to pay respect

But Google tells me that a typical rate for size of mortgage in your example is 6.6%, not 2.85%.

Today, certainly. Back in 2020 when we were entering the COVID-induced recession, the prime rate plunged back into ZIRP territory and you could refinance a mortgage incredibly cheaply.

Also of note, the 25 year mortgage has a slightly lower rate than the 30

Generally speaking, your options are 15 year or 30 year (at least in the US). The difference in interest rates is typically marginal, though. Maybe .5 pt, from what I’ve seen. The real perceived benefit is paying off the debt faster. But… again, if the loan is large and the interest rate is small, you’re putting a lot of cash behind a comparatively low return.

There are two things missing from that calculation. First, the mortgage savings are generally after tax, while investment gains are taxable. So the comparison of break even needs to take this into account.

Long term taxation on investments is 15%. So, at a 2.85 interest rate we’re still talking about 3.3% ROI. I can beat that buying a US Treasury Bond.

Secondly, if pay off the mortgage earlier, then you have some number of years at the end where you can then invest the entirety of your payment instead of paying mortgage.

But you’ve foregone all the income returns in the initial years that you failed to invest in the market.

Let’s be conservative and predict a 7% market ROI (right now, the markets are doing closer to 25% YOY). If my options are $1100 mortgage payment over 25 years or $1000 over 30 years, I’m looking a 25 years of $100/mo savings ($1200/year -> 25 years = $30,000). By the time you’ve paid off your mortgage, my accrued investment returns amount to around $78k. So we’re going into year 26. I’ve got $78k in investment principle, at 7%/year, earning me $5400/year. That’s nearly half my mortgage note. You’re putting your first $1100/mo => $13,200/year into savings, having missed 25 years of compounded returns.

Up the ROI from 7% to 10% (the historical DOW return over the last 30 years), and now I’ve got $123k in principle, earning $12,300/year, which is more than the mortgage note.

The excess you’re paying into the mortgage is effectively an investment with a yield equal to your interest rate. If you were paying an 11% note, getting rid of your mortgage quickly makes sense. But at 3%, it does not.

The raw math becomes ($mortgage payment)(ROI - Interest Rate) = Implicit Return.

The last thing isn’t numbers, really. You can live in a house, you cannot live in an investment account

In both scenarios, we’re living in the house. The amount you pay on the note doesn’t change that.

Not to mention the discipline bit that you mentioned.

That’s where the math ultimately gets fuzzy. Are you actually banking the $100/mo in mortgage savings as investment? Or are you just shoving it in your savings account and forgetting about it? Or spending it?

I find that periodic automatic transfers do a lot of this book-keeping for me. 401ks come out of my paycheck before it hits my savings account. I’ve got an automatic monthly deduction for my son’s 529 and my Roth IRA. And I try to do a sweep from my savings to investments roughly once a month, when I’m over a certain cash balance.

But I’ll concede all this requires a certain surplus income. If you’re stuck living paycheck to paycheck, its possible that paying down the mortgage faster is just less of a headache than juggling balances to make sure ends meet.

Getting above a 2.85% return is pretty trivial.

Paying off your high interest debt is a priority, because it’s very hard to find anything that’ll get you Credit Card Interest levels of return. We scrambled to pay down our student debt, which was in the 7-8% range. Maybe not the best move, but it was a conservative decision. If you’re into the double digits, definitely get rid of that ASAP.

When I renewed my mortgage, from 4.25 to 2.85, I was given the option of resetting to thirty years to reduce the monthly payment.

I took the offer, on the theory I’d be better off investing the difference than paying the principle. So far, it’s paid off.

One day USB-A will be so uncommon

Every USB-C to C connector I’ve seen ends up coming with half a dozen adapters, because cell phones seem like the only device that uses it reliably.

Maliki accused the Iran-aligned Houthis ​of indiscriminately shelling civilian areas in violation of international humanitarian law

Saudis upset any time you don’t engage via the humanitarian method of bonesawing your dissidents alive.

Whole new levels of brain rot.

Seems weird to resign if you know the allegations are false.

If you’re being harassed continuously, alongside the accusations? Not that weird.

Did he? Seems like they just buried him under a heap of investigations based on the accusations of “DEI” from a rival.

Questions about his qualifications were raised publicly last month by Nathan Cofnas, a one-time Cambridge philosophy researcher who left the university after his criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion policies sparked widespread protests.

On July 24, the Times of London published an analysis of Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. thesis highlighting what it said were multiple examples of passages that were “identical or near-identical” to an earlier paper written by another researcher.

Cambridge initially stood by Arday, saying that the plagiarism allegations had been investigated by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday’s doctorate.

Always curious to see the scrutiny certain individuals will face at certain moments in their careers, while others seem to skate by. I hardly blame him for leaving. Hope he lands somewhere more productive and less petty.

In another 20 years, I wonder if we’re going to be looking at Ukraine like '00s-era Americans look at Iraq.

In fairness, I’ve got friends in my Big Evil Oil Company’s Environmental Sustainability and Health department, and a lot of what they do is researching real useful methods for improving the local ecology (after we’ve wrecked it with construction and extraction).

The caveat, of course, is that they do the work with an eye towards profitability.

As a case in point, a recent project involved cutting the light pollution at remote facilities by upgrading all the lighting fixtures on site. This drastically reduced the ambient light that the site produced. And, as a consequence, it reduced the cost of lighting the facility (because ambient light is an expensive waste product) while also reducing the accident rate (drivers entering and exiting the site didn’t have their night vision wrecked as they came and went).

They also ran a project to detect methane leaks along the pipeline arteries. This reduced the ambient methane that the pipelines released, which was good for the environment as a whole and also good because we’re in the business of selling methane rather than leaking it. The cost of the surveillance and repairs was superseded several times over by the value of the methane we retained.

The flip side of this is how anything seen as cost-positive (or labor intensive and cost-neutral) tends to be ignored.

Raytheon keeps around an ethics department for the same reason Satan reads the Bible.

Worth noting how many people are terrorized by MAGA-world if they express any degree of dissent from its crusade on Latin America.

Is .piefed an instance

There’s a constellation of instances with the piefed prefix operating in the Fediverse ecosystem.

https://fedidb.com/servers

I like to whisper “China Bad” into my Alexa every night before I go to bed, so I stay at the bottom of the list for getting black-bagged by my local sheriff’s office.

I tried this with .piefed and it genuinely improved my entire experience.

Amazing how much dumb bullshit a handful of terminally online losers can create.

Marriage, as a romantic notion, is about demonstrating a lifelong commitment to another person.

Marriage, as a legal institution, is about creating an economic incentive for intergenerational land ownership among the government-favored ethnic group.

I might suggest that you, at a bare minimum, like the other person even if you’re not romantically fixated on them. The marriage process comingles assets and incomes in a way that’s very difficult to unwind over time. Idk if I’d consider you “broken” for thinking about it. But you might want to reconsider what you’re getting into, especially if there’s someone other than your prospective partner who does have a romantic interest on one (or, fuck it, both) of you.

For folks who are married, the joke has been made a thousand times “We should have done this when we were poorer”. And I even have a friend who did a court-house wedding, months in advance of the family celebration, just to get the tax rebate sooner.

But, it’s a big decision. You’re sharing credit as a single household. Depending on the state, your partner can have all sorts of medical and legal authority that constrains you. And if you don’t even live with the person you’re married to? The economic benefits slide off quite a bit.