Somebody(geek) please reassure me that these 'changes in behavior' are not paramount to becoming a parent because this premise seemed pretty implicit throughout most items in this list. It's hard enough for me to grow up as is; it's especially harder if you still love being immature (yet playful) towards your peers and are older than twenty-two.
EDIT: I've been fired from a marketing firm for forgetting to remove my test word 'Poopy' from a Fortune500 company's web-site (running on WebLogic, yikes). No one knew the word was there for like a week since 'Poopy' was not an actual product it only showed up in their glossary. A week later I told my boss after releasing the next update and removing the test word: she flipped out, told the client, and fired me that following Monday because word got around their (the client's) IT department resulting in someone digging up a cached copy of their web-site's glossary and passing it on to someone higher up the corporate ladder. I'm an idiot for using such a vulgar test word but I had no business working there (in a marketing firm), let alone no business editing 14,000-20,000 lines of XML. (seriously, there were about 3-4 XML files that long) In retrospect though, I'm glad it happened because now (then) I finally had a reason to learn Mercurial (or why version-control is important and how branching could have saved my ass) :P
Sad as it may seem, 'Poopy' is simply not a character combination that should cross your keyboard when working for a client of any size. The clients that can accept random 'Poopy' showing up in their product are few and far in between.
I really don't think this particular blog post has anything at all to do with being a parent.
That said, being a parent forces you to grow up - but not in the ways you may expect. You can still have fun, be playful, pull pranks, etc. That stuff doesn't have to change if that's who you are. The biggest change, I think, is learning to handle unpleasant events that you cannot control and do not have a choice to ignore. When the baby fills his diaper, you have to change it even if it smells especially bad. When he throws a tantrum, you have to deal with it. When he hurts himself, you have to help him. When he makes mistakes, you have to teach him. The list goes on and on. Many of those things are hard in some way (often due to timing, the interruption, the stress of no sleep, etc) - BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM. Prior to having a child, most people simply avoid or find ways to reduce their involvement in things that might be unpleasant, difficult, undesirable, disruptive, etc. You have no choice when you become a parent but to deal with those situations and you will become better for it.
Opposite - having kids IMHO keeps you young, and in touch with your playful side.
One of the reasons I had kids early was to do that. I didn't want to be one of those old parents who has already "grown up" and lost all touch with fun.
I think it has for me. At least, it's given me an excuse to keep in touch with my inner child. My sons and I play with lego's together. Watch cartoons and kids shows (I love What's New Scooby Doo), etc.
Of course, I'm not sure what's gonna happen with all that as they get older. :-( Maybe I'll really become an old man then.
"having kids IMHO keeps you young, and in touch with your playful side."
Agreed, and since I had my kid later, I'm still goofy and playful. I think if he was years gone I'd be guarding my lawn with razor wire and proximity sensors.j
Children give you the chance to appreciate childhood.
I think 'old parents' losing all touch with fun is an unfair stereotype, but I think I understand where you're coming from by narrowing the generational/cultural divide between you and your son or daughter you're minimizing the difference in how you communicate and think.
Right. I think it's certainly possible to keep that fun/childish side going, and stay in touch with culture etc without having kids around, but it's much harder.
I see what you're saying... I didn't mean that old parent wouldn't be fun, but it's likely to be a different type of fun. One that may be alien to kids.
We have several stages of our lives and I thing overlapping with your kids makes it so you can enjoy more of the same things together.
The problem with a mortgage is it tends to increase consumption. Most people are fine renting a fairly small apartment relative to their needs, but as soon as they are buying a place they start thinking about having an extra rooms just in case etc.
I don't think that's the case. Mortgage is just borrowing against your future worth. If some people over estimate that then it's their own problem.
The problem is usually silly people borrowing far more than they can afford, and lenders trying to push people into borrowing more than they can afford. But that's not a problem with mortgages per se.
Renting is ok if you like throwing money away, or need to move often.
I don't understand the throwing money away idea about renting. Are you anticipation appreciation (good luck for the foreseeable future)? Is it the home mortgage deduction you're so excited about? For most people, unless they're sure they're gonna be in their home for a long time (10+ years maybe?) I'm not sure how purchasing is worse than renting.
I think a desire/plan to stay in one place for an extended period of time is a good reason to purchase a home. The best reason really. But I think if you're pretty uncertain about whether you'll want to spend 10+ years in 1 house it makes more sense to rent. And I really don't understand so many people have bought into this meme that renting is "throwing money away". The facts just don't seem to support that conclusion.
It's not just a question of needing to move often as much as benefiting from being able to move often. I walk to work and save a lot of time and money by doing so. But, I was willing to take a job with an hour+ commute because I knew I could quickly move there.
