Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Black Friday strategy

It is Black Friday season. That’s right: what used to be just a single day of sales (the Friday after Thanksgiving, obviously) have stretched onto many weeks. And I hate it. REP Fitness has had a weekly rotating category since the start of November. Amazon has been doing Black Friday flash sales starting last week.

As a consumer it’s frustrating to have to be on alert over a period, instead of knowing for sure that all deals are available on the day of Black Friday. Amazon does these lightning deals where if you missed it on that particular day, it is gone. So you kind of have to scope things out ahead of time, and keep visiting the website everyday during the holiday season.

What I’ve done is add what I want to buy to the cart. On my daily visits to Amazon, I go straight to the shopping cart to see if any items are on Black Friday sale. As of writing I already knocked off two things on the list using this strategy. Black Friday discounts can be rather significant, so it’s worth waiting until the sales to buy what you want. Since the season turned autumnal I’ve been queuing up items at various vendors, waiting for the right prices to press checkout.

Of course there are no guarantees the stuff you want actually goes on sale. In that case the calculus is simple. If it’s a want, no purchase. If it’s a need, then the listed price is the listed price. Like these packs of gum. Excellent for teeth cleanliness, will buy regardless.

Happy hunting this Black Friday. The health of the U.S. economy is depending on us!

The best seating material in a car under $100,000.

My time is now

Break out the winter blankets! San Francisco weather has gotten properly chilly now, which is just fantastic. You do have winter blankets, right? Who can afford to heat the home during slumber hours? Besides, I’m Asian: winter heating is for emergencies only, not a regular occurrence.

Granted, I’d for sure be singing a different tune if I lived in a place with a true winter.

The dream of course would be to have a house with enough solar panels and batteries to climate control the home year round. But that’s putting the horse way before the cart. Can I even buy a house, anywhere in the Bay Area? Get back to work, peasant.

San Francisco has a low income home buying program for people like me. Don’t let the low income term fool you though because it’s all relative. You can cross six figure annual and still be too poor for housing in this town. The issue I have with the program is that what’s available are all condominiums. Single family home? Not a chance.

I love condos, just not in this country. In Asia with fast and reliable public transportation, and many shops clustered in neighborhoods, condominiums make sense. Car ownership is entirely optional. Here in America, it’s the opposite - and that’s okay! That means the one bedroom on sale for $400,000 with no parking is not going to work.

Then there’s the HOA fees. I don’t see how this one bedroom gets resold when the monthly HOA fee (nearly $1,700) is likely more than the monthly mortgage. Even at the more normal $500 - $700 going rate, I feel like I’m not getting an enough return on that money. Mortgage payments are a kind of stored value; taxes, insurance, and HOA fees are gone forever. Nothing we can do about taxes and insurance, obviously, so HOA is best avoided.

Honestly, if I’m putting down some considerable sum for a home, it’s got to be a proper single family house, with a garage and a yard. My own kingdom that’s beholden to no-one, except for the municipality collecting taxes. This may not happen anytime soon, given the Bay Area housing market, and my current meager salary. But opting for the SF home buying program would simply be an ultimately unsatisfactory solution.

50 years a mortgage

President Trump is floating the idea of a 50-year mortgage loan, superseding the current standard longest of 30 years. I think it’s a wonderful idea, because I can finally afford a home around here! All it takes is for a bank to practically own me for the rest of my life. If I were to buy a house today and it’s a 50 year loan, I will be 87 when the final payment schedule hits. Will I even be alive by then?

In simplistic mathematic terms, the 50-year mortgage makes sense. Housing is expensive, so let’s extend out the loan term so people can “afford” it. It’s the same thing happening in the automotive industry. The average new car price crested over $50,000 recently. Along with it are ever longer loan terms. 60-month used to be the maximum standard, but now 72 or 84-month is popularizing. Just so folks can squeeze in a monthly payment that is somewhat palatable.

Is that not a similar goal in floating a 50-year house loan? Perhaps it’s too big of a jump from 30? For sure 50 years will be more than half a lifetime for most of us. Also, think of the amount of interest that’s going to be paid for a loan that long. You can more than likely buy a whole other house on total interest payments alone.

But I think it’s a problem only from an investment lens. For a home that you want to stay in forever until death, a 50 year loan doesn’t seem that ridiculous. So what if the cumulative interest payments amount to a crazy high number? The most important number is for the monthly mortgage cost to come beneath an affordable threshold. Indenturing myself to a bank for the rest of my life is quite alright if I get a stable and comfortable home in return.

Surely the banks also wouldn’t mind that extra 20 years of accrued interest! I think mortgage terms longer than 30 years should be made available; as a tool, an option, but not a panacea to a problem.

Infinite money losing glitch

Word on the streets is that online gambling is a big problem? We’ve all seen the advertisements, surely. No major sports broadcast is complete without ads for DraftKings or BetMGM. Some of the services even give new users “free” money to bet as an introductory offer. Remember when few years ago every other ad was about crypto? I feel like we’re now in a similar era of sports betting.

I personally don’t partake in gambling because I don’t subscribe to forsaking my hard-earned money like that. We all know how incredibly shitty the odds are. The most risk I am willing to take with money is putting it into the broad stock market.

People are saying online gambling is a problem because lots of young men are falling into addiction and debt. But that’s just the natural outcome, isn’t it? Only a very few subset of bettors can win - by design. Otherwise the game wouldn’t exist. A game that creates many losers will of course have negative consequences. So long as the carrot remains ever gleaming, legions will keep returning and returning.

