Hah hah. After all the interest on the mortgage, expenses, renovations and repairs we netted a whopping $1,000 renting out our house this year. Fucking. Property. BARONS. I'm gonna go buy me a swanky car. It'll have to be diecast, but whatever. But I'm thrilled about it because at least we weren't spending money on the fucker. God, I hate the present model of home ownership. HATE. IT. What a way to lock away all your means and assets and force the population to agitate for political and economic models that impoverish the young, so that despite us being so very, very rich in the west, most people always feel a little poor and desperate.
Fuck it. Fuck it hard. And I write that as someone who waited until late to buy a house and so doesn't have a mortgage that feels like it's strangling us. And who now lives in a place with cheap rent and lots of tenant rights so theoretically I'll never have to jump back into this fucking bilgepool. We will, though. Once the house in Australia is sold and we've lived in this apartment long enough for the kitchen to have paid for itself. My money philosophy is pretty much based on keeping fixed costs low so when he have enough cash again to not worry about mortgages again we'll spend it.
I do like the German model of relying on rentals better, of course - though I think it started running away with itself when everyone decided to move to Berlin a few years ago, and they've just had to slam down some pretty tight rent controls there. Our apartment was completely bare when we moved in and we had to get a kitchen installed. It's about half-half here - half the apartments already have kitchens, half don't - and the ones that are empty when you move in are about two hundred a month cheaper than the ones that aren't. So if we manage to stay here a good four or five years, which I think we will because it's lovely, we'll be ahead of the ball.
One thing is making me savagely joyful though - having a lawn, hiring someone else to mow it, and still coming out ahead. Fucking. Lawns. What an emblem of the decadence of Western culture. Which, BTW, is a point where I'm in agreement with one of the subjects of this fascinating documentary. As well as in thinking that "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a fucking gross, rape-y song.
Fuck it. Fuck it hard. And I write that as someone who waited until late to buy a house and so doesn't have a mortgage that feels like it's strangling us. And who now lives in a place with cheap rent and lots of tenant rights so theoretically I'll never have to jump back into this fucking bilgepool. We will, though. Once the house in Australia is sold and we've lived in this apartment long enough for the kitchen to have paid for itself. My money philosophy is pretty much based on keeping fixed costs low so when he have enough cash again to not worry about mortgages again we'll spend it.
I do like the German model of relying on rentals better, of course - though I think it started running away with itself when everyone decided to move to Berlin a few years ago, and they've just had to slam down some pretty tight rent controls there. Our apartment was completely bare when we moved in and we had to get a kitchen installed. It's about half-half here - half the apartments already have kitchens, half don't - and the ones that are empty when you move in are about two hundred a month cheaper than the ones that aren't. So if we manage to stay here a good four or five years, which I think we will because it's lovely, we'll be ahead of the ball.
One thing is making me savagely joyful though - having a lawn, hiring someone else to mow it, and still coming out ahead. Fucking. Lawns. What an emblem of the decadence of Western culture. Which, BTW, is a point where I'm in agreement with one of the subjects of this fascinating documentary. As well as in thinking that "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a fucking gross, rape-y song.
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Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. In his anti-lawn essay “Why Mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/21/turf-war-2
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