PS: The cost of renting tends to balance with the costs of buying a home (including transaction and maintenance costs etc) such that it's rare for one to win out over the other in a healthy housing market. I do spend a lot of money living in this area, but I also invest a lot more money than I could if I was trying to buy in the area even with a long commute. Even with the huge drop in housing costs buying in this area is extremely expensive in large part due to the number of people renting their houses / condo's.
In the UK average rental yields are under 5%, which means that on average over time renting is cheaper than servicing mortgage debt.
There are a lot of other factors that make a difference though, especially related to personal financial discipline, over-buying and tax incentives. Any of those can push things one way or the other.
>> "In the UK average rental yields are under 5%, which means that on average over time renting is cheaper than servicing mortgage debt."
If you're paying over 5% for a mortgage you're doing something seriously wrong. Hell - if you're paying more than 2% you've been had.
And the other tiny point is that at the end of your mortgage, you own the house and can cash it in. If you have the option to buy, buying is always the sane choice.
Interest rates are unusually low at the moment, they more often hover between 4-6% and have been as high as 8% (and this is the base rate - most people pay more than this, especially for fixed rate deals).
In the long run owning your house may or may not work out to be more profitable than keeping the difference between rent and mortgage payments (plus maintenance plus taxes plus other fees) but it's not always the case.
This is especially true if the gap between the mortgage payment (plus costs and fees) and rent is well invested. At the moment countering the low cost of borrowing is the fact that equities are also very cheap. Every pound invested in the FTSE 250 in mid 2009 was a great buy, more than compensating for the low mortgage rate.
In the end buying vs renting is mostly a personal decision rather than an economic one.
>> "This is especially true if the gap between the mortgage payment (plus costs and fees) and rent is well invested."
Firstly, there often isn't a gap, or it's negative - mortgage payments are less than rental payments.
Secondly, you'd be hard pressed to find a better paying investment than property.
House prices always increase in the long term. It's an investment. You buy a property, then a few years later can sell it for quite a bit more than you paid. As long as it's a property that is attractive people will always want it.
Personally I find the economics extremely clear cut. Mortgage payments here are comparable to rental payments, if not lower. So you can either give the money to a landlord and get nothing in return, or you can give it to a bank, pay off the balance (Long terms savings), and benefit when house prices increase if you sell it. Or of course just wait until mortgage is over and then live there rent free for the rest of your life.
I've never understood why the economics are even debated online like this :/
You are failing to account for the capital built up in the property which is only returning 5% (on average), whilst it could be earning a (historical) average of 12% elsewhere. (The average index fund growth.)
You are also failing to account for maintenance costs, which are not cheap on a property of any size. Specific to the UK market you are also not calculating stamp duty and capital gains tax, which are either property specific or harder to minimize on property.
The reason that the economics are debated on-line is because:
- Rentals have hidden advantages (opportunity cost of invested capital).
- Housing has unhidden advantages (capital growth of the property).
- It's much harder to screw up a family-home-property based investment scheme.
Which means that people invariably don't correctly account for all of the variables.
If property investing were that clear cut then investment capital would buy up property until house prices had risen and rents had been depressed to remove the advantage! Markets seek an equilibrium.
EDIT: I should probably point out that I have in front of me the yield data for four cities at the moment and the average return on capital for all of them is 4.8% - you personally may have found a better deal, but that's just an anomaly. I'd probably buy something if I had children, but it has nothing to do with the value of the investment.
>> "You are failing to account for the capital built up in the property which is only returning 5% (on average), whilst it could be earning a (historical) average of 12% elsewhere. (The average index fund growth.)"
Yes but with a mortgage you're effectively investing someone elses money (the banks). You get to invest a large amount of money into a pretty good return investment, with hardly any outlay from yourself.
If you were renting and putting the (maybe £100 a month max) difference into some investment, you'd make next to nothing on that. But with a mortgage, you're 'investing' the banks money as well as your own.
I've only bought 2 houses in my life (3rd one soon), but both were financially very good. Even in the current market.
If you have £100k of equity/capital in your house then on average (long term historical index investment) you would have made £864k investing over 20 years vs a historical average of £165k in a property.
The money your borrow from a bank can (depending on relative cost) close or open the gap. If average return is 5% and the average cost of borrowing is 2% (over 20 years) then you would make an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. However if the average mortgage rate is 8% then you would lose an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. Capital growth will also add something - over the last 20 years it was about 100k per 100k invested/borrowed.
2% and 8% are both well within the historical mortgage rate trends. Renting helps reduce your exposure to this, whilst increasing your exposure elsewhere.
"traveler" is clearly biased (look at his username) but he makes a good point. Multiple studies have shown that having kids decreases your happiness and increases your stress. Having kids is a biological imperative and your justifications are mostly backwards rationalizations. I'm guilty of backwards-rationalizing as much as the next guy but it's helpful for consciousness if you're aware of the phenomenon and can be honest with yourself.
