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3 . 3 1 . 0 8 Raining all day, this morning, afternoon, and tonight in the district, it seems like this time of year we're stuck right in the middle in between winter and spring, and its really hard to tell whether its going to snow or rain. Its really too warm for ice, but cold enough to make you shiver on your way home late at night. Either way its soggy and humid, be sure to pack an umbrella and watch your step. In the meantime the sakura are blooming all around with a reminder that spring is just around the corner, and then theres the heat of summer to look forward to. Had a very restful and reflective weekend at home, and milling about the city. rented the zipcar and ran some errands, went grocery shopping and as noteworthy as it is, I bought up some non-perishables as I have been meaning for a while as far as my ad-hoc emergency/disaster preparedness supply project. Not like I'm really expecting a need for all of this, but maybe its the boy scout in me thinking that it wouldn't hurt to make as much of an effort to just be prepared for the unknown. This weekend I found some stackable 3 liter bottles of water to go with my MREs and freeze dried food supply, canned corned beef, tuna, and canned veggies. Hoping that I'll never have a need for any of this, but like I said, it doesn't hurt to be somewhat prepared in advance. In other news, Badgers get upset by the cinderella and crowd favorite of the tournament, Davidson behind a hot shooting Curry. I watched most of the sweet 16 game and was very impressed with the intensity that Davidson brought to the court. Pretty bummed that they weren't able to keep it going against Kansas after beating Wisconsin pretty handily. Now we're left with a first time ever 4 top seeded final four. Blah, boring. I guess theres always next year to look forward. 3 . 2 7 . 0 8 Close to the end of March and things are picking up as usual, both on the school and work ends. Looking like I'll be attending a few conferences for work in the upcoming months, should be good to get out of the office for a change. On the school front I'm coming up on my last push month before finals, looking like it'll be pretty busy from here on out. Doing some independent research on my own, have to say that I enjoy it a lot more than classes, although it is a lot more challenging since a lot of its well, independently driven. I think maybe after so many semesters of being force fed law its a different change of pace trying to find different angles and theoretical solutions to legal problems. In doing the literature review I've been pretty impressed with the level of legal analysis and arguments that have already been made and been published, a lot of them show the amount of time and effort that was probably put into coming up with them. This has been a tough reminder about the costs and benefits of working on a degree during the evening while holding a full time job. I've gotten the full dose of the argument that getting real-world experience simultaneously is irreplaceable, but I think its every once in a while I get more than 4 hours of sleep I wonder whether it puts you in a position of being too stretched out. The main factor that has made me convinced that this has been all worth it is the financial situation and forecast, I'll be coming out of school well below the average debt load, both the reported average and some of the estimates I've heard anecdotally. I don't envision that I'll be bound by any golden handcuffs so to speak, no 6 figure debt estimates like I've heard from some old classmates that decided to go into other fields like academia or medicine. Knowing that these plans worked out more or less is worth some peace of mind, or relatively speaking at least. I've been keeping a cautious eye on the state of the financial markets and housing bubble/crash ever since moving out here back in 2004 when the market was really taking off and everyone I knew was saying buy, buy, buy before you get priced out. partly out of the reality of my situation, being right out of school, with little savings to boot, other part of my sense of the situation that it isn't smart to take on interest-only, adjustable rate loans on a $600,000 condo or $900,000 3 bedroom townhouse, no matter what the expected appreciation rate was, and no matter the assurances from an industry expert that I could qualify with current credit and modest government salary. After crunching some numbers, I decided it was better to rent, save, and wait to see what happened. My gut said that the prices would eventually have to come down, at least to a historical average, although I had no idea when it would happen. I also reasoned that the low interest rates were temporary, as with any monetary cycle, and then when they did increase, the shocks to the holder of the mortgage would be pretty steep. an increase from 2% to 4% would represent a doubling of a monthly interest only payment, and unless my income was likely to double on a monthly basis, this was a very stupid financial deal to accept. In the meantime I reasoned that if prices didn't come down, then the new reality is that nobody can afford to own without continue to rent and save until a combination of our salary and savings would increase to a point that we could buy something outright, or with at least a hefty down payment. Somewhere around 2006 I starting coming across various blogs and websites that are out there that were offering an alternate opinion to what I was hearing in the main stream media about all the middle class, self-made tycoons of real estate investments, more along the lines of what I was thinking, that all of the appreciation and speculation was imaginary, and doomed to fall eventually, and maybe fall hard. They were all really good about poking holes in what were mostly absolute statements, and raising good questions about the economics of these business transactions, many of which were never raised by the mainstream media. Now the latest trend in news stories revolve the ongoing proposals to bail out people who are stuck in depreciating real estate assets and resetting mortgages despite all of the paper-success of recent memory. I often feel like I'm in Econ 101 again reading about the pitfalls of moral hazards and individuals ignorant of their own risk curves, many of the recent news reports have talked about "average" Americans who are finding themselves suddenly in hard times financially in the recent downturn. There are a few things that are similar in each of these stories, first is that the individuals are living paycheck to paycheck, even making a salary that is well above the national average when some event comes along (sickness, layoff, mortgage reset) and they are unable to cope because of their lack of any savings whatsoever. Secondly there is this inability or unwillingness to face the shitty reality of the situation and make some tough financial decisions (sell the house, get another job, go on a budget), and finally there is always this call to the government to bail them out, as if they had no control over the situation. Unfortunately it seems like too many of us have gotten so used to the assurance that a lifetime of debt is normal and sustainable both on the personal and macro levels that when it comes around and bites us in the ass it really hurts and we are unwilling to deal with it without some reflection and self sacrifice. Don't know for sure what is around the corner, but I'm not too optimistic overall. The volume of the message that all of this is unsustainable in the long run is getting louder with each multi-bullion dollar bailout of a bank, each FED rate cut, each report of housing prices crashing and industry layoffs. Badgers make a sweet 16 run, and are matched up with the tourney's cinderella 10-seeded Davidson, who knocked out area favorite 2-seeded Georgetown for a shot at the elite 8, and final 4. Seems like de ja vu from the last time Wisconsin made it this far, there was talk about them lucking out playing lower seeded teams all due to a lot of upsets in the bracket. 3 . 2 1 . 0 8 Another busy few weeks between posts, mostly been bogged down at work wrapping up some things here and there and everywhere. I ended up trying to beat the clock showing up a few hours earlier than usual, catching the 1st or 2nd train into the city, and staying a few hours later, it became a new paradigm for me to leave and get back home in darkness. At least I'm fortunate enough to have a cubicle next to a window, otherwise I wouldn't see the sun at all these past few weeks. Looking like on this new assignment, there will be some travel in store, a welcome change of pace from the past year or so long job that I've been assigned to. I say this even though I was never much of a fan for work travel - true, its nice to be able to go to far away cities on your employer's dime, but really, you end up working most of the time anyway, and don't really get to see much or experience much of the new city that your visiting at all. Since I started working full time after grad school, I've only been on a handful of trips, and my memories of them were all very productive, but also busy, sleep deprived, and jet-lagged. Adding to it, the places I was traveling weren't your usual destinations, kind of off the beaten path, which meant there really wasn't much to do during the free time that I did have after work. Plus theres this challenge of juggling night classes, the way I have them lined up this semester is all stacked on two days, so if I have to miss a day for work, it means I have to make arrangements for 3 classes all at once. Hopefully I'll be able to keep the missed days to a minimum. I'm also finalizing my last handful of classes for the next year or so, still can't believe that I'm almost done with this degree. Meanwhile march madness is in full swing, Badgers are back in the big dance, after winning both the Big Ten regular season, they dominated the Big Ten tournament and got a 3 seed in the Midwest bracket of the NCAA. I have a feeling that they'll go a lot farther this year with the big man center back in commission. Last year they were pretty tough, but had injuries down the stretch, ended up getting upset by UNLV in the second round. 3 . 3 . 0 8 Been about a month between actual entries, once again life gets busy and there hasn't been too much time to stop and actually write something down. Had a good trip out west, will have to write about that with some pictures when I get around to it. Meanwhile life goes on I suppose, I'm getting pretty tired of the daily grind, especially when lately it seems like its much ado about nothing at all. Its an ongoing struggle seeing and learning one thing in school, and then seeing the opposite at work, sometimes vice versa, either way it can be either uplifting or discouraging. The study of law is a different animal, in some ways its hyper theoretical, studied in a vacuum, just like other ivory tower disciplines. In other ways its quite real and hard hitting, when it comes to basic procedure and due process. At the same time work has the theoretical process on how work is supposed to go, contrasted with the imperfect reality of how things play out and how people actually interact. I have to say that I'm quite proud of how I've been able to balance both day work and night school, so far neither has really intruded into the other one in a negative way, mostly because there has been so much overlap between the two. It is discouraging sometimes when it feels like I'm the only one that really sees it though. In the meantime I'm cautiously keeping an eye on the world markets and talk of credit crisis in the international banks going hand in hand with the ongoing housing crash. Amazingly there are people I know that are actually jumping for an opportunity to buy, citing lower prices than a few months ago, and of course that old famous phrase, "its always a good time to buy." For me I'd have to think long and hard before locking myself down to any large asset, especially going into a huge amount of debt as well. The more I read about the market conditions makes me think that liquidity may be the way to go for the short term at least. This is especially in recent times where even going grocery shopping I have started to notice more and more the reality of inflation - it used to be just classroom term, or a short paper topic for economics at KCC, but now its glaring me in the eye every I go to the grocery store. You don't have to be ultra price conscious to notice that the dollar doesn't buy as much as it used to. Just as no market boom or investment rule of thumb lasts forever, and really no job sector is really as stable as we would hope to be. Obviously as things start slowing down more the service sector and retail sectors will start to tighten up, but eventually so will governments, local, state and even the federal levels. Is this the calm before the storm? I've also been a little disturbed at how calm or nonchalant some people are about everything. I've heard from more than one person that they think that the powers to be will not let things get too bad, they won't let the dollar crash too much. While I don't deny that there must be very powerful forces out there that would be hurt from a shock to the US dollar, I'm not so optimistic that they haven't already hedged their bets to profit from a dollar crash, and when it all hits that all of the rest of us will be left holding the bag. Thats usually how it is. I really hope I'm wrong, but my gut isn't comforting me very much. There is something worth mentioning that my generation has been the beneficiary of the one of the longest bull markets, by some estimates since 1982, meaning that we've never had a period of economic slowdown, never had a tough period for finding jobs, never had anything major barriers to access to credit. Both have contributed to a decent and increasing quality of life, either from actual income, or more perceived quality of life from cheap credit at low interest rates. As businesses start tightening their belts and laying people off, as banks stop giving out loans without ample capital or credit ratings, this will ultimately result in a shift in the American way of life as we currently know it, a shift that I wonder we are all adequately prepared for, both financially and psychologically. |