I shop around for the best savings account rate. I wind up changing banks every year or two.
I pick stocks and hold for the LOL's. Currently getting a 12% APY on about $5000 invested. No real plan and not interested in dumping a ton of money there. It's just more interesting than the casino.
We bought the house we're going to die in. paying it off asap.
After the house is paid off we'll probably buy something else. I REALLY want to build a self-storage building on some cheap land. She wants a condo on a beach. We'll see.
What saving account rates have you been able to find lately? My bank in CA offered a checking account with 5% interest back in 2007, and it's only down now to 3.5%. Most people I talk to say these are very high rates. Can I do better?
Whoops, since I've last checked they dropped the rate to 3%.
It does come with minor strings attached. You only get the high interest up to 15k, you have to use the debit card attached to the checking account 10 times per month (which is simple for me) and you have to get your statement electronically, not by mail.
Its funny, but I think the richest people I know have all paid off their real estate. They don't pay rent, and they stayed in their homes til they could pay them off. It sounds simple, but it really takes a tremendous amount of resolve.
Self-storage might be a US phenomenon. It's basically someone building a bunch of windowless locked garages of varying sizes (some the size of a small closet, some bigger than a car) for people to store their excess stuff. The price per square foot is pretty high, and a lot of people will rent for years - never even interacting with the stuff.
If the renter defaults, the storage company typically (through contract) owns the material inside and can sell it off at auction.
Self storage is the epitome of American excess. We bought so much crap at the big box retailers that we ran out of space in our McMansions to keep it all. So, we put some of it in storage. This excess stuff that we obviously don't need, since we haven't used it in years, will stay there in storage, being air conditioned in the summer, heated in the winter, and having rent paid for it, until we eventually run out of space and need a bigger storage unit.
There should be an episode of Hoarders where they find crazy people that have been storing junk in self-storage facilities for decades and look at what exactly they have that is so important that they need to lock it up for years and never see it or touch it.
That said, self-storage isn't just for people who can't stop accumulating stuff. In cities like San Francisco and especially Manhattan, it often makes sense to put rarely-used or not-yet-used items in storage, like camping gear, or heirloom furniture that you don't have the space for at the moment.
I've found self-storage useful when moving between cities -- it's hard to predict exactly when you'll find the right place, so it's a reasonably cheap way to buffer the transfer.
A high school friend of mine's dad made an entire career out of buying the crap from those storage contract defaults and re-selling it. Has his own furniture business and everything now.
One time he got a corvette. Dissassembled, inside a storage shed.
Apparently the way it works is they open the door and let you look in, but you can't actually go inside and see what's in the boxes or whatever. So it's kind of like gambling, bid on a room and hope you find something good to resell.
I'm guessing another perk of actually owning the building is you can have a look at the storage shed before you decide to hold an auction. Sounds like the owners of that particular facility probably only keep the assembled cars...
our 401k's are maxed out.
I shop around for the best savings account rate. I wind up changing banks every year or two.
I pick stocks and hold for the LOL's. Currently getting a 12% APY on about $5000 invested. No real plan and not interested in dumping a ton of money there. It's just more interesting than the casino.
We bought the house we're going to die in. paying it off asap.
After the house is paid off we'll probably buy something else. I REALLY want to build a self-storage building on some cheap land. She wants a condo on a beach. We'll see.