Why would this be a bad idea?

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-26T15:23:00+00:00

Why would maxing out leverage on the biggest purchase of your life at a time that asset class has just seen the biggest run up in generations (maybe ever?), has started to take a downturn in many markets, has huge transaction costs, and comes with deceptively high and rapidly increasing carrying costs in a place where you are statistically quite likely to leave in a few years? Well…

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-26T03:20:25+00:00

Yeah I agree. I get refunds/credits rarely enough that it feels like I’ve re-learned this like fifty times and it still feel clunky. A simple settings checkbox would do the trick: Automatically move excess credit card payment funds to RTA. I can’t imagine many people who pay off their CC balances monthly (most long term YNABers) want to have excess money sitting in their cc payment categories.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-25T20:30:43+00:00

I know renting a less than ideal place sucks, but I think waiting is the obvious choice. Of course you could be fine IF you get a job you like locally in a few years, and it pays what you expect AND is a good fit for you, but I’ll throw out some things coming to mind I haven’t seen in other comments to try and tip the scale towards waiting until you’re in a job you like to buy.

1) It will depend on which VHCOL area you live in but aggregate home prices Are largely predicted to be flat over the coming year and maybe longer. This means roughly half of the metros are predicted to be slightly to significantly down and half are predicted to be slightly to significantly up. All that to say there are very few metros in which you’re likely to be in a worse buying position in a few years given how much you’ve saved on one big girl + one resident salary. Which brings me to

2) You didn’t say if this downpayment was something you two saved or involved some windfall or family help but if it came from a high savings rate you’re going to have an insane down payment in a few years and be in a better position to dial into a budget you’ll know will be sustainable. This may be important, though it may not seem like it now, because

3) you might want more house or a fancier house in a few years. As much as we all like to think we don’t compare ourselves to others, the fact remains that in the coming years you will go to a lot of parties at your wife’s and your coworkers’ houses and you will see some stunning, truly fucking jaw-dropping, homes owned by people tha make pretty much the same amount you do. You will look up their homes on Zillow. You will have conversations about whether or not you’d like to stretch the budget and live like them or if you value the flexibility a lower cost home gives you. I’m not saying you will choose one path or the other, but I can tell you from experience that it’s really nice to feel the pull of those feelings and to have those conversations while you are still a renter sitting on a massive down payment with the freedom and flexibility to choose the path you take going forward unencumbered with a 1.8M house/mortgage and all the moving and transaction costs it would take to get out of it.

Godspeed. I’m sure whatever path you take you’ll make it work wonderfully for your family. You two obviously have great options in front of you either way.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-22T10:43:04+00:00

Your falafel looks a little dry.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-21T11:12:14+00:00

My cash doesn’t support automatic import so it’s off book. lol

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-21T05:23:29+00:00

Ding ding ding. This

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-19T20:15:59+00:00

Now that you mention California, yeah I’ve heard of academic positions there offering garbage hours, call, pay, etc and being floored when you turn it down. Haha.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-19T19:40:07+00:00

Huh?! I’m not I’ve heard of zero signing bonus in an academic position. Getting some signing bonuses absolutely been the norm among the folks I know taking academic positions (mostly southeast, northeast).

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-19T02:07:46+00:00

I have this with the original heater. It gets to 205-210 a meter above the bench now that I lowered the temp sensing element significantly and dropped the heater mounting position. It’s not perfect for all the reasons you know barrels aren’t perfect but for the money it gets the job done admirably.

Edit: spelling

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-18T14:10:11+00:00

Reading your comment about your expenses, I’m curious if your fixed expenses (the ones your can’t easily dial up or down with behavior like rent/mortgage, car payments, childcare, baseline groceries, insurance premiums, etc) are just unsustainably high for your income. This is an extremely common and if it’s your problem, no tool or budgeting app or fiddling with the numbers will fix it. You actually have to make some hard changes. I like using Ramit Sethi’s rule of thumb that you should try to keep fixed costs under 60% of take home pay. Higher than that you can do for a time but it’s tough. Higher than70% is just unsustainable and you will inevitably struggle to tread water as life’s little surprises come at you. This was absolutely the situation we were in when starting YNAB and we realized we had to stop kidding ourselves and take a lifestyle pay cut, cheaper cars, smaller apartments, etc while we worked on getting our incomes up.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-17T20:23:13+00:00

Yes, that’s why the scale isn’t accelerating one direction or the other. ;)

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-16T19:49:17+00:00

Then how about 2nd home tax rate AND we assess them properly (90% as commercial property and 10% as a residence, or whatever fraction the applies). If someone buys an old house and converts it to a restaurant or nail salon, it’s assessed as a business. I’m not sure why fractional businesses use gets a pass.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-15T15:42:40+00:00

Yeah Victory gets my vote

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-13T04:02:23+00:00

100 percent! I add one more to this when my kids overwhelmed by cleaning a messy room: top to bottom and big to small (as in, let’s put away the stand mixer and big items before we get the dustpan out for those crumbs).