I think the allure of gambling is the possibility of a huge monetary reward in a short amount of time. Social media has shown everyone the world is indeed our oyster, but most of us don’t have the sort of capital to make that possible. I absolutely cannot traditionally invest my way towards affording a brand new Porsche 911 GT3, unlike the many influencers on the Internet. Online gambling then becomes an alluring shortcut towards attaining the lifestyle that social media has promised us.

There’s a money shortcut available to women that’s closed to men: selling your likeness online. Any reasonably attractive woman has potential to earn money quick if she is willing to forgo a few bits of clothing for people to watch. Heck, if a lady is attractive enough, she can be fully clothed and simply stream herself playing video games. That sort of leveraging of beauty is typically not an avenue open for men. So they instead funnel towards online gambling. Or day trading.

Listen, if all it takes for me to be able to buy a GT3 is to “YOLO” my entire savings into a five game parlay? Hmmmm…

You get a layoff! You get a layoff!

Word on the streets is that Amazon is cutting 14,000 personnel in its vast corporate offices. That is a lot of people soon to be out of work. The greater Seattle area is in shambles, as the kids say these days. This news comes only a few days after Target announced similar corporate job cuts. All of this coming right before the (hopefully) busy holiday shopping season. Who has money to spend right now, honestly.

The pending Target layoffs hits close to home as my cousin works there in corporate. The problem is, he’s nowhere near the company headquarters in Minnesota. A corporation looking to trim down will certainly look first at folks working off-site, no? I hope the best for my cousin.

The best did not happen for my friend who got laid of from Stanford earlier this year. Even education, the once believed lead-pipe lock of job security (especially at a world renowned university like Stanford), is not immune from the current economic headwinds. I somewhat worry for my position, because I too work for a university. An institution that just this week forecasts dire budget straits for the coming fiscal year. Not great!

We’ve seen so many layoff news throughout 2025, and yet the U.S. stock market is currently, as of writing, sitting at all-time highs. One suspects, basing on sheer mathematics, the bottom has to fall out eventually, no? Folks out of a job aren’t wont to keep on spending.

I’m glad I recently downsized my car to something cheaper, netting a solid difference to add to the rainy day war chest. The current economy is too uncertain to be making daring money moves, at least for someone in my lower middle class position. If I do get unfortunately laid off, I want to have at least 12 months of money runway. I know, right to privilege jail, right away.

It is pure greed

The homies and I were eating lunch at a Shake Shack. The gentleman next to us friendly interrupted us to ask whether or not the food there is worth it. I bluntly replied a resounding no. $20 for burger, fries, and drink will forever be too damn high, no matter how gourmet it is (I would say Shake Shack is only slightly above McDonald’s). The only reason we were there for lunch is there was a buy-one-get-one offer on the Shake Shack app.

Apps are downright mandatory these days when eating at chain restaurants. Most will have deals that aren’t advertised in-store. The gentleman was bemoaning the fact he did not know about the free burger offer. In these times of inflated eating out costs, app deals are the only way to get me to spend money at restaurants. (Unless I’m eating with others.)

Speaking of inflated costs: can someone explain how can banks possibly charge $5,000 for simply closing on a mortgage? This feels like pure fat off the top, doesn’t it? The institution is already making money on the loan by adding points on top of the benchmarking lending rate! You mean to tell me that it cost $5,000 for a few people to crunch the numbers (I concede that underwriting due diligence requires some labor) and press the return key on a keyboard?

Worse: when it comes time to refinance - with the same bank - you will get charged another $5,000 for closing that. For what is presumably a formality! The bank knows your information already, and have records of you paying on time. Unless the borrower is completely upside down on house, all the bank has to do is rearrange the numbers internally. And for that, the easiest $5,000 made ever. Even a Porsche cars salesperson would blush at such wetting of the beak.

Be realistic

Sometimes you must get honest with yourself: are you infatuated only with the ideal, or is it something you’re really going to do (or want)?

An example is the person who bought a treadmill thinking he will run marathon amounts of miles (or kilometers for those you with nationalized healthcare) every week. What ends up happening is the treadmill will sit and gather dust after the first week of ownership. He fell in love with the image of himself being a fit runner, but his actual proclivities never made the change. He’s never going to be a runner, and that’s okay!

My family bought a $400 Vitamix mixer thinking that smoothies will become a regular thing. That unit has since been gathering dust on the counter. Same thing with that air fryer, too…

I’ve had this ideal of owning enthusiast cars and taking them on many roadtrips, documenting them along the way. That practice has not materialized at all in the past decade plus of driving. What I actually prefer is owning the cars, but not to have too much to do with it otherwise. If it were possible for a car to never require maintenance and the paint always keeps shiny - sign me up. I much rather be driven (or walk) everywhere than get behind the wheel.

It’s being painfully honest with myself that explains why I’ve never owned more than one car at time. I enjoy seeing enthusiasts’ garages with a fleet of cars. It would be nice in theory to have many cars of my own, representing different varieties the automotive world has to offer. But if I can’t even be bothered to do anything with one car, buying any more would simply be a burden.

Being realistic is why I recently sold the BMW M2. It was costing too much money to support the ideal of being an owner of such an amazing car. I don’t use it, it mostly sits, and the insurance for the car is amazingly high. I would be lying to myself if I kept the M2 on the pretense that sometime in the future I may use it as I’d imagined. It’s highly unlikely, given the five prior years of ownership it hasn’t already happened.

Spending money is easy. So is imagining our changing lifestyle with that new purchase. I think it’s important to deeply think over whether or not it’s merely the idea that we are enamored with. Are you buying a house just for the sake of buying a house? Will your present lifestyle actually be improved? Or will the house just add more costs and responsibilities that, in the end, you really don’t want?