with our sales. Landlords who list with us can get access to this information, meaning they can get a better price." I've never lived in New York, but I thought the prices landlords could get were usually limited more by rent control than by lack of information.