I think it's disingenuous to use this kind of counter-argument to justify some people's almost unnatural hatred of children and the people who have and want them.
Backward rationalizations can be used to change your future ways of thinking. In other words, if you feel that the stress of having a child will be well worth it, then you'll tell yourself that over and over while you're stressed. It will become true to you and the perception and emotions of a stress event changes.
This kind of reverse thinking is how we grow. Touch a hot stove, burn yourself, and cry about it. Next time you won't want to touch the hot stove because it hurt last time. If you did a study of people who touched hot stoves just after the fact, I'm sure you'd find that touching a hot stove reduces happiness and increases stress levels. However if you wait long enough, this lesson of stoves==hot results in decades of NOT touching hot stoves and NOT getting burned by them. A study of that should reveal that by touching a hot stove once, you've gained a lifetime absence (aside from accidents) of the stress and unhappiness associated with touching a hot stove. Suddenly the one time you burned yourself seems to have been worth the pain.
It depends on what sort of person you are. I couldn't live without having kids. It's what 'the point' is for me. Not to mention the enormous gratification in helping to shape some new human beings and watch them grow into their own personalities.
Startups also massively increase your stress and likely decrease happiness for most, but we still do them.
> Somebody(geek) please reassure me that these 'changes in behavior' are not paramount to becoming a parent because this premise seemed pretty implicit throughout most items in this list.
I'll try to do that! In my experience, having a kid 2 years ago has been the most motivating event in term of self-accomplishment, bootstrapping projects, and moving toward a (much) better quality of life.
Of course education is a hard topic some days, but most of the time I just feel very lucky to be living this.
And no - I'm not rationalising my mortgage: living (currently) in Paris, we've been very careful to keep a rent instead of mortgage, and to live with just enough surface and in a quite cheap area of the city (this could apply with a mortgage as well).
This has allowed us to save a lot, and we're now moving to the country-side, able to buy a house without any mortgage, working remotely and bootstrapping projects in a cheap area of France.
So I'd say each one can find its own way. It can be (really) uncomfortable, but apart from cultural pressure, nothing can force you to choose a given path, in my opinion.
I like "Poopy". A while back I wrote a mass mailing app for a fund management company. They were sending out frequent updates to the ~12000 investors of their funds which had to be very HTMLy and professional.
Well, it turns out that leaving setSignature("sausage") in your code can really get you into some trouble. Especially when you consider that European companies are legally bound to include certain company information in their signatures.
OTOH it turned out that this was the mailing that received the most replies ever, most of them pretty cheerful.
"I shall not place a supply of "Sharpie" permanent markers in any whiteboard trays."
Sharpies are fun. People take the "permanent" label much too seriously. At work we have picture badges, at one point I was drawing mustaches on other peoples badges and watching them freak out.
Alcohol will erase Sharpies as long as the surface is non-porous. (as they say in manuals, try in an inconspicuous place first ;-).
One of my victims ran over to the computer room after I clued him in on the alcohol trick. (This was quite a while ago when we had tape drives and there were squeeze bottles of alcohol laying around for cleaning tape heads.) He grabbed the first bottle, squirted his badge, rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he sniffed the liquid and realized he had grabbed a bottle of water instead of alcohol. Bonus.
"I will not dial someone at random and conference them in to the building’s intercom system." LOL
Thanks for the laughs. Congratulations on being irreplaceable enough to be able to build such a list. From the sound of things, the list will grow, too.
A few years ago someone gave me a stash of self-adhesive metal labels intended for vending machines. They are imprinted "INSERT 25 CENTS" and have coin slots cut into them. I'm sorry to say I have as yet not stuck them inside the elevators and sent round a company-wide memo: "Due to new cost-saving initiatives and in an effort to promote physical fitness..."
EDIT: I've been fired from a marketing firm for forgetting to remove my test word 'Poopy' from a Fortune500 company's web-site (running on WebLogic, yikes). No one knew the word was there for like a week since 'Poopy' was not an actual product it only showed up in their glossary. A week later I told my boss after releasing the next update and removing the test word: she flipped out, told the client, and fired me that following Monday because word got around their (the client's) IT department resulting in someone digging up a cached copy of their web-site's glossary and passing it on to someone higher up the corporate ladder. I'm an idiot for using such a vulgar test word but I had no business working there (in a marketing firm), let alone no business editing 14,000-20,000 lines of XML. (seriously, there were about 3-4 XML files that long) In retrospect though, I'm glad it happened because now (then) I finally had a reason to learn Mercurial (or why version-control is important and how branching could have saved my ass) :P