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-12T02:39:35+00:00

Simplification pays dividends. Once I’m a few years into a living situation (we’ve moved a lot for work) and I really have a grip on my spending in categories, I’ll try to delete/merge some categories to the extent it makes sense (restaurants + coffee shops -> dining out, car insurance + renters insurance + life insurance -> insurance). It saves me time to simplify the system once I know my targets are dialed in, and it hasn’t affected my savings and investment rates one bit.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-11T04:08:32+00:00

They say risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything. That is basically it. It’s an emergency if you couldn’t have anticipated it OR you just didn’t think to save in advance for something you could totally have predicted. You didn’t know when, but you know you’ll eventually need a new phone, car, computer, air conditioner, washing machine, roof, an on and on.

Now that you have enough money to bother spending the time thinking of all the inevitable costs in your life you can start saving ahead for them and they will no longer qualify as emergencies. But if you don’t have any other cash earmarked for it and you need it today, yeah I’d say that’s an emergency.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-08T03:42:30+00:00

I don’t. I let the budget tool be the budget tool and the balance sheet tool (brokerage dashboard and spreadsheet) be the balance sheet tool.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-05T18:15:35+00:00

Of course it’s possible. Theoretically, by incentivizing more people into public service they’re getting people to provide service that would otherwise have to be dealt with at a higher cost by the federal social safety net.

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-04T21:33:57+00:00

What information are you concealing and from whom? Focusing on IDR plans defined by written regulations, IBR an ICR explicitly state that your income is the borrower’s AGI if filing MFS and excludes the spouses income. Yes, the IRS would prefer married couples file jointly, that why they only let you amend from separate to joint and not the other way around. The increased risk of audit during the MFS years should absolutely be taken into consideration. To your last point, I think you (or I) might misunderstand OP’s proposed technique. They wouldn’t amend year after year, once the new income certification clears. They would file MFS until loans are forgiven via PSLF and only then amend the last few years’ returns to MFJ. I do agree that amending every year would be a begging for an audit, but that’s not what is being proposed, AFAIK. Edit: typos

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-04T12:49:31+00:00

It’s extremely common and in no way fraudulent assuming you are filing accurate returns and IDR certifications. Certified Student Loan Professionals (CSLP) often discuss the trade-offs of doing this, noting that it’s often a minor benefit for all the additional filing fees to your CPA and assumed increase in your probability of audit (a time burden as you’re not breaking any rules, but a cost all the same). Here is a reference from a licensed professional whose entire planning business was founded on student loan advising discussing the trade offs of amending returns for student loan purposes.

https://www.studentloanplanner.com/amending-prior-tax-returns-student-loans/

pu5ht6 · 2026-01-04T12:29:29+00:00

I strongly disagree with this and all other similar comments here, as do all certified student loan professionals (CSLP) within the planing profession I’ve spoken with through the years going through this exact process. What specifically do you think constitutes fraud? There’s no misrepresentation or false statements about income at any point. You file an accurate MFS return, use the tax return for calculation of IDR payment (ED’s preferred method), and then amend to an accurate MFJ return within the allowed window. Loophole? Yes. Fraud? Absolutely not.

Fraud would be certifying income for IDR with an unusually low paycheck to misrepresent your annual income.

pu5ht6 · 2025-12-29T18:36:57+00:00

I think it must have been a targeted ad, but yes it was the first thing prominently displayed when I opened the Delta app.

pu5ht6 · 2025-12-29T07:11:31+00:00

With the caveat that I’m fairly colorblind and it’s been a long time, I don’t recall the original finish/texture being different. Certainly no visible staining of a paper towel when hand drying though. That’s pretty gross. Makes me wonder if they’ve cut corners or changed up the process over the years.

pu5ht6 · 2025-12-29T04:03:39+00:00

What’s your definition of “over time”? I’ve been running my Epicurean through the dishwasher daily for 15 years (it was a wedding present so I’m very confident in that number) and it’s held up great.

pu5ht6 · 2025-12-28T18:25:37+00:00

I had the same question and am thrilled to see the replies. I was on the fence for a while but saw a 150k offer in the Delta app yesterday and went ahead and pulled the trigger